Germany Ww2 Quotes

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people

You can do anything you put your mind to doing.

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

Current interventions in use with children include psycho-pharmacological treatments, play therapy, psychological debriefing and testimony therapy, but this was Nazi Germany in 1945!

Children accept the conditions they are born into, and, to a degree, I was getting used to the bombings, fires, and death around me. I remember that I thought those things were normal. It is grown-ups who worry about things, and this ... this was total panic! I could taste the fear, and I could see that my mother was frightened, which I had never seen before, and this made me even more frightened.

He loved children and used to dandle me on his knee. This was how the title came about for this book, Uncle Hitler, although in the old German tradition, I called him Uncle Adolf, even though I was not related to him. This was a sign of respect to an older person, which is why I called Frau Eva ‘Aunty Eva’. However, little did I know at that time what revulsion the name Adolf Hitler would eventually invoke in the decent conscience of the world.

One day, I noticed that my father’s uniform had changed from a smart, light green colour with silver edging on the shoulder straps to a black uniform with SS markings and runes on the collar. I asked him why this was, and he told me that he was still a policeman, but now worked for the Schutzpolizei.

The fact is that many people did not – and still do not – understand that many Germans were held in the concentration camps from 1933 onwards. The camps were not just for Jews or other ‘non-people’, but also for any German who had made some remark about the Nazis, or who would not follow the Nazi rules.

I look at my mother, connected by a breath of glimmering hope, her red and shadowed eyes reveal that some element of our whole being has been lost and, somehow, thrown away. Sob-gasp, sob-gasp, sob-gasp. Slowly, that feeling within me fades. But wisps of it stay with you, locked in the chambers of your mind, always.

I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.

I heard people talking about what this Red Army did to any Germans they captured, and this only added to my fears.

If people still blame Germany for ww2 then why are people not hating The USA for "Freeing the Philippines" or Japan for conquering most of Asia or even The Mongol empire for annexing most of Europe and Asia. People just hate Germany for the things they done in the past but not others because 1.They live and love them or 2. they just blame the main character.

But you never knew where the bombs would fall in the dark, so night bombing was even more frightening than daylight bombing. Let’s just say, it scared the living daylights out of us!

It was on 7 March 1936 that Hitler comprehensivelyviolated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops intothe industrial region of the Rhineland, which under Article 180 had been specifically designated ademilitarized zone. Had the German Army beenopposed by the French and British forces stationednear by, it had orders to retire back to base and sucha reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler thechancellorship. Yet the Western powers, riven withguilt about having imposed what was described as a‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany in 1919, allowedthe Germans to enter the Rhineland unopposed. ‘After all,’ said the influential Liberal politician andnewspaper director the Marquis of Lothian, who hadbeen Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in RamsayMacDonald’s National Government, ‘they are onlygoing into their own back garden.’ When Hitler assured the Western powers in March 1936 thatGermany wished only for peace, Arthur Greenwood,the deputy leader of the Labour Party, told the Houseof Commons: ‘Herr Hitler has made a statement…holding out the olive branch… which ought to be takenat face value… It is idle to say that those statementsare insincere.’ That August Germany adopted compulsory two-year military service

We had seen too many horrors already, and we could see and hear more explosions all around us as the war continued, very close to our hiding place; machine gun fire and the sounds of grenades – all very frightening.

I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical.

I thought of the people on the roof and wondered how they managed to stay up there as there was nothing to hang on to but, thinking back, I think they had either been shot or had fallen off the train many miles back as we left Strausberg.

As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live.

We had the air war overhead, which was frightening, but we were, in a way, getting used to it. Now, however, we could hear – and at night, see – the flashes of explosions reflected in the dark sky. We could feel the ground vibrate under our feet. The war was getting closer!

At times the engine stopped, and grown-ups and children climbed out of the carriages with tins to collect water from the engine steam pipes. This was the only drinking water that we had access to, and though it was hot and very rusty, it was the best drink I felt I’d ever had.

