Nazi Soldier Quotes

[Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Nazism:] Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of Charles Darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. Darwin’s thought was not taught in Germany; Darwinism was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime. Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms – the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome – if it’s an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of Mein Kampf, that Hitler says that he’s doing God’s work and executing God’s will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making Hitler into a minor god, begins, “I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come that the first treaty made by the Nationalist Socialist dictatorship, the very first is with the Vatican? It’s exchanging political control of Germany for Catholic control of German education. How come that the church has celebrated the birthday of the Fuhrer every year, on that day until democracy put an end to this filthy, quasi-religious, superstitious, barbarous, reactionary system? Again, this is not a difference of emphasis between us. To suggest that there’s something fascistic about me and about my beliefs is something I won't hear said and you shouldn't believe.

In case you haven't noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appalling powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed. In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazi's once were. And with good reason. In case you haven't noticed, our unelected leaders have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound 'em and kill 'em and torture 'em and imprison 'em all we want. Piece of cake. In case you haven't noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send 'em anywhere. Make 'em do anything. Piece of cake. The O'Reilly Factor. So I am a man without a country, except for the librarians and a Chicago paper called "In These Times." Before we attacked Iraq, the majestic "New York Times" guaranteed there were weapons of destruction there. Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the First World War. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you? Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is the not the first time I surrendered to a pitiless war machine. My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse." Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas! Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations and made it all their own?

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.

Today a great shot for freedom was heard. I think it stands a chance of being heard forever. It marls a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The beginning of the return to a statues of dignity we have not known for two thousand years. Yes, today was the first step back. My battle is done. Now I turn the command over to the soldiers.

During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could ever go into wide distribution.

CHAPTER 2: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS ALDO THE APACHE My name is Lt. Aldo Raine and I'm putting together a special team, and I need me 8 soldiers. 8 Jewish-American soldiers. Now, y'all might've heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we'll be leaving a little earlier. We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Nazis. Now, I don't know about y'all, but I sure as hell didn't come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross 5,000 miles of water, fight my way through half of Sicily and jump out of a fuckin' air-o-plane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin', mass murderin' maniac and they need to be destroyed. That's why any and every every son of a bitch we find wearin' a Nazi uniform, they're gonna die. Now, I'm the direct descendant of the mountain man Jim Bridger. That means I got a little Injun in me. And our battle plan will be that of an Apache resistance. We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German won't not be able to help themselves but to imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the German will be sickened by us, and the German will talk about us, and the German will fear us. And when the German closes their eyes at night and they're tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us they are tortured with. Sooounds good?

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.

First, our enemies were the natives, then they were the Nazis, then after a while it was the communists. Finally, at the pinnacle of what we’re calling civilization, our enemies are the Islamic terrorists. Our enemies seem to change over the course of history along with our ways of fighting them. But what hasn't changed is government profit; politicians and leaders seem to always be getting richer by the blood of our soldiers. Makes you wonder who the real enemy has been all this time.

It wasn’t just Nazi soldiers and fascist thugs who turned against us. Ordinary citizens, our friends and neighbours since before I was born, joined in the violence and the looting.

My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul. I don’t consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust photographs of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by Nazi soldiers, the women look like my own mother and I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother—and by extension, myself.

But there was definitely something going on. Helen had agreed. With Harry and Sly taking off before they even ate dinner that night before, there had to be. I’m glad I have Joanie and the others. I need the support, and the calming influence. They are just the ones to give me peace. Just as she was about to drift off with that comforting thought, the front door flew open and Joan burst in breathless. “Annie!” she said, turning to her. “I think that Nazi guy is right here in town!

Your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.” He toasted his glass in Todd's direction. “Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.

When I tried to sing by myself, I felt sad and empty, for inevitably my father's favorite songs came to me, and before I got to "und auf den Wiesen blühen die Blümelein rot und blau" (and on the meadows bloom the little flowers red and blue), I had to hide and cry. He was buried somewhere in France, and I was sure no one had planted a flower on his resting place. Who would have, for a soldier who had fought for Hitler?

America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism. How did this happen? Is the fall of democracy in the United States inevitable? And if not, how can we reclaim our democratic principles? This crisis in American democracy crept up on many of us. For generations of Americans, grainy news footage from World War II showing row upon row of Nazi soldiers goose-stepping in military parades tricked us into thinking that the Adolf Hitlers of the world arrive at the head of giant armies. So long as we didn’t see tanks in our streets, we imagined that democracy was secure. But in fact, Hitler’s rise to absolute power began with his consolidation of political influence to win 36.8 percent of the vote in 1932, which he parlayed into a deal to become German chancellor. The absolute dictatorship came afterward.

I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier. Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.

The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.

Soldiers went off to fight the Nazis with pictures of girls like you in their helmets.

I thought we stopped using grunts as guinea pigs decades ago. Even the Nazis didn't run medical experiments on their own troops in combat. This book explodes like a grenade in the Pentagon's privy. Red it and weep; better yet, get mad." Col. David H. Hackworth (U.S. Army, ret.)

