Sam

“Given this framework, he necessarily plays down Hitler’s role, and concludes among other things that ‘what Hitler and the Nazis actually did was to unshackle and thereby activate Germans’ pre-existing, pent-up antisemitism’. What he calls the ‘great success’ in persecuting the Jews, resulted ‘in the main’ from ‘the preexisting, demonological, racially based, eliminationist antisemitism of the German people, which Hitler essentially unleashed’.14”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“When Mrs. Kondo spoke to me in 1989, her daughter was forty-five years old and living far away on Hokkaido in northern Japan. The younger woman suffered the classic symptoms of fetal exposure: microcephaly and mental retardation. With her mother’s constant support, she had finished basic schooling, had married, and had borne two children of her own. The children showed no symptoms of abnormality; as in so many other cases, there was no evidence of a genetic effect. But Mrs. Kondo’s daughter cannot function as a normal mother in her state of limited mental capability. So she relates to her children much as a sister, and others bear the responsibility of parenthood.”
― James N. Yamazaki, Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician’s Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands

“Himmler encouraged Gestapo and Kripo to do their bit, and in 1936 a new ‘Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion’ was created to register all homosexuals investigated by police.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

“a police official in SS uniform, probably a member of the Gestapo, turned up in a senior high school class in the Stuttgart area. He was there to explain the background of ‘shootings “because of resistance” one could read about from time to time in the press’. He said simply, that while courts worked well when hard evidence could be found, the police had to act when there was insufficient evidence. They knew how to recognize guilt and were not bound by rules of evidence as were judges, so that the police could become the proverbial judge, jury, and executioner. Lest students worry unduly, they were assured that the police did not execute anyone without ‘previously thoroughly examining’ the case.”
― Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany