Nazi Germany Quotes

“There was nothing conservative about Adolf Hitler. Hitler was an artist and a revolutionary at heart. He wanted to completely upend and remake German society.”
― A.E. Samaan

“Would you have wished more, or fewer, anarchists around in the Thousand Year Reich or any of the other fantasies of hierarchy?”
― Christopher Hitchens, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

“The present destruction of Europe would not be complete and thorough had the German people not accepted freely [the Nazi] plan, participated voluntarily in its execution and up to this point profited greatly therefrom”
― Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress

“The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.

pp. 181-182”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Even so, the advance of the far right in Europe and the United States reveals the need to rethink memory work, to adapt it to new generations for whom the Second World War feels like a long-ago crisis. It's important to tell a story people can identify with, a story of ordinary people, the Mitlaufer, and not only of heroes, victims, or monsters. To raise awareness that, if history as such does not repeat itself, sociological and psychological mechanisms do, which push individuals and societies to make irrational choices by supporting regimes and leaders who are opposed to their interests, by becoming complicit in criminal ideas and actions. The most dangerous monster is not a megalomaniacal and violent leader, but us, the people who make him possible, who give him the power to lead. By our opportunism, by our conformity to all-powerful capitalism, which places money and consumption over education, intelligence, and culture, we are in danger of losing the democracy, peace, and freedom that so many of our predecessors have fought to preserve.”
― Géraldine Schwarz, Those Who Forget: My Family's Story in Nazi Europe – A Memoir, A History, A Warning

“German children were on the lookout for stray coins. German Jews kept watch for possible capture.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Antanas eased up on the accelerator and pulled the truck onto the shoulder. The sound of the soldiers' footsteps crunching in the snow made Maria sit up straight. The truck had driven about thirty metres past the patrol, but none of the soldiers had fired upon them. Antanas hoped fervently that the transport documents that Peter had furnished him would pass inspection. Maria reached down and touched a metal pipe concealed beneath her seat. She was prepared to use it.

Jadwyga continued to pray quietly. "Mother Mary, spare me, Maria, and the other women from rape, and Antanas from death."

As a sergeant approached the truck, Jadwyga's stomach cramped, sweat broke out on her forehead, and her arms began to shake. Then she fainted. Maria propped Jadwyga up to make it look as though she was sleeping, and then smiled at the sergeant who was rapping on the glass.

Antanas rolled down his window.”
― Mark Creedon, Caught Between Two Devils

“Sidney Hellman doesn't remember who he was the last time around, if there was a last time. But how can he? None of us do.

Still, there are clues.

For instance, he starts seeing things. Images of events from another life. Terrible images."

--From the story "The Monster Inside," included in BROTHERS, FATHERS, AND OTHER STRANGERS, the new story collection by Mitchell Waldman”
― Mitchell Waldman

“There was the smell of pea soup, something burning and confrontation.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“A crackling sound prompted her to think that the fire had already begun. It hadn't the noise was kinetic humans, flowing, charging up.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Voices climbed over shoulders and the smell of pure German sweat struggled at first, then poured out. It rounded corner after corner till they were swimming in it. The words, the sweat. And the smiling. Let's not forget the smiling.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Hitler was a very persistent man and never gave up on anything except for games of tiddlywinks! If the Allies had known this, they could have scrapped the land, air and sea wars, turned World War II into the Tiddlywink Olympics, and ended the whole thing in six minutes instead of six years.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Sidney Hellman doesn't remember who he was the last time around, if there was a last time. But how can he? None of us do.

Still, there are clues.

For instance, he starts seeing things. Images of events from another life. Terrible images.

--From the story "The Monster Inside," included in BROTHERS, FATHERS, AND OTHER STRANGERS, the new story collection by Mitchell Waldman”
― Mitchell Waldman

“Sidney Hellman doesn't remember who he was the last time around, if there was a last time. But how can he? None of us do.

Still, there are clues....."

For instance, he starts seeing things. Images of events from another life. Terrible images.

--From the story "The Monster Inside," included in BROTHERS, FATHERS, AND OTHER STRANGERS, the new story collection by Mitchell Waldman”
― Mitchell Waldman

“Hitler's holocaust took over 6 million lives, hence he is rightly deemed a monster, but the british empire uprooted 15 million people from their homes, massacred millions and starved four million people to death. What about that?”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race

“Thank You Hitler (The Sonnet)

Thank you Hitler for showing the worst of humanity,
I am sorry that we couldn't place you on a pedestal.
Things would've been different if you were not a nobody,
Particularly if you had a background royally honorable.
Apparently if you have an empire to your name,
You can get away with the most heinous of atrocities.
If you have that blue blood running through your veins,
Tyranny, oppression, are deemed as acts of great dignity.
The common notion is, everything nazi is sick and sinister,
At the same time, everything british is great and glorious,
Despite the fact that it was the british empire that was,
An international force of evil unlike the nazi bastards.
Nazism is an enemy of humanity, there is no doubt.
Only if we felt so for the empire as we do for the krauts!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Making Britain Civilized: How to Gain Readmission to The Human Race