Ironically, the memory of the women heroes of World War I was largely eclipsed by the very women they had inspired. The more blatant evil enacted into law by Nazi Germany during the Second World War ensured that those who fought against it would continue to fascinate long after the first war had become a vague, unpleasant memory—one brought to mind only by fading photographs of serious, helmeted young men standing in sandbagged trenches or smiling young women in ankle-length nursing uniforms, or by the presence of poppies in Remembrance Day ceremonies.

A few moments later they witnessed the miracle. The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.

Hitler fantasized that the United States so fully shared his racist views that it would ultimately side with the Third Reich. Nazi writers regularly pointed to America’s anti-Asian immigration quotas and bigoted Jim Crow laws to deflect foreign criticism of their own discriminatory statutes. Even the German quest for Lebensraum found its model in America’s westward expansion, during which, as Hitler noted, U.S. soldiers and frontiersmen “gunned down . . . millions of Redskins.

If the question is ‘How do we stop enormous evils in the world?’ the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently ‘War.’ Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed ‘war is not the answer.

The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War. pp. 181-182

Denise, the Nazi soldiers in those trucks do not suspect they're about to be outfoxed by two girls." In the stillness before we spring back itno action, Denise looks to me, grinning like mad. She quotes a line from King Kong, one of my favorite movies I watched with Tom. "'Oh no. It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.

nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from Ritchie Boys.

What the King conquered, the Prince formed, the Field Marshal defended, the Soldier saved and unified

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus. Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town. Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men? I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer. I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis. To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.

The attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings.

Another letter complained about the soldiers suffering in Stalingrad, asking God why He let things like this happen to the brave German people. This letter was a classic. The godless barbarians who had forgotten the image of God in the hour of their victories, the murderers who were shooting tens of thousands of Jews and Russian prisons of without blinking an eye, suddenly now remembered that there was a God somewhere after all. Where was God when they were massacring innocent women and children in the forts of Lithuania, piling them on top of the other in huge mass graves? Why didn't they look up to Him at that hour? But at that time they were playing God themselves, with the lives of millions of "subhumans." Oh, how good it felt to hear a German Nazi clamour of God! God! This was our revenge. God was no in Stalingrad. This was the Ninth Fort for the Germans.

The partisans would continue picking off Nazis; the Nazis would continue massacring noncombatants; and eventually the Fascists would learn that they could not win the war even if they killed thirty civilians for every one of their dead soldiers. The arithmetic was brutal, but brutal arithmetic always worked in Russia’s favor.

I asked, Did she know Adolf Hitler invented the blow-up sex doll? And Ms. Wright’s black sunglasses turned to look at me. During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan blood-lines pure, and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could go into wide distribution. True fact.

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.

during a night journey taken early in the Second War in a compartment full of young soldiers. Their conversation made it clear that they totally disbelieved all that they had read in the papers about the wholesale cruelties of the Nazi régime. They took it for granted, without argument, that this was all lies, all propaganda put out by our own government to “pep up” our troops. And the shattering thing was, that, believing this, they expressed not the slightest anger. That our rulers should falsely attribute the worst of crimes to some of their fellow-men in order to induce others of their fellow-men to shed their blood seemed to them a matter of course. They weren’t even particularly interested.

the Great Terror in the Soviet Union of 1937–38 and the Holocaust of European Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany in 1941–45. Yet we make a great mistake if we imagine that the Soviet NKVD or the Nazi SS acted without support. Without the assistance of regular police forces, and sometimes regular soldiers, they could not have killed on such a large scale.

Why this book is disliked by gay readers: Captain Ernst Roehm, was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional soldier—the upper part of his nose had been shot away in 1914—with a flair for politics and a natural ability as an organizer. Like Hitler he was possessed of a burning hatred for the democratic Republic. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist Germany and he believed with Hitler that this could be done only by a party based on the lower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army officers, had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual—he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the S.A.... (...) Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes. (...) The brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can. (...) [Hitler] who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man’s morals. No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. (...) Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and ex-bouncer in a café frequented by homosexuals, whom Roehm had made leader of the Berlin S.A., had alerted the storm troopers...

In Berlin, Stauffenberg and his confederates had at last perfected their plans. They were lumped under the code name “Valkyrie”—an appropriate term, since the Valkyrie were the maidens in Norse-German mythology, beautiful but terrifying, who were supposed to have hovered over the ancient battlefields choosing those who would be slain. In this case, Adolf Hitler was to be slain. Ironically enough, Admiral Canaris, before his fall, had sold the Fuehrer the idea of Valkyrie, dressing it up as a plan for the Home Army to take over the security of Berlin and the other large cities in case of a revolt of the millions of foreign laborers toiling in these centers. Such a revolt was highly unlikely—indeed, impossible—since the foreign workers were unarmed and unorganized, but to the suspicious Fuehrer danger lurked everywhere these days, and, with almost all the able-bodied soldiers absent from the homeland either at the front or keeping down the populace in the far-flung occupied areas, he readily fell in with the idea that the Home Army ought to have plans for protecting the internal security of the Reich against the hordes of sullen slave laborers.

There followed an exhortation to all Germans “not to give up the struggle.” He had finally forced himself to recognize, though, that National Socialism was finished for the moment, but he assured his fellow Germans that from the sacrifices of the soldiers and of himself the seed has been sown that will grow one day… to the glorious rebirth of the National Socialist movement of a truly united nation.

One night, around the campfire after a dinner of bully-beef stew, someone opened an extra bottle of rum. ‘As it grew darker, the men began to sing, at first slightly self-conscious and shy, but picking up confidence as the song spread.’ Their songs were not the martial chants of warriors, but the schmaltzy romantic popular tunes of the time: ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’, ‘My Melancholy Baby’, ‘I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’. The bigger and burlier the singer, Pleydell noted, the more passionate and heartfelt the singing. Now the French contingent struck up, with a warbling rendition of ‘Madeleine’, the bittersweet song of a man whose lilacs for his lover have been left to wilt in the rain. Then it was the turn of the German prisoners who, after some debate, belted out ‘Lili Marleen’, the unofficial anthem of the Afrika Korps, complete with harmonies: ‘Vor der Kaserne / Vor dem grossen Tor / Stand eine Laterne / Und steht sie noch davor …’ (Usually rendered in English as: Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate, darling I remember, how you used to wait.) As the last verse died away, the audience broke into loud whistles and applause. To his own astonishment, Pleydell was profoundly moved. ‘There was something special about that night,’ he wrote years later. ‘We had formed a small solitary island of voices; voices which faded and were caught up in the wilderness. A little cluster of men singing in the desert. An expression of feeling that defied the vastness of its surroundings … a strange body of men thrown together for a few days by the fortunes of war.’ The doctor from Lewisham had come in search of authenticity, and he had found it deep in the desert, among hard soldiers singing sentimental songs to imaginary sweethearts in three languages.

Every evening they announce that they want punch our nose, us and all the other Nazi pigs. Sure, you want to, but doing it is something rather different, gentlemen! The whole affair has a certain tragicomic tone. The Jews talk as if they were really strong, but soon they have to move their tents and run like rabbits from the approaching German soldiers. Qui mange du juif, en meurt! One could almost say that anyone with the Jews on his side has already lost. They are the best pillar of the coming defeat. They carry the seed of destruction. They hoped this war would bring the last desperate blow against National Socialist Germany and an awakening Europe. They will collapse. Already today we begin to hear the cries of the desperate and seduced peoples throughout the world: “The Jews are guilty! The Jews are guilty!” The court that will pronounce judgment on them will be fearful. We do not need to do anything ourselves. It will come because it must come. Just as the fist of an awakened Germany has struck this racial filth, the fist of an awakened Europe will surely follow. Mimicry will not help the Jews then. They will have to face their accusers. The court of the nations will judge their oppressor. Without pity or forgiveness, the blow will strike. The world enemy will fall, and Europe will have peace. "Mimicry", Das Reich, 20 July 1941

Now that she saw Germans daily, with their bright blue eyes and shaggy beards, hearing their "Danke, Fraulein" for the soup, she struggled to understand why they and French and British lads had spent four years killing one another. Of course, she knew about the German atrocities in Belgium. She knew what terrible brutality they had caused in 1914. But surely there weren't the ones who had done it. How did one nation produce both humble souls and killers?

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.

The shots and shouts of the attackers rang out quite clearly but were already gone some distance away. Here I lay on my back in the warm sun; under the circumstances, I would have been expected to spring to my feet and begin attempting to justify mu most awkward situation. Defying all the rules, still flat on my back, I cracked my heels together, threw my hand to my forehead in salute, and yelled up to the oberleutnant, "Funder Rauch died for the Führer, Folk, and the Fatherland!" Where there's a war, there have to be dead bodies, I reasoned

There might be a war on, there might be Nazi tanks on the Champs Elysées and Jews rounded up in the Marais, but this is still Paris, damn it. There are still fresh baguettes baking across the arrondissements, and if the cinemas have to occasionally show a German film to please the troops – H.A. Lettow and Ernst Schäfer’s documentary of the SS expedition to Tibet, Lhasa-Lo – Die verbotene Stadt, for instance – then so be it. Paris is still gay, there is still music in the cafés and wine in the brasseries, and aren’t some of those German soldier-boys handsome?

Colonel Klaus Von Strassen stepped out of the command car. Under the cover of darkness and flanked by German soldiers bearing submachine guns at the ready, the Nazi officer slipped through the back door of a schoolhouse on the eastern edge of Sedan to see the nearly three dozen prisoners—men, women, and children—sitting in orderly rows on the floor. They had been forced to strip down to their underwear. Their feet and hands were bound tightly with ropes and chains. They were blindfolded and gagged. They sat shivering in the cool night air, thick with the smell of gunpowder and burning human flesh.

It was a mass of conservatives who despised the democratic Republic established in Berlin; and as time went on it was above all the great mob of demobilized soldiers for whom the bottom had fallen out of the world in 1918, uprooted men who could not find jobs or their way back to the peaceful society they had left in 1914, men grown tough and violent through war who could not shake themselves from ingrained habit and who, as Hitler, who for a while was one of them, would later say, “became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.

In the small town of Horodenko in the Ukraine the Nazis ordered all Jews to report to the local church for vaccination against typhoid. Twenty-five hundred people were assembled there. They were loaded onto trucks and driven to the bank of the river Dnester. When they arrived there, there was an orchestra playing and German officers were sitting at tables laden with food and drink. Large pits had been dug out opposite the officers. Between the pits and the tables lay soldiers with machine guns. When the Jews arrived, they had to stand next to the pits and were shot at in such a way as to fall directly into them.

The Nazi infiltration into the armed services became serious enough to compel General Groener, now the Minister of Defense, to issue an order of the day on January 22, 1930, which recalled a similar warning to the Army by General von Seeckt on the eve of the Beer Hall Putsch seven years before. The Nazis, he declared, were greedy for power. “They therefore woo the Wehrmacht. In order to use it for the political aims of their party, they attempt to dazzle us [into believing] that the National Socialists alone represent the truly national power.” He requested the soldiers to refrain from politics and to “serve the state” aloof from all party strife.

in the spring of 1945 the Third Reich simply ceased to exist. There was no longer any German authority on any level. The millions of soldiers, airmen and sailors were prisoners of war in their own land. The millions of civilians were governed, down to the villages, by the conquering enemy troops, on whom they depended not only for law and order but throughout that summer and bitter winter of 1945 for food and fuel to keep them alive. Such was the state to which the follies of Adolf Hitler—and their own folly in following him so blindly and with so much enthusiasm—had brought them, though I found little bitterness toward him when I returned to Germany that fall.

It is of more than historical interest to reflect that Henry Ford modeled his assembly line car production after visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse in the early 1900s. He watched the suspended animals, legs shackled and heads downward, on a moving conveyor as they traveled from worker to worker, each of whom performed a step in the slaughtering process. Ford immediately saw that it was a perfect model for the automobile industry, creating an assembly method of building cars. More than efficient, the slaughtering assembly line offered workers a newly found detachment in the whole messy business of killing animals. Animals were reduced to factory products and the emotionally deadened workers could see themselves as line workers rather than animal killers. Later, the Nazis used the same slaughterhouse model for their mass murders in the concentration camps. The factory-style assembly line became a way for Nazi soldiers to detach from the killing--seeing the victims as "animals," and themselves as workers. Henry Ford, a rampant anti-Semite, not only developed the assembly line method later used in the Holocaust, he openly admired the Nazis' efficiency. Hitler returned the admiration. The German leader considered "Heinrich Ford" a comrade-in-arms and kept a life-sized portrait of the automobile mogul in his office at the Nazi Party headquarters.

Fourteen years of sharing political power in the Republic, of making all the compromises that were necessary to maintain coalition governments, had sapped the strength and the zeal of the Social Democrats until their party had become little more than an opportunist pressure organization, determined to bargain for concessions for the trade unions on which their strength largely rested. It might be true, as some Socialists said, that fortune had not smiled on them: the Communists, unscrupulous and undemocratic, had split the working class; the depression had further hurt the Social Democrats, weakening the trade unions and losing the party the support of millions of unemployed, who in their desperation turned either to the Communists or the Nazis. But the tragedy of the Social Democrats could not be explained fully by bad luck. They had had their chance to take over Germany in November 1918 and to found a state based on what they had always preached: social democracy. But they lacked the decisiveness to do so. Now at the dawn of the third decade they were a tired, defeatist party, dominated by old, well-meaning but mostly mediocre men. Loyal to the Republic they were to the last, but in the end too confused, too timid to take the great risks which alone could have preserved it, as they had shown by their failure to act when Papen turned out a squad of soldiers to destroy constitutional government in Prussia.

If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws. That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don’t know how. Or we believe that bad things won’t happen to us. And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler’s murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia’s icy wasteland—into the Soviet Army’s machine guns and cannon—to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor. Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons’ lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush’s shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers’ coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers’ sacrifice. And so she invited the press to the Sacramento International Airport to photograph her son’s flag–draped coffin. Again, I am not comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, nor America to Germany’s Third Reich. What I do believe is that each of us has the duty to keep the Bushes of the world from becoming anything like Hitler—and to keep America from invading other countries with no just cause. We will never, though, be able to stop corrupt politicians and corporations from doing criminal things until we stop surrendering our power to them. The more we fear to oppose them—the more we want to retreat into the supposed safety of our nice gated communities or downtown lofts—the more powerful people will conspire to ruin our prosperity and wreck our lives.

