Dresden Germany Quotes

In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well tended. "Only horses seem to be equally happy, never children or the youth," he wrote. ... He called it "horse happiness" and had noticed the same phenomenon in Nuremburg and Dresden. In part, he knew this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison. "At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting." He added, "One might easily wish he were a horse!

The sun had just gone down, and its afterglow was backlighting the city, which formed low cliffs around the bucolic void to the idle stockyards. The city was blacked out because bombers might come, so Billy didn’t get to see Dresden do one of the most cheerful things a city is capable of doing when the sun goes down, which is to wink its lights on one by one. There was a broad river to reflect those lights, which would have made their nighttime winkings very pretty indeed. It was the Elbe.

Auschwitz was a much safer place to be than Dresden or any other city of any size in Germany from 1943 onward.

Industrial production actually rose in Germany during the war. And the cities with the highest morale were the ones—like Dresden—that were bombed the hardest. According to German psychologists who compared notes with their American counterparts after the war, it was the untouched cities where civilian morale suffered the most.

Putin was a former KGB intelligence officer who’d been stationed in East Germany at the Dresden headquarters of the Soviet secret service. Putin has said in interviews that he dreamed as a child of becoming a spy for the communist party in foreign lands, and his time in Dresden exceeded his imagination. Not only was he living out his boyhood fantasy, he and his then-wife also enjoyed the perks of a borderline-European existence. Even in communist East Germany, the standard of living was far more comfortable than life in Russia, and the young Putins were climbing KGB social circles, making influential connections, networking a power base. The present was bright, and the future looked downright luminous. Then, the Berlin wall fell, and down with it crashed Putin’s world. A few days after the fall, a group of East German protestors gathered at the door of the secret service headquarters building. Putin, fearing the headquarters would be overrun, dialed up a Red Army tank unit stationed nearby to ask for protection. A voice on the other end of the line told him the unit could not do anything without orders from Moscow. And, “Moscow is silent,” the man told Putin. Putin’s boyhood dream was dissolving before his eyes, and his country was impotent or unwilling to stop it. Putin despised his government’s weakness in the face of threat. It taught him a lesson that would inform his own rule: Power is easily lost when those in power allow it to be taken away. In Putin’s mind, the Soviet Union’s fatal flaw was not that its authoritarianism was unsustainable but that its leaders were not strong enough or brutal enough to maintain their authority. The lesson Putin learned was that power must be guarded with vigilance and maintained by any means necessary.

The destruction of Dresden was an overkill. It was done in February, 1945, when it was clear that Germany would lose the war. Russians could have already swept across the country but they waited for some reason. Firebombing mostly old people and children and women, hardly any of them culprits in the war, wasn’t the most ethical thing to do, but it was done, and now, watching the restoration of the cathedral, which takes place for years and takes millions of dollars, it is clear how much easier destruction is than construction.

With Herr Hitler’s consent, he just passed a new ordinance,” the man said. “It’s a law called the Regulations against Jews’ Possession of Weapons. Effective immediately, no Jew in Germany has the right to own, possess, or carry a gun. All weapons and ammunition in the possession of Jews must be turned over forthwith. Any Jews caught with a handgun or rifle will be imprisoned and fined.” “And?” Dr. Weisz asked. “I’m no sportsman. Are you?” “No, I’m not,” the man from Dresden said. “But don’t you see? These attacks on our communities are just the beginning. Now Hitler is disarming us, and when we are completely defenseless, he will come for us, for all of us. Mark my words.

I was halfway across when the planes came roaring, demolishing the sky over the Severn Valley. Tornados fly over our school several times a day, so I was ready to cover my ears with my hands. But I wasn’t ready for three Hawker Harrier Jump Jets, close enough to the ground to hit with a cricket ball. The slam of noise was incredible! I bent into a tight ball and peeped out. The Harriers curved before they smashed into the Malverns, just, and flew off toward Birmingham, screaming under Soviet radar height. When World War III comes, it’ll be MiGs stationed in Warsaw or East Germany screaming under NATO radar. Dropping bombs on people like us. On English cities, towns, and villages like Worcester, Malvern, and Black Swan Green. Dresden, the Blitz, and Nagasaki.