Within minutes we had left the station and were entering a cutting with trees on both sides, so the horror of the massacre was now out of sight. The train left the wooded cutting, and we saw Strausberg on fire. There were Russian tanks in the streets and soldiers on foot entering buildings. People were being dragged out, and shot.

Inside my carriage there was mass panic and I was in danger of being trampled, but somebody picked me off the floor, and I found myself by the window on the platform side. I was very frightened now, for I thought that I had lost my mother and was all alone, but a few minutes later she arrived at my side. She had some blood on her face, but she told me not to worry, it would all be fine soon.

In therapy, to meet the needs of traumatized survivors of war and torture, the patient is requested to repeatedly talk about the worst traumatic event in detail while re-experiencing all emotions associated with the event. Traumatic memory, they say, is cleared by narration of whole life; from early childhood up to the present date ... this book is my therapy. I am awash with living memories.

One woman, called Eva, used to visit my mother and sometimes we would call in next door to visit her. Sometimes Frau Eva gave me cakes and fruit drinks. I remember she was very kind. It was not until many years later that I understood just who she was. To me, at the time, she was just a very nice woman who lived next door sometimes, although she did tend to go away, and was often not seen for several months.

I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee.

With our collective shock, what we saw seemed to be frozen into a state of suspended animation. Indelibly etched into our memories in terror, forever! My life was in slow motion, it was as if I was no longer in my body and this was a rather bad dream! It is almost impossible to describe with words what I saw, but I will try. This very experience is the one that has continued to shake me awake during the dense night of my lifetime.

As we passed this living cruelty, I shuddered in momentarily isolation and then let out an audible gasp at what I saw. They were hanging from trees! Some shaking violently, with their intestines hanging out of their bodies! Those who were still partly alive were screaming with pain, and wriggling on the branches trying to get off the ropes ... some had fallen off the branches of the trees, they were crawling along the ground, and towards us.

I looked at him. He sat in the darkness, with his brows knitted tightly together, as though trying to grasp something, to understand the inconceivable, to pinpoint the moment when everything suddenly got out of control and the point of no return was officially passed by both sides – the future murderers and their victims. The new Reich sorted us into two kinds and now he suddenly found himself among those who held an ax above our miserable heads.

I do recall hearing a conversation in our home in Strausberg, between my mother and my father, where my mother sounded very angry that my cousin had let the Rödels down by having to be dragged out of Oma’s house, crying for his mother and shouting that he did not want to return to the war in Russia. Like a great many other soldiers throughout that period, he died in Russia on 5 May, 1944. He was just twenty years of age, and is buried somewhere in that country.

The train, I was later told by my mother, only had about ten carriages to it, and there were hundreds of people fighting to get on. I don’t think anybody knew where the train was going, only that it was leaving Strausberg and would take us away from the Russians, who were now arriving on the far end of the platform. Some German SS soldiers and Police were shooting at the Russian troops, and many people – men, women and children – were hit by the flying bullets.

I quickly got used to being picked up by my mother, and taken to the air raid shelter near our home. Although frightening, this was a great adventure to me as a child, for in the shelter I played with the other children and we felt safe there as we were surrounded by grown-ups; although now the grown-ups were more worried than they had been in the past. There were greater feelings of anxiety and fear in the older people, which we children also felt, and it unsettled us all.

Later, I started to understand just why these children ‘hated’ us other children. I understood that they did not, in fact, hate ‘us’, but hated the fact that we were German and spoke in a language that they associated with pain, fear and the loss of their parents, uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers, their whole families, in fact. Once I understood this it affected me in all sorts of subconscious ways, ways that were to blight my life for many years and make me deny my German birth.

And you, my dearest, you are something unutterably familiar to me, you are really I myself! We are truly a wonderful idea. My life up until now was not lacking in love, God knows, but was empty of life, real life. I have spent years living for nothing, have wasted my life. And that is not what life is for. I want to live, to love with all the fire in my heart, to savor life and love to the fullest. I will never stand before you empty-handed. I will look after you, be your homeland, your home and family. I will give you everything you lack, and I know that my call in life is to make you happy.