During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium. The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths. The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro. Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. Some of the Norwegian rescuers of the ship had thought the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this view had not prevailed, and the German survivors had been rescued. And that had been the end of the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Which was to say that Knut Haukelid had killed innocent people. One of whom, the night watchman of the ship, had been a good person. Someone who'd gone out of his way to help Haukelid, at risk to himself; from the kindness of his heart, for the highest moral reasons; and been sent to drown in turn. Afterward, in the cold light of history, it had looked like the Nazis had never been close to getting nuclear weapons after all. And Harry had never read anything suggesting that Haukelid had acted wrongly.

In the morning, real nurses taught us the rudiments of anatomy and instructed us in the preparation of dressings and bandages. But then in the afternoon, representatives of the Frauenschaft, the women’s auxiliary of the Nazi Party, came to instruct us in our real mission: to boost the morale of the wounded and spread the propaganda of German invincibility. “You must make sure that every single soldier in your care knows that, despite the cowardly British air attack last May, the Cologne cathedral is still standing,” said the sturdy, uniformed instructor. “You must also tell everyone that there has been no bombing in the Rhineland. Am I clear?” “Yes, ma’am,” we all said. In fact, the Rhineland was being crushed by Allied air attacks.

What was the Right in Bavaria at this chaotic time? It was the Regular Army, the Reichswehr; it was the monarchists, who wished the Wittelbachs back. It was a mass of conservatives who despised the democratic Republic established in Berlin; and as time went on it was above all the great mob of demobilized soldiers for whom the bottom had fallen out of the world in 1918, uprooted men who could not find jobs or their way back to the peaceful society they had left in 1914, men grown tough and violent through war who could not shake themselves from ingrained habit and who, as Hitler, who for a while was one of them, would later say, “became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.

Schnall’s strong reaction to the failed replication of her own work provoked a mixed reaction from the psychological community. While many psychologists were bewildered by her response, a number of prominent US psychologists voiced support for her position. Dan Gilbert from Harvard University likened Schnall’s battle to the plight of Rosa Parks, and he referred to some psychologists who conducted or supported replications as “bullies,” “replication police,” “second stringers,” McCarthyists, and “god’s chosen soldiers in a great jihad.” Others accused the so-called replicators of being “Nazis,” “fascists,” and “mafia.” Rather than viewing replication as an intrinsic part of best scientific practice, Gilbert and his supporters framed it as a threat to the reputation of the (presumably brilliant) researchers who publish irreproducible findings, stifling their creativity and innovation

Antanas eased up on the accelerator and pulled the truck onto the shoulder. The sound of the soldiers' footsteps crunching in the snow made Maria sit up straight. The truck had driven about thirty metres past the patrol, but none of the soldiers had fired upon them. Antanas hoped fervently that the transport documents that Peter had furnished him would pass inspection. Maria reached down and touched a metal pipe concealed beneath her seat. She was prepared to use it. Jadwyga continued to pray quietly. "Mother Mary, spare me, Maria, and the other women from rape, and Antanas from death." As a sergeant approached the truck, Jadwyga's stomach cramped, sweat broke out on her forehead, and her arms began to shake. Then she fainted. Maria propped Jadwyga up to make it look as though she was sleeping, and then smiled at the sergeant who was rapping on the glass. Antanas rolled down his window.

Captain Ernst Roehm, on the staff of the Army’s District Command VII in Munich, had joined the party before Hitler. He was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional soldier—the upper part of his nose had been shot away in 1914—with a flair for politics and a natural ability as an organizer. Like Hitler he was possessed of a burning hatred for the democratic Republic and the “November criminals” he held responsible for it. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist Germany and he believed with Hitler that this could be done only by a party based on the lower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army officers, had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual—he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the S.A., the army of storm troopers which he commanded until his execution by Hitler in 1934.

That night, atrocities were being committed by civilised Germans all over Leipzig, all over the country. Nearly every Jewish home and business in my city was vandalised, burned or otherwise destroyed, as were our synagogues. As were our people. It wasn’t just Nazi soldiers and fascist thugs who turned against us. Ordinary citizens, our friends and neighbours since before I was born, joined in the violence and the looting. When the mob was done destroying property, they rounded up Jewish people – many of them young children – and threw them into the river that I used to skate on as a child. The ice was thin and the water freezing. Men and women I’d grown up with stood on the riverbanks, spitting and jeering as people struggled. ‘Shoot them!’ they cried. ‘Shoot the Jewish dogs!’ What had happened to my German friends that they became murderers? How is it possible to create enemies from friends, to create such hate? Where was the Germany I had been so proud to be a part of, the country where I was born, the country of my ancestors? One day we were friends, neighbours, colleagues, and the next we were told we were sworn enemies. When I think of those Germans relishing our pain, I want to ask them, ‘Have you got a soul? Have you got a heart?’ It was madness, in the true sense of the word – otherwise civilised people lost all ability to tell right from wrong. They committed terrible atrocities, and worse, they enjoyed it. They thought they were doing the right thing. And even those who could not fool themselves that we Jews were the enemy did nothing to stop the mob. If enough people had stood up then, on Kristallnacht, and said, ‘Enough! What are you doing? What is wrong with you?’ then the course of history would have been different. But they did not. They were scared. They were weak. And their weakness allowed them to be manipulated into hatred. As they loaded me onto a truck to take me away, blood mixing with the tears on my face, I stopped being proud to be German. Never again.

