Paul Roland > Quotes

“Was that it? (for my grave stone)”
― Paul Roland

“In many parts of the world, ghosts are not considered to be a creation of local folklore, but a fact of life. In China the dead are understood to co-exist with the living, a belief which gave rise to the practice of ancestor worship, while in South America the deceased are honoured with annual festivals known as the Day of the Dead which suggests that the material world and the spirit world might not be as distinct as we might like to believe. In the Eastern and Asiatic religions it is believed that death is not the end, but simply a transition from one state of being to another. The Hindu Upanishads, for example, liken each human soul to a lump of salt taken from the ocean which must ultimately return to the source.”
― Paul Roland, The Complete Book of Ghosts: A Fascinating Exploration of the Spirit World, from Apparitions to Haunted Places

“It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience. And”
― Paul Roland, The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and Their Crimes Against Humanity

“For three days, I couldn’t take my eyes off Goering, who lounged in the dock like a bored Roman emperor… As concentration camp survivors testified, I sometimes caught Goering’s cold, unblinking stare, which was full of contempt for the Tribunal and the witnesses. When the prosecution showed films of piled-up corpses at Auschwitz, Goering kept turning his head away, sometimes in my direction. I’m ashamed to say he stared me down, because I’d never before felt myself in the presence of such unmitigated evil.”
― Paul Roland, The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and Their Crimes Against Humanity

“The masses are like an animal that obeys its instincts. They do not reach conclusions by reasoning . . . The masses have a simple system of thinking and feeling, and anything that cannot be fitted into it disturbs them [. . .] what you tell the people in the mass, in a receptive state of fanatic devotion, will remain like words received under a hypnotic influence, ineradicable, and impervious to every reasonable explanation.”
― Paul Roland, Nazi Women: The Attraction of Evil

“I learned from my parents the ability to question, never to trust implicitly those in charge, not to believe the promises made in speeches and never to ignore the atrocious propaganda posters in public places … this kind of propaganda is designed to cause fear, and people who live in fear of a common enemy can be easily manipulated.”
― Paul Roland, Life in the Third Reich: Daily Life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

“The inconsistency in the attitude of the two former allies towards the prosecution of war criminals was further underlined by the fact that the British did not make completion of the denazification questionnaire compulsory for every German adult in their zone, but only for those employed in the public sector or applying for jobs in public organizations and businesses.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Peter de Mendelssohn, press officer for the British Control Commission, was entrusted with verifying the credentials of German journalists and organizing a free press in the British zone (Der Spiegel and Die Welt were considered reliable by their German readership). Equally significant was the contribution made by progressive educator Robert Birley, future headmaster of Eton, who reformed and restructured the German educational system. Literacy, numeracy and the core subjects had all been fatally neglected during the Hitler years, as National Socialist indoctrination took priority over the basic curriculum, leaving a generation semi-literate and woefully ill-informed.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Ursula believes that it was her habit of reading these cuttings that gave her a head start with her education.”
― Paul Roland, Life in the Third Reich: Daily Life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

“In the West, the Americans witnessed similar scenes of prosperity, at least in the agricultural regions where even the farm animals were well fed. They passed by ‘rich’, well-equipped and well-managed farms tended by ‘strong and healthy’ farmers and their equally well-fed and well-nourished foreign workers. It was only when the Americans entered the larger towns and cities that they witnessed the destruction and sensed the ‘air of defeat’.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another ... There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body.’ (1 Corinthians 15:35–44).”
― Paul Roland, The Complete Book of Ghosts: A Fascinating Exploration of the Spirit World, from Apparitions to Haunted Places

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads or you shall learn nothing.’ Thomas Henry Huxley on the duty of a scientist, 1860”
― Paul Roland, The Complete Book of Ghosts: A Fascinating Exploration of the Spirit World, from Apparitions to Haunted Places