After the Christmas and New Year of 1944 my mother and I returned to Strausberg, but the area was full of people evacuated from Berlin due to mass bombings on the capital by the RAF. These had started, in a small way, on 25 August, 1940, and had continued through 1941 and 1942. However, by November, 1943, these air attacks were major, involving mass bomber streams of more than 800 aircraft. I used to stand outside the front of our house and look at the sky, watching the silver bombers turning over Strausberg and heading in the direction of Berlin. Many were shot down, some near us in the fields around Strausberg.

But the public did not know the truth about what happened to the people in the trucks; they believed the stories from the government, who said that these people, known as Untermensch (non-people or ‘lower people’), were simply moved to open spaces in the east and settled on farms, away from Germany, so as not to ‘contaminate’ the German race. This is an example of people not wishing to know the facts behind the rumours in which were whispered between trusted friends. The general belief was that the rumours were rubbish anyway, for how could a civilized country do such things? Our leaders would never allow anything bad to happen to these people; after all, we were not barbarians! And so nothing was said, or done, and the public developed a collective blindness to the truth.

You seem surprised to find us here,’ the man said. ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.’ ‘We are everywhere,’ the man said. ‘We are all over the country.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. Who do you mean by we?’ ‘Jewish refugees.’ [...] ‘Is this your land?’ I asked him. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You mean you are hoping to buy it?’ He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he has given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food.’ ‘So where do you go from here?’ I asked him. ‘You and all your orphans?’ ‘We don’t go anywhere,’ he said, smiling through his black beard. ‘We stay here.’ ‘Then you will all become Palestinians,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps you are that already.’ He smiled again, presumably at the naïvety of my questions. ‘No,’ the man said, ‘I do not think we will become Palestinians.’ ‘Then what will you do?’ ‘You are a young man who is flying aeroplanes,’ he said, ‘and I do not expect you to understand our problems.’ ‘What problems?’ I asked him. The young woman put two mugs of coffee on the table as well as a tin of condensed milk that had two holes punctured in the top. The man dripped some milk from the tin into my mug and stirred it for me with the only spoon. He did the same for his own coffee and then took a sip. ‘You have a country to live in and it is called England,’ he said. ‘Therefore you have no problems.’ ‘No problems!’ I cried. ‘England is fighting for her life all by herself against virtually the whole of Europe! We’re even fighting the Vichy French and that’s why we’re in Palestine right now! Oh, we’ve got problems all right!’ I was getting rather worked up. I resented the fact that this man sitting in his fig grove said that I had no problems when I was getting shot at every day. ‘I’ve got problems myself’, I said, ‘in just trying to stay alive.’ ‘That is a very small problem,’ the man said. ‘Ours is much bigger.’ I was flabbergasted by what he was saying. He didn’t seem to care one bit about the war we were fighting. He appeared to be totally absorbed in something he called ‘his problem’ and I couldn’t for the life of me make it out. ‘Don’t you care whether we beat Hitler or not?’ I asked him. ‘Of course I care. It is essential that Hitler be defeated. But that is only a matter of months and years. Historically, it will be a very short battle. Also it happens to be England’s battle. It is not mine. My battle is one that has been going on since the time of Christ.’ ‘I am not with you at all,’ I said. I was beginning to wonder whether he was some sort of a nut. He seemed to have a war of his own going on which was quite different to ours. I still have a very clear picture of the inside of that hut and of the bearded man with the bright fiery eyes who kept talking to me in riddles. ‘We need a homeland,’ the man was saying. ‘We need a country of our own. Even the Zulus have Zululand. But we have nothing.’ ‘You mean the Jews have no country?’ ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ he said. ‘It’s time we had one.’ ‘But how in the world are you going to get yourselves a country?’ I asked him. ‘They are all occupied. Norway belongs to the Norwegians and Nicaragua belongs to the Nicaraguans. It’s the same all over.’ ‘We shall see,’ the man said, sipping his coffee. The dark-haired woman was washing up some plates in a basin of water on another small table and she had her back to us. ‘You could have Germany,’ I said brightly. ‘When we have beaten Hitler then perhaps England would give you Germany.’ ‘We don’t want Germany,’ the man said. ‘Then which country did you have in mind?’ I asked him, displaying more ignorance than ever. ‘If you want something badly enough,’ he said, ‘and if you need something badly enough, you can always get it.’ [...]‘You have a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘But you are a good boy. You are fighting for freedom. So am I.