In an extraordinary article in the Daily Express, Major R. Crisp stated that the ordinary German soldiers he used to come across had been replaced by an army of fanatical fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who appeared incapable of anything but brutality. There is nothing that is decent, or gentle, or humble to be read in them. Everything that is beastly and lustful and cruel. This is a generation of men trained deliberately in barbarity, trained to execute the awful orders of a madman. Not a clean thought has ever touched them … Every German born since 1920 is under this satanic spell. The younger they are the more fiercely impregnated are they with its evil poison. Every child born under the Hitler regime is a lost child. It is a lost generation. The newspaper article went on to suggest that it was a blessing that so many of these children were being killed in the fighting, and that the remainder should be dealt with similarly for the good of the world. ‘But whether you exterminate them or sterilise them, Nazism in all its horribleness will not perish from the earth until the last Nazi is dead.

In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo, citing decades of research, details all of the ways that ordinary, average individuals—whether they be soldiers in Guatemala, doctors in Nazi Germany, Hutus in Rwanda—can be stripped of their values, their morality, their souls. After elaborating on the variables that contribute to this process—isolation, drug use, denying people identities—he declares that the most important variable, far and away more important than the others, is the fear of being excluded from the in-group. Manipulating this fear, he asserts, is the most effective way people are transformed from ordinary human beings into human beings capable of evil. We tend to associate the desire for acceptance by the in-group with high school, but according to Zimbardo, this need does not stop at adolescence but continues through adulthood. He cites people’s willingness to suffer painful and or humiliating initiation rites in return for acceptance in fraternities, cults, social clubs, or the military. When the desire to be included is coupled with the terror of being excluded, Zimbardo writes that it can cripple initiative, negate personal autonomy, and lead people to do virtually anything to avoid rejection. “Authorities can command total obedience not through punishment or rewards but by means of the double-edged weapon: the lure of acceptance coupled with the threat of rejection.

Adeline is Battered & Threatened Not knowing the title of this bureaucrat, I addressed him incorrectly as Meine Herrschaften. With this silly fabricated title, I simply tried to explain to him that the corporal was a brave Frontsoldat. My efforts were in vain since he was intent on finding out the corporal’s name, and my stalling only made matters worse. “What’s his name?” he shouted again and again, this time hitting my breasts and punching me in the stomach, which caused me to vomit all over the floor. It didn’t matter to him that my husband was a German soldier fighting for das Vaterland. He continued to beat me and threatened to put me into the terrible prison camp at Schirmeck. Having passed by there recently, the crying and moaning sounds from inside the gates of this prison were still very vivid in my mind. He reached for his telephone and said, “With one call you’ll be there if you don’t answer me!” “Please, I won’t be able to live with myself if I’m the cause of an innocent person’s death,” I sobbed. I remember him saying, “I remember you! You’re the woman from Bischoffsheim who helped with the kindergarten class and did the art work there. You have two little girls, don’t you?” How could this man know so much about me? He continued his threats by saying that he would beat my little girls at 3 o’clock every afternoon in the Village center, until I gave him the names he wanted. I formed a mental image of this cruel act, however in spite of this, I firmly told him that I would never talk and that the only Etappenhase was the man standing in front of me. The last thing I can remember was him using the telephone to hit me. His last blow struck me above my right eye…. With this I fell down into my own vomit and lost consciousness!

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84

We can dismiss any notion that the Nazi regime murdered Jews in order to gratify German public opinion. It took elaborate precautions to hide these actions from the German people and from foreign observers. In official documents the responsible authorities referred to the killings with euphemisms like Sonderbehandlung (“special handling”), and undertook major operations to eliminate all traces of them, at a time when men and materiel could hardly be spared from the fighting. At the same time, there was no particular effort to keep the secret from German troops on the eastern front, many of whom were regularly assigned to participate. Some soldiers and officials photographed the mass executions and sent pictures home to their families and girlfriends.57 Many thousands of soldiers, civil administrators, and technicians stationed in the eastern occupied territories were eyewitnesses to mass killings. Many more thousands heard about them from participants. The knowledge inside Germany that dreadful things were being done to Jews in the east was “fairly widespread.” As long as disorderly destruction such as the shop-front smashings, beatings, and murders of Kristallnacht did not take place under their windows, most of them let distance, indifference, fear of denunciation, and their own sufferings under Allied bombing stifle any objections. In the end, radicalized Nazism lost even its nationalist moorings. As he prepared to commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, Hitler wanted to pull the German nation down with him in a final frenzy. This was partly a sign of his character—a compromise peace was as unthinkable for Hitler as it was for the Allies. But it also had a basis within the nature of the regime: not to push forward was to perish. Anything was better than softness.59

