Nazi Germany Historian Quotes

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore.

One day I hoped some thoughtful historian would point out the close connection between the Mercedes-Benz motor car and Germany’s favorite dictator and that the Lord would find a way to pay these bastards back for their help in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there.

As other (previously lost) eyewitness accounts verifying Hitler’s and the Nazis’ detailed plans to annihilate the Jewish people are recovered by historians each passing decade, Holocaust deniers’ attempts to defend the Third Reich against accusations of genocide become more and more feeble. No, make that more and more laughable.

In 2011 he published Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Metaxas’s version of Dietrich Bonhoeffer bore an uncanny resemblance to conservative American evangelicals, in that he battled not only Nazis but the liberal Christians purportedly behind the rise of Nazism. Once again, evangelicals emerged as heroes. Evangelicals loved the book. Meanwhile, historians panned it; the director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust described it as “a terrible oversimplification and at times misinterpretation of Bonhoeffer’s thought, the theological and ecclesial world of his times, and the history of Nazi Germany.” 19

For the two Western leaders, the alliance with Stalin posed a peculiar moral dilemma. Roosevelt and Churchill, the British military historian Max Hastings noted, "found it convenient, perhaps essential, to allow Stalin's citizens to bear a scale of human sacrifice which was necessary to destroy the Nazi armies, but which their own nations' sensibilities rendered them unwilling to accept." As a result, they traded "dependence upon one tyranny"--the Soviet Union--for "the destruction of another"--Nazi Germany. In doing so, they traded away Poland's future.

another. The administrators of the law became one of the centers of the counterrevolution, perverting justice for reactionary political ends. “It is impossible to escape the conclusion,” the historian Franz L. Neumann declared, “that political justice is the blackest page in the life of the German Republic.”4

Only nine weeks after Hitler brought Rommel home from North Africa, his replacement, Colonel General Juergen von Arnim, was forced to surrender to the Allies.  As Rommel had predicted, Africa was, at this point, unwinnable for the Germans.  Over 100,000 German soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, and Italy, now open to invasion, would fall in 1943.[118]  Historian Samuel Mitcham Jr. claims that Hitler told Rommel he had made a mistake, and “should have listened

During the war, trains, men, and much materiel were used by the Germans to transport and kill the Jews of German-occupied Europe rather than utilize them in the war effort. Since the end of the war, historians have studied this and have come to essentially the same conclusion: the extermination of the Jews was more important to the Nazis than actually winning the war. In more than a few instances, German troops that were needed immediately at the front lines had to walk or wait while hundreds of trains transported Jewish people to the camps. That sounds heartless, but it is the truth. To Hitler and Himmler, their deaths were more important than the war at the front. In the twisted minds of Hitler, Himmler, and the Nazi true believers, the “threat” that the Jews posed for Germany and Europe was greater than the threat posed by the war.

The first four months of Truman’s presidency saw the collapse of Nazi Germany, the founding of the United Nations, firebombings of Japanese cities that killed many thousands of civilians, the liberation of Nazi death camps, the suicide of Adolf Hitler, the execution of Benito Mussolini, and the capture of arch war criminals from Hitler’s number two, Hermann Göring, to the Nazi “chief werewolf” Ernst Kaltenbrunner. There was the fall of Berlin, victory at Okinawa (which the historian Bill Sloan has called “the deadliest campaign of conquest ever undertaken by American arms”), and the Potsdam Conference, during which the new president sat at the negotiating table with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Soviet-occupied Germany, in an attempt to map out a new world. Humanity saw the first atomic explosion, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dawn of the Cold War, and the beginning of the nuclear arms race. Never had fate shoehorned so much history into such a short period. “The four months that have elapsed since the death of President Roosevelt on April 12 have been one of the most momentous periods in man’s history,” wrote a New York Times columnist at the time. “They have hardly any parallel throughout

The historian Meike Wöhlert has analyzed and compared the judgments rendered by courts responsible for malicious acts of treason in five cities. Although her research only deals with registered cases and not unofficial ones, the results suggest that the telling of political jokes was a mass phenomenon beyond state control. In 61 percent of official cases, joke-tellers were let off with a warning, alcohol consumption often being cited as an extenuating circumstance. (People who had had one too many in bars were considered only partially responsible for their actions, and because most of the popular jokes that made it to court had been told in bars, the verdicts were accordingly lenient.)

