Fritz Fischer Quotes

And this is where I don't remember. This is where I want to wander my mind back and under, past the smell, past the thump-bump of the boots and the suitcases, toward some semblance of a good-bye. Because we should have seen our loves go missing, we should have been able to watch them leave us, should have known the precise moment of our loss. If only we'd seen their faces turning from us, a flash of eye, a curve of cheek! A face turning - they would never give us that. Still, why couldn't we have had a view of their backs to carry with us, just their backs as they left, only that? Just a glimpse of a shoulder, a flash of woolen coat? For the sight of Zayde's hand, hanging so heavy at his side - for Mama's braid, lifting in the wind! But where our loved ones should have been, we had only the introduction to this white-coated man, Josef Mengele, the same Mengele who would become, in all his many years of hiding, Helmut Gregor, G. Helmuth, Fritz Ulmann, Fritz Hollman, Jose Mengele, Peter Hochbicler, Ernst Sebastian Alves, Jose Aspiazi, Lars Balltroem, Friedrcih Edler von Breitenbach, Fritz Fischer, Karl Gueske, Ludwig Gregor, Stanislaus Prosky, Fausto Rindon, Fausto Rondon, Gregor Schklastro, Heinz Stobert, and Dr. Henrique Wollman.

The memo provoked, and still provokes, deep division. At the time, the Foreign Office’s most strident critic was Thomas Sanderson, who rejected Crowe’s simplistic portrayal of German history as ‘an unchecked record of black deeds’.24 Since then, however, historians have tended to come down on Crowe’s side. Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s Aims in the First World War is the most controversial meditation on the idea that Germany sought to conquer Europe and the world. Yet his book is confined to Germany’s aims during the war, i.e. after the war began, when all nations were fighting for their lives; it finds no persuasive evidence that Germany intended global conquest – through force of arms – before the war began.

Many historians still cite Lloyd George's previously quoted comment that the European nations 'stumbled into war' as evidence that no nation was entirely free of guilt for the conflict, but a careful analysis of German plans and ambitions in the pre-war years by the German historian Fritz Fischer confirms the popular opinion that the root causes of the Great War were German militarism and political ambition - and that these roots had been established for some time.

This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the extensive researches made into the Wilhelmine archives at Potsdam by Professor Fritz Fischer, research which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Germany had been planning a major European war for years and saw the Sarajevo incident, and the subsequent reactions of Austria-Hungary and Serbia, as a chance to start it.