The psychological impact of trauma in both the military and civilian arenas has been documented for well over 100 years [1], but the validity of the traumatic neuroses and their key symptoms have been continuously questioned. This is particularly true for posttraumatic amnesia and therapeutically recovered traumatic memories. Freud’s [2] abandonment of his seduction theory was followed by decades of denial of sexual trauma in the psychoanalytic and broader sociocultural realms [3]. Concomitant negation of posttraumatic symptomatology was noted in regard to the war neuroses, emanating equally from military, medical and social spheres [4]. Thus, Karon and Widener [5] drew attention to professional abandonment of the literature on posttraumatic amnesia in World War II combatants. They considered this to be due to a collective forgetting, comparable to the repression of soldiers, but instead occurring on account of social prejudices. He further noted that the validity of memories was never challenged at the time since there was ample corroborating evidence. Recent research confirms the findings of earlier investigators such as Janet [6], validating posttraumatic amnesia of both civilian and military origin. Van der Hart and Nijenhuis [7] cited clinical studies reporting total amnesia for combat trauma, experiences in Nazi concentration camps, torture and robbery. There is also increasing evidence for the existence of amnesia for child sexual abuse. Thus, Scheflen and Brown [8] concluded from their analysis of 25 empirical studies that such amnesia is a robust finding. Since then, new studies, for example those of Elliott [9], have appeared supporting their conclusion. This paper examines posttraumatic amnesia in World War I (WWI) combatants. The findings are offered as an historical cross-validation of posttraumatic amnesia in all populations, including those subjected to childhood sexual abuse.

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientists were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

My father only saw six months of combat before being taken prisoner. How did they capture him? They were advancing over a frozen lake while the enemy’s artillery shot at the ice. Few made it across, and those who did had just spent their last strength swimming through freezing water; all of them lost their weapons along the way. They came to the shore half-naked. The Finns would stretch out their arms to rescue them and some people would take their hands, while others…many of them wouldn’t accept any help from the enemy. That was how they had been trained. My father grabbed one of their hands, and he was dragged out of the water. I remember his amazement: “They gave me schnapps to warm me up. Put me in dry clothes. They laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, ‘You made it, Ivan!’ ” My father had never been face to face with the enemy before. He didn’t understand why they were so cheerful… The Finnish campaign ended in 1940…Soviet war prisoners were exchanged for Finns. They were marched toward each other in columns. On their side, the Finns were greeted with hugs and handshakes…Our men, on the other hand, were immediately treated like enemies. “Brothers! Friends!” they threw themselves on their comrades. “Halt! Another step and we’ll shoot!” The column was surrounded by soldiers with German Shepherds. They were led to specially prepared barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The interrogations began…“How were you taken prisoner?” the interrogator asked my father. “The Finns pulled me out of a lake.” “You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.” My father also considered himself guilty. That’s how they’d been trained…There was no trial. They marched everyone out on the quad and read the entire division their sentence: six years in the camps for betraying the Motherland. Then they shipped them off to Vorkuta to build a railway over the permafrost. My God! It was 1941…The Germans were moving in on Moscow…No one even told them that war had broken out—after all, they were enemies, it would only make them happy. Belarus was occupied by the Nazis. They took Smolensk. When they finally heard about it, all of them wanted to go to the front, they all wrote letters to the head of the camp…to Stalin…And in response, they were told, “Work for the victory on the home front, you bastards. We don’t need traitors like you at the front.” They all…Papa…he told me…All of them wept

The urban isolated individual An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spirltual and emotional life; they are not easily penetrated by propaganda. For example, it is much more difficult today for outside propaganda to influence a soldier integrated into a military group, or a militant member of a monolithic party, than to influence the same man when he is a mere citizen. Nor is the organic group sensitive to psychological contagion, which is so important to the success of Nazi propaganda. One can say generally, that 19th century individualist society came about through the disintegration of such small groups as the family or the church. Once these groups lost their importance, the individual was substantially isolated. He was plunged into a new environment generally urban and thereby "uprooted." He no longer had a traditional place in which to live. He was no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestry. An individual thus uprooted can only be part of a mass- He is on his own, and individualist thinking asks of him something he has never been required to do before: that he, the individual, become the measure of all things. Thus he begins to judge everything for himself. In fact he must make his own judgments. He is thrown entirely on his own resources; he can find criteria only in himself. He is clearly responsible for his own decisions, both personal and social. He becomes the beginning and the end of everything. Before him there was nothing; after him there will be nothing. His own life becomes the only criterion of justice and injustice, of Good and Evil. The individual is placed in a minority position and burdened at the same time with a total crushing responsibility. Such conditions make an individualist society fertile ground for modern propaganda. The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frames of reference — all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be fed information from the outside and conditioned at will. The individual left to himself is defenseless the more so because he may be caught up in a social current thus becoming easy prey for propaganda. As a member of a small group he was fairly well protected from collective influences, customs, and suggestions. He was relatively unaffected by changes in the society at large.