Reagan never forgot the emotional impact of being at the wall. It was incomprehensible that in the decades following the fall of Nazi Germany, such a prison would be erected in the heart of Berlin, with the sole purpose of keeping an entire population of people under guard. The existence of the wall encapsulated his abhorrence of the Communist state. What kind of society, he wondered, can function only by trapping its citizens and forcing them into compliance? There could be no justification in ideology or necessity for such an abomination. Why was the Western world—and the United States!—so complicit in the continuation of this travesty? That wall should come down, he thought. He returned to the United States haunted by what he had experienced. By the third year of Carter’s presidency, it was becoming clear that there was going to be an opening for a strong contender. The professor and historian Andrew E. Busch captured Carter’s core dilemma well, writing that not only was he besieged by economic crises, but in his posture toward the Soviets “he became Teddy Roosevelt in reverse, speaking loudly and carrying a twig. An increasing majority of Americans thought Carter too small for the job.” If Carter had been elected in a post-Watergate cleansing, his moral authority was diminished by his failures of governance.

The Kemal-ist way to “make politics”— to wage war against the Entente for an honorable peace— was viewed as “active politics” par excellence. The opposite was what the papers diagnosed in the case of Germany: ful-fi llment politics, which in their eyes was either “passive politics” or not even politics at all. The Kladderadatsch cartoon “How to Revise a Peace Treaty” summarized this debate and Turkey’s role- model function perfectly. It ruled out historians, diplomats, and politi-cians as agents of revision. The one who achieves revision is a Turk, “saber in hand”—“action” instead of “talk.

Shirer was used extensively by CBS in its daily coverage of the buildup to war. He did a daily five-minute broadcast from Prague in 1938, and tried to cover Hitler’s invasion of Austria but was ejected from the Vienna radio station at bayonetpoint. At Murrow’s directive, he flew to London and gave his report from there. He returned to Berlin in September 1939: his daily reports, beginning “This is Berlin,” were done under strict censorship. But Shirer was able to tell much by using slang phrases that otherwise might not have been allowed. He returned to the United States in 1940, bringing the detailed diaries he had kept throughout his years in Germany. These were published in June 1941 as Berlin Diary, which became a bestseller. Shirer settled with his family in Bronxville, New York, and began a regular stint as a CBS commentator Sept. 28, 1941. But he and Murrow (who by 1947 was head of CBS News) came to an unfortunate parting of ways, and Shirer went to Mutual. His final broadcast was April 10, 1949. He then entered a new career, that of contemporary historian. His history of Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, was published to great acclaim and financial success in 1960. He was still producing books in his 80s.

In a double-page spread in 1999, the Daily Mail ran a large photo of fake Nazis from ’Allo ’Allo! with a think-piece headlined ‘In the week that Germany kept the old feud alive by illegally banning British beef: Why it’s a good thing for us to be beastly to the Germans.’ It was written, not by some hack but by the distinguished historian Niall Ferguson. He found a way to argue both that the ‘war’ with Germany was entirely phoney and that it was nonetheless worth continuing because it was somehow in Europe’s best interests. While conceding ‘The reality is that we have more in common with the Germans than with any other European people’, Ferguson managed to conclude that ‘bad Anglo-German relations were (paradoxically) a good thing. To be precise: it would really be rather bad for everyone else in Europe if Britain and Germany did strike up a firm alliance.

So Adorno’s F-Scale had no power to explain why fascism came to power in Germany and Italy but not elsewhere. Most real fascists, historian Anthony James Gregor dryly observes in The Ideology of Fascism, “would not have made notably high scores.

...Jim Crow was the American equivalent of South African apartheid and the racial laws passed in Germany under the Nazi regime of the 1930s. And these similarities are not merely coincidental. Historians have uncovered growing evidence showing that racist parties around the world, including in Nazi Germany, were inspired and guided by the example of American Jim Crow.