That time will have come when our prison, which though extensive is nonetheless cramped and filled with suffocatingly stale air, has opened-that is, when the war raging at present has come to an end, one way or the other. And how that "or the other" sets me in terror of both myself and the awful straits into which fate has squeezed the German heart! For in fact I have only "the other" in mind; I am relying on it, counting solely on it, against my conscience as a citizen. After all, never-failing public indoctrination has made sure that we are profoundly aware of the crushing consequences, in all their irrevocable horror, of a German defeat, so that we cannot help fearing it more than anything else in the world. And yet there is something that some of us fear-at certain moments that seem criminal even to ourselves, whereas others fear it quite frankly and permanently-fear more than a German defeat, and that is a German victory. I hardly dare ask myself to which of these two persuasions I belong. Perhaps to a third, in which one yearns for defeat constantly and consciously, but with unrelenting agony of conscience.

As they crossed the assembly yard, all three men suddenly heard the start up of construction noise, coming from the nearby thick forest, on the far side of the wire. A distant whistle, some shouts, and the rat-a-tat of hammers and the ripping sound of handsaws. "They start those poor bastards early, don't they?" Scott asked rhetorically. "And then they work them late. Makes you glad you weren't born a Russian," he said. Then he smiled wryly. "You know, there's probably a joke in that some- where. Do you suppose right now one of those poor s.o.b.'s is saying he's glad he wasn't born black in America? After all, the damn Germans are just working them to death. Me? I've got to worry about my own country- men shooting me.

The Jewish mob has done the world a hell of a lot of good. It was instrumental in the creation of Israel. If there’d been a Jewish mob in Germany in 1923 during the Beer Hall Putsch, “They’d’ve shot Hitler, and history would have been a hell of a lot different.

As a young adult, Naomi became a teacher to help inspire children; to aid the creativity and channelled passions of their fertile minds. Now, the kids would read these Protocols; that 11yr old boy would be joined by an army of thousands, countless thousands, even millions. How long until the twisted poison of language could scar purity, and forever pervert the children of Britain into a hateful, vengeful, violent clique of racists? *Jewish life was life unworthy of life.* How could she have ever ignored and belittled this work? So maleficient was its content, to perniciously penetrate the conscious fears of all European nations – and presumably the rest of the world – to transcend cultural differences, and encompass all facets of cultural decay and parasitic operation to insidiously affect the thinking of – and thence bind together –all peoples of Britain, America and Europe to the modern form of anti-Semitism and scientific racial loathing. From the medieval beliefs of sacrifice and well-poisoning to this modern resurrection of ancient fears, with its sinister new ambition and devilish upgrade in scale; Naomi realised with trepidation that once more, her people truly had been chosen.

El holocausto alemán aún no es reconocido como tal.

This week, Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said the USSR had invaded Germany and Ukraine in WW2. Despite attempts by the Western press to bury the story, Russia is now demanding answers from Berlin.

Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer. Speer had been imprisoned for his role in the use of slave labor during the war, but though he was found guilty for a number of crimes,  and served nineteen years in prison, upon his release which was supported by such people as French president Charles DeGaulle and other high-ranking politicians, he was considered in many ways a “good German”. He had admitted his guilt at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials after the war, and acknowledged that the crimes committed under Hitler would haunt Germany forever. He wrote his memoirs in prison and spoke not only about his complicity in the use of slave labor but also his attempts to thwart some of Hitler's more barbaric plans at the end of the war. Much of the proceeds from his bestselling memoirs went to Jewish organizations, though this was not discovered until after Speer had died.