“Accepting complicity in a crime in which you did not actively participate takes extraordinary courage, which few possess or are even willing to consider.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Ironically, his Communist counterpart in East Germany was also a former anti-Nazi. Walter Ulbricht escaped to Russia during the Hitler years and became a stalwart supporter of Joseph Stalin. He then returned to Germany in 1945 to head the new Socialist Unity Party, lobbying for reform and independence from the Soviet bloc while at the same time advocating the building of the Berlin Wall. He blamed, … the 10 million Germans who in 1932 cast their votes for Hitler in free elections, although we Communists warned that ‘He who votes for Hitler, votes for war.’ … The tragedy of the German people consists of the fact that they obeyed a band of gangsters. The Communist state ensured East Germans would not make the same mistake again by depriving them of the right to vote.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Nazi industrialists evade justice In the West, some of the biggest industrialists escaped justice. Alfried Krupp, the 37-year-old head of the German armaments manufacturer, was released after a cursory interview and returned to his vast estate on the outskirts of Essen.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“In a characteristic piece of English understatement, Arthur Street, a senior civil servant in the British occupation zone reported: ‘We are very much alive to the dangers inherent of too drastic a policy of denazification in industry.’ As a consequence of this reappraisal over 300 German mining officials were released from custody in the British zone and reinstated, leaving only 20 in jail.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Newspapers such as Der Ruf employed young journalists who vilified the American occupation forces and accused the new American-funded radio stations (RIAS and Radio Liberty) of peddling propaganda, but reading the uncensored views of the more articulate members of the population proved instructive to those in the Allied administration, who were prepared to listen and to learn from them. Among the lessons they learned from the new German press were that restrictive measures on their own only brought resentment and that imposing democracy was counterproductive”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“The myth of the Trümmerfrauen originated in West Berlin, where 26,000 women answered the appeal for volunteers, but in a city with half a million women of working age this amounted to just 5 per cent of the female workforce and the percentage of female volunteers in other German cities was significantly less. In the”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“It was common for the occupying armies to be berated by angry, resentful citizens and be accused of having brought misery and deprivation unnecessarily upon ‘innocent’ Germans. As one woman expressed it: ‘None of this would have happened if you had surrendered in 1940.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“The intention of this book is to explain how an ill-educated, psychologically unbalanced nonentity succeeded in mesmerizing an entire nation,”
― Paul Roland, The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich

“Alexandra Senfft, the granddaughter of a Nazi war criminal and the author of a foreword to Kriegskinder, a book of childhood memories of the Second World War says: What the Kriegskinder did not come to terms with they passed on to us grandchildren. Psychologists have found that many grandchildren internalized their grandparents’ experience even if the Nazi era was never spoken of. Grandchildren thus often possess the family memory without having experienced the events themselves.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“It was the lack of food as much as anything which finally convinced the Western Allies that they had to help Germany get back on its feet if they wanted to avoid having to expend their own limited resources policing and subsidizing the country”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Europe could only recover from the war if it could utilize German industry, especially the plants in the Ruhr.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“War child and psychoanalyst Hartmut Radebold confirmed this in an interview with Der Spiegel on 28 March 2013: Many children have unconsciously adopted the symptoms of their parents. One patient dreams of the tank attacks that his father experienced. The adults have conveyed much more through gestures and insinuations than they realize. This has been absorbed by the children and incorporated into their identities. Parents unconsciously pass on tasks to their children: Carry on with the family, do a better job and protect us, so we don’t decompensate.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Konrad Adenauer, post-war Germany’s first chancellor and an ardent anti-Nazi, called for ‘an end to this sniffing out of Nazis’ because he believed the new democratic administration needed experienced ministers regardless of their previous misdeeds. For that reason he appointed Hans Globke as his senior state secretary. Globke was the lawyer who had helped draft the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which denied German and Austrian Jews their civil rights. He was so adept at playing both sides that he had the dubious distinction of appearing for both the prosecution and the defence at Nuremberg. The report also disclosed that the German domestic intelligence service (Bfv) knowingly hired former SS and SD men who had worked for the Gestapo as surveillance experts. However, they were employed as freelancers to keep them at a respectable distance, because they were considered ‘tainted’.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Of more immediate concern was the distinct possibility that the Russians might increase their influence in Europe by making life in East Germany more attractive to the migrating masses, a fear articulated by America’s viceroy in Germany, General Clay. It is my sincere belief that our proposed ration allowances in Germany will not only defeat our objectives in middle Europe, but will pave the road to a communist Germany. As abhorrent as the idea might have been to the displaced and dispossessed, the Soviet-controlled sectors were offering substantially higher rations than were to be had in the British, American and French zones. For a starving people it was tempting to take their chances with the Russians – at least you might live another day.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“You can have vengeance or peace, but you can’t have both. Former US President Herbert Hoover,”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Ironically, the extensive destruction of Germany’s major towns and cities enabled some of the architects and urban planners who had worked for the Third Reich to rebuild post-war Germany much as Hitler and his architect Albert Speer would have wished.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“Austria’s citizens had welcomed Hitler back to his Heimat after the Anschluss in March 1938, but they now recast themselves as ‘the first victims’ of Nazi aggression. The Austrian authorities were accused of being too lenient with former Nazis and suspiciously negligent in accumulating evidence against alleged mass murderers.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins

“It was alleged that some diplomats had protected Nazi war criminals then hiding in Africa and South America. All this against accusations that there was substantial ‘covering up, denying and suppressing’ not only by civil servants but also by influential members of the German media, who wished to conceal the extent of their involvement with the dictatorship. An estimated 800 former Nazis were said to have been given coded warnings by the German Foreign Office not to travel to France, where they had been tried and convicted in their absence and would have risked arrest and prosecution for their wartime activities.”
― Paul Roland, Life After the Third Reich: The Struggle to Rise from the Nazi Ruins