“The Holocaust is the lowest humankind has ever sunk. There had been massacres and genocide in the past. There had never been industrial-scale human slaughterhouses before. It was the perfect storm of absolute power inciting rabble-rousing hatred combined with advanced technology and the urge to kill in the primitive recesses of the human mind. I hope that the world never descends to that level of barbarity again. I fear that history's darkest stain will be deepened and surpassed in the future.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Adams was not quite an “ordinary” woman; she was an academic who engaged in a public exchange of views with a Jewish woman and who actively combated Nazism. But she was ordinary in that she was one of the growing number of women who, from 1930 on, voted for the Nazis, and her motives apparently resembled those of most Nazi voters: they voted for the party not because they agreed with everything the Nazis said but as a protest against the government in power.”
― Dalia Ofer

“Adams was not quite an “ordinary” woman; she was an academic who engaged in a public exchange of views with a Jewish woman and who actively combated Nazism. But she was ordinary in that she was one of the growing number of women who, from 1930 on, voted for the Nazis, and her motives apparently resembled those of most Nazi voters: they voted for the party not because they agreed with everything the Nazis said but as a protest against the government in power.”
― Gisela Bock

“Despite the incontrovertible evidence demonstrating the Rockefeller family’s massive contribution to the rise of Nazi Germany militarily and ideologically, not one single family member has ever apologized or acknowledged any wrongdoing.”
― Gavin Nascimento, A History of Elitism, World Government & Population Control

“Anti-Semitism was, of course, the Nazis' cleverest -- because most effective -- psychological stroke. Moreover, the leaders and forerunners of Nazism really believed in it -- for we must not imagine that any propaganda line will ever make headway unless its early spokesmen are themselves convinced of its truth. All political extremists mean what they say and shout. All of them, on both right and left, will carry out what they have promised in their wildest proclamations. For if they ranted only to win votes, or out of pure calculation, they would never be able to incite the masses to fanaticism. That is a truism we have learned through many painful lessons.”
― Carl Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself

“To most Liberals, the concept of political ideology was both alien and abhorrent. Liberalism rejected the rule of dogma and absolutes in politics; it refused to believe that unswerving doctrine should or could be translated into policy. It therefore attempted, in the thirties, to dismiss the notion that Germany under Hitler was in fact governed by the ideology and precepts embodied in Mein Kampf. Even years of Hitlerite persecution at home and Nazi aggression abroad failed to convince many that here indeed was an ideology on the path of fulfilment. No doubt, the refusal of many Britons to admit this stemmed in some measure from a realization of the consequences if it were indeed true: if Nazi ideology was as malign as its detractors contended, and was being enacted, then the prospects for Europe were indeed bleak.”
― Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany During 1930s

“...Jim Crow was the American equivalent of South African apartheid and the racial laws passed in Germany under the Nazi regime of the 1930s. And these similarities are not merely coincidental. Historians have uncovered growing evidence showing that racist parties around the world, including in Nazi Germany, were inspired and guided by the example of American Jim Crow.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“It is easy to identify with noble victims, but hard to think oneself into the mind of a child playing his trade on the black market or of a girl imagining herself ready to sacrafice her own and her brother's life on the 'alter of the father-land'. It is difficult to imagine what a fifteen-year-old boy thought as he guarded women waiting to be shot.”
― Nicholas Stargardt

“We have fallen into the hands of criminals.”
― Hjalmar Schacht

“National Socialism has no theory of society as we understand it, no consistent picture of its operation, structure, and development. It has certain aims to carry through and adjusts its ideological pronouncements to a series of ever-changing goals. This absence of a basic theory is one difference between National Socialism and Bolshevism. The National Socialist ideology is constantly shifting It has certain magical beliefs—leadership adoration, the supremacy of the master race—but its ideology is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.”
― Franz Leopold Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944

“[describing 'the prime minister' i.e Goering] He loved war as a child loves Christmas”
― Klaus Mann, Mephisto

“Fascism is eliminationism.

Hitler promised to make Germany great again, by eliminating all the people who allegedly made Germany not great.

Trump is promising to make America great again, by eliminating all the people who allegedly make America not great.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America

“Ever wonder what you would have done in Nazi Germany?

You're doing it right now.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America

“Munich is the most wonderful town, my favourite in all of Europe, and the National Socialists have brought peace to the streets.

And yet . .  . and yet below the surface I sense a terrible undertow of violence. Do you not feel it?’

I won’t say a word against my city or my country, Mr Gainer.’

‘No, of course you won’t. My country right or wrong, as an American once said. What I mean is, it’s all this pagan stuff.

Munich has some of the most beautiful churches in the world and a fine history of Christendom, but the pagans are winning, and their ways are not ways of kindness and love.

I sometimes fear that Germany is in the process of renouncing two thousand years of Christian civilisation.

Am I alone in this? Do the ordinary German people not feel it?”
― Rory Clements, Munich Wolf