Appeasement was a policy put in place by Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister to try to avert war. His theory was that trying to prevent Germany from getting what it wanted would cause more harm than good in the long run. Therefore Britain’s official foreign policy would be that they would fulfill Germany’s wishes, “provided they appeared legitimate and were not enforced with violence,” described in German newspaper Der Spiegel. Chamberlain was aware that the British Empire’s resources were limited and that they really didn’t have the power to stop Hitler. So cooperating with them seemed like a better option.

Just as Britain, bypassed, remained to become a floating arsenal and launching platform for Germany's destruction, a whole generation of Americans would have to wrestle with the islands of people and principle abandoned in Eastern Europe by Rooseveltian diplomacy.

During the war, Buchenwald housed prisoners from dozens of nations, including several future European leaders: one prisoner was Dr. Konrad Adenauer, an anti-Nazi who was mayor of Cologne. After the war, he would become West Germany’s first Chancellor. Prisoner Leon Blum later became Prime Minister of France. The mayor of Prague, Petr Zenkl, was also among the Buchenwald prisoners.

No, he went on, they were not Nazis, but they thought the fake news was giving the Nazis in Germany a bad name. Hollywood movies and radio programs were spreading false information regarding events in Germany. The US, he said, lacked a free press.

Anyone who has done a bit of family history research which has taken them into the censuses of the 19th and 20th Centuries will be aware of just how many German citizens there were in Britain in those years. So we must assume that Katrin Fitzherbert's experiences and feelings must have been mirrored many times over in the 20th C. Other readable examples which spring to mind are Robert Graves ("Good-Bye to all that") who had a German mother, which caused him several difficulties, and Christabel Bielenberg ("The Past is Myself") a British woman who married a German lawyer in 1934 and spent WW2 in Germany. I find that reading the experiences of people resident in Germany during WW2 shows how similar peoples' lives were on both sides of the front. War diaries of life in Britain show the frustrations of ordinary folk with their own Government, but we never quite (so far as I remember) go to the point of having political officers keeping and eye on us and our remarks.

They. His own superiors became “they” to him. The alien side, the hostile side. Somehow, in the middle of this war, he switched fronts without realizing it fully.

He was still standing there, looking after me, a shadow except for his white shirtfront and pale head, a stray moonbeam hitting and lighting his golden hair. “I love you, I thought, although I didn’t speak the words. You’re beautiful and I’ll love you forever.

It is rather amazing that the Finns appeared not to have realized that their refusal to participate in operations against the Soviet Union after they had secured the lost territories at East Karelia that the achievement of their own goals was totally dependent on Germany achieving its goal of destroying the Soviet Union. Germany’s failure to do so, either because of a military defeat or because of a negotiated settlement would jeopardize Finland’s position. If Germany lost the war, the very existence of Finland came into question. It therefore made virtually no difference what the Finnish war aims were as they were intrinsically linked to those of Germany. It is nevertheless extraordinary that the Germans did not press the Finns for more definite answers regarding their participation in achieving the two main German objectives: operations against Leningrad, and the cutting of the Murmansk railroad. The failure to do so became a major bone of contention and should have been anticipated. Carl von Clausewitz wrote: ‘no war is begun, or at least no war should begin, if people acted wisely without first finding the answer to the question: what is to be attained by and in war?

You are beautiful and I will love you forever, she had said to him that day by the lake. Neither of them ever forgot her valiant, youthful promise, but now—the love destroyed, his beauty mocked by the ugly significance of his uniform, she hoped he was dead.

I am reminded of an old Chinese curse I read somewhere: May you live in interesting times. I think of it and laugh. What a curse it is. Interesting times, indeed.