tony deckard

“By the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilian foreigners were toiling for the Third Reich. Nearly all of them had been rounded up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or water or any sanitary facilities, and there put to work in the factories, fields and mines. They were not only put to work but degraded, beaten and starved and often left to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter. In addition, two million prisoners of war were added to the foreign labor force, at least a half a million of whom were made to work in the armaments and munitions industries in flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions, which stipulated”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“A nation is born in blood and purchases with blood its right to stand in the ranks with other nations.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

“fulfilling their expectations of the aged: sitting in a chair in a room, alone, musing on the past, on former glory, on missed opportunities, on the way things used to be. On dead people.”
― Paula Hawkins, A Slow Fire Burning