Joseph Andreas Epp. Epp told us that German scientists had secret UFOs’ facilities in Germany and Poland. He particularly mentioned the UFOs’ hangars located in Letow, Breslau and Dresden, which was reduced to ashes by Allied aerial carpet bombings. He stated that 15 UFOs prototypes were built and flew successfully. He added that the early German UFOs were based upon blueprints and instructions given by Maria Ostric’s Vril Society. Epp in his own words, describing the UFO mode of operation: The circular wing blades rotated independently and smoothly around the external body (Chassis) of the machine as the craft moved forward in a centrifugical manner (Auto-gyrocopter), and the craft took off vertically in a spiral mode. It reached a high altitude at an incredible speed…close to a supersonic speed.

What's in the papers then, Son?" he asked with the curtness of a father. "Nothing much, Dad," his son answered. "I saw that those newts have got up as far as Dresden, though." "Germanys had it then," Mr. Povondra asserted. "They're funny people you know, those Germans. They're well educated, but they're funny. I knew a German once, chauffeur he was for some factory; and he wasn't half coarse, this German. Mind you, he kept the car in good condition, I'll say that for him. And now look, Germanys disappearing from the map of the world," Mr. Povondra ruminated. "And all that fuss they used to make! Terrible, it was: everything for the army and everything for the soldiers. But not even they were any match for these newts. And I know about these newts, you know that, don't you. Remember when I took you out to show you one of them when you were only so high?" "Watch out, Dad," said his son, "you've got a bite." "That's only a tiddler," the old man grumbled as he twitched on his rod. Even Germany now, he thought to himself. No-one even bats an eyelid at it these days. What a song and dance they used to make at first whenever these newts flooded anywhere! Even if it was only Mesopotamia or China, the papers were full of it. Not like that now, Mr. Povondra contemplated sadly, staring out at his rod. You get used to anything, I suppose. At least they're not here, though; but I wish the prices weren't so high! Think what they charge for coffee these days! I suppose that's what you have to expect if they go and flood Brazil. If part of the world disappears underwater it has its effect in the shops. The float on Mr. Povondra's line danced about on the ripples of the water. How much of the world is it they've flooded so far then?, the old man considered. There's Egypt and India and China - they've even gone into Russia; and that was a big country, that was, Russia! When you think, all the way up from the Black Sea as far the Arctic Circle - all water! You can't say they haven't taken a lot of our land from us! And their only going slowly .. "Up as far as Dresden then, you say?" the old man spoke up. "Ten miles short of Dresden. That means almost the whole of Saxony will soon be under water." "I went there once with Mr. Bondy," Father Povondra told him. "Ever so rich, they were there, Frank. The food wasn't much good though. Nice people, though. Much better than the Prussians. No comparison.

Warum, mit welchem Recht und aufgrund welcher Erfahrung ausschließen, daß eines Tages in Leipzig und Dresden, in Magdeburg und Schwerin – und in Ostberlin – nicht Hunderte, sondern Hunderttausende auf den Beinen sind und ihre staatsbürgerlichen Rechte einfordern? Einschließlich des Rechts, von einem Teil Deutschlands in den anderen überzusiedeln?" ("Why, from what right and based on what experience exclude the possibility that one day in Leipzig and Dresden, in Magdeburg and Schwerin – and in East Berlin – not merely hundreds but hundreds of thousands will take to the streets and demand their rights as citizens? Including the right to move from one part of Germany to the other?")

Britain and Germany thought they were winning World War II by trying to bomb the other into submission. In reality, they were destroying themselves as global powers, and (ironically, similar to one of the firestorms their city bombings caused), creating a vacuum on the world stage that the United States and the Soviet Union rushed to fill as superpowers in the post-war years.

On 14 September 1869, one hundred years after his birth, Alexander von Humboldt’s centennial was celebrated across the world. There were parties in Europe, Africa and Australia as well as the Americas. In Melbourne and Adelaide people came together to listen to speeches in honour of Humboldt, as did groups in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. There were festivities in Moscow where Humboldt was called the ‘Shakespeare of sciences’, and in Alexandria in Egypt where guests partied under a sky illuminated with fireworks. The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill. In New York City the cobbled streets were lined with flags. City Hall was veiled in banners, and entire houses had vanished behind huge posters bearing Humboldt’s face. Even the ships sailing by, out on the Hudson River, were garlanded in colourful bunting. In the morning thousands of people followed ten music bands, marching from the Bowery and along Broadway to Central Park to honour a man ‘whose fame no nation can claim’ as the New York Times’s front page reported. By early afternoon, 25,000 onlookers had assembled in Central Park to listen to the speeches as a large bronze bust of Humboldt was unveiled. In the evening as darkness settled, a torchlight procession of 15,000 people set out along the streets, walking beneath colourful Chinese lanterns. Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all. Every speech across the world emphasized that Humboldt had seen an ‘inner correlation’ between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was ‘one of those wonders of the world’. His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was ‘in some sort bound up with the universe itself’. In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt and many other cities. The greatest German celebrations were in Berlin, Humboldt’s hometown, where despite torrential rain 80,000 people assembled. The authorities had ordered offices and all government agencies to close for the day. As the rain poured down and gusts chilled the air, the speeches and singing nonetheless continued for hours.

And almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made, or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. It seemed as if they actually believed that Nazis had come from and returned to the western parts of Germany, and were somehow separate from them—which was in no way true. History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century. In Dresden once,

As the KGB rezident at Leningrad State University and as an employee of the Leningrad Fifth Chief Directorate, where he worked as a member of the active reserves after returning from East Germany, Putin would certainly have had access to the lists of agents and informants who worked for the KGB during the Soviet period. He also would have been tasked to monitor political activity among faculty and students at the university. Lieutenant Colonel Andrey Zykov,XVII the lead Russian investigator in St. Petersburg for especially important cases, who was assigned to examine Putin’s activities for criminal behavior, even went so far as to allege that two of Putin’s later associates, Anatoliy Sobchak and Dmitriy Medvedev, both of whom were teaching law at Leningrad State University at the time, had provided Putin with information (“I Anatoliy Sobchak, i Dmitriy Medvedev byli ego stykachkami”).127 Thus Putin would not have been the only person interested in “cleansing” his own file of damaging materials. Eastern Europe at this time was awash with exposés as high-ranking politicians were unmasked as agents of either the KGB or local security services. No one in Russia wanted a repeat of this, and indeed there has never been such a period in post-Soviet Russia. Clearly the KGB got there first, and files, lots of files, were burned. As mentioned earlier, Putin himself admits that in Dresden, after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, he burned so many files that the furnace exploded. But also the entire mood in Russia, the heart of the Soviet Empire, was quite different compared to the rest of the Soviet Bloc—it was one thing to unmask someone in Poland who had worked for the Russians; it was quite another to reveal that a Russian son had been spying on his father, for example.128 Russians as a whole sensed that such a settling of accounts would be divisive, ruinous, and pointless. And those tens of thousands of people coming out of the collapsed CPSU and KGB had other tasks in mind—most notably making a living in new conditions. The elites from these two organizations knew where the money was and how to use it. They had more lucrative assignments in mind than revenge.

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window was among the paintings rescued from destruction during the bombing of Dresden in World War II, The painting was stored, with other works of art, in a tunnel in Saxon, Switzerland; when the Red Army encountered them, they took them. The Soviets portrayed this as an act of rescue; some others as an act of plunder. Either way, after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviets decided in 1955 to return the art to Germany, “for the purpose of strengthening and furthering the progress of friendship between the Soviet and German peoples.” Aggrieved at the thought of losing hundreds of paintings, art historians and museum curators in the Soviet Union suggested that “in acknowledgment for saving and returning the world-famous treasures of the Dresden Gallery” the Germans should perhaps donate to them Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and Sleeping Venus by Giorgione. The Germans did not take to the idea, and the painting was returned. Well-preserved, it is on display at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden.

At home in the courtyard of his palace in Dresden, he would amuse himself and the townspeople by having his servants release wild boars to run headlong at him. Only once did he miss his target with his hunting spear, but as the charging boar approached him, he dodged, caught it by the hind leg with one hand, drew his sword with the other, and killed it in a single stroke.

One midranking former KGB spy unhappy about this state of affairs was Vladimir Putin. Putin had missed perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev’s reformist ideas, and had returned from provincial East Germany and Dresden. Putin was now carving out a political career in the new St. Petersburg. He mourned the lost USSR. Its disappearance was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.