I can’t remember a specific time when the comments and the name-calling started, but one evening in November it all got much worse,’ she said. ‘My brother Tobias and me were doing our homework at the dining room table like we always did.’ ‘You’ve got a brother?’ She hesitated before nodding. ‘Papa was working late at the clinic in a friend’s back room – it was against the law for Jews to work as doctors. Mama was making supper in the kitchen, and I remember her cursing because she’d just burned her hand on the griddle. Tobias and me couldn’t stop laughing because Mama never swore.’ The memory of it made her mouth twitch in an almost-smile. Then someone banged on our front door. It was late – too late for social calling. Mama told us not to answer it. Everyone knew someone who’d had a knock on the door like that.’ ‘Who was it?’ ‘The police, usually. Sometimes Hitler’s soldiers. It was never for a good reason, and it never ended happily. We all dreaded it happening to us. So, Mama turned the lights out and put her hand over the dog’s nose.’ Esther, glancing sideways at me, explained: ‘We had a sausage dog called Gerta who barked at everything. ‘The knocking went on and they started shouting through the letter box, saying they’d burn the house down if we didn’t answer the door. Mama told us to hide under the table and went to speak to them. They wanted Papa. They said he’d been treating non-Jewish patients at the clinic and it had to stop. Mama told them he wasn’t here but they didn’t believe her and came in anyway. There were four of them in Nazi uniform, stomping through our house in their filthy great boots. Finding us hiding under the table, they decided to take Tobias as a substitute for Papa. ‘When your husband hands himself in, we’ll release the boy,’ was what they said. ‘It was cold outside – a freezing Austrian winter’s night – but they wouldn’t let Tobias fetch his coat. As soon as they laid hands on him, Mama started screaming. She let go of Gerta and grabbed Tobias – we both did – pulling on his arms, yelling that they couldn’t take him, that he’d done nothing wrong. Gerta was barking. I saw one of the men swing his boot at ther. She went flying across the room, hitting the mantelpiece. It was awful. She didn’t bark after that.’ It took a moment for the horror of what she was saying to sink in. ‘Don’t tell me any more if you don’t want to,’ I said gently. She stared straight ahead like she hadn’t heard me. ‘They took my brother anyway. He was ten years old. ‘We ran into the street after them, and it was chaos – like the end of the world or something. The whole town was fully of Nazi uniforms. There were broken windows, burning houses, people sobbing in the gutter. The synagogue at the end of our street was on fire. I was terrified. So terrified I couldn’t move. But Mum kept running. Shouting and yelling and running after my brother. I didn’t see what happened but I heard the gunshot.’ She stopped. Rubbed her face in her hands. ‘Afterwards they gave it a very pretty name: Kristallnacht – meaning “the night of broken glass”. But it was the night I lost my mother and my brother. I was sent away soon after as part of the Kindertransport, though Papa never got used to losing us all at once. Nor did I. That’s why he came to find me. He always promised he’d try.’ Anything I might’ve said stayed stuck in my throat. There weren’t words for it, not really. So I put my arm through Esther’s and we sat, gazing out to sea, two old enemies who were, at last, friends. She was right – it was her story to tell. And I could think of plenty who might benefit from hearing it.

Jackson’s men cut off the noses of dead Indians as they counted the bodies. Afterwards there were few regrets; one of Jackson’s soldiers chuckled that he had killed a boy “five or six years of age” for the reason that “he would have become an Indian someday.”22

A U.S. serviceman, standing nearby, was not so content. He yelled at the Czechs to stop. “The war is over, so halt your bullying!” he shouted. Some of his buddies agreed. That was too much for Hana. “How dare you?” she demanded of the American. “Where in the States are you from, anyway?” “Mississippi,” he said. “Miss-iss-ip-pi?” said Hana, drawing out the syllables sarcastically. “I see. So you’ve come all the way from Miss-iss-ip-pi to tell us in Czech-o-slo-vakia how we should treat our traitorous Nazi scum, our prisoners. You find it too much if we humiliate those dregs of humanity by making them sing Czech folk tunes? Where have you been all this time? Do you know what they have done? Do you know they tortured and killed millions? Or haven’t you heard? Or maybe,” said Hana, drawing a deep breath, “you sympathize with them because you float dead Negroes down your river?” Her words caused a commotion: furious and indignant soldiers gathered round; Hana’s own phrase was thrown back at her: “How dare you?” Another American intervened. “She’s absolutely right,” he said. “I’ve just come from those camps where we’ve been liberating the inmates. You should see it. Besides, these Germans are not being harmed in any way.” Turning to the first soldier, he said, “Let’s you and I keep out of it, okay?

Parisians were starting to chafe against rationing and other restrictions despite their occupiers going to extraordinary lengths to foster good relations. German soldiers were not allowed to smoke or loosen their ties in public, buy cocaine in bars, go swimming in the Seine, sing or dance in the street,

It was a long time since I had had anything to eat and I was becoming very hungry. I didn’t know where my next meal would come from and I knew that I was facing a long journey ahead. Hunger was something we all learned to live with in wartime Germany. The compartment was now completely full. Looking out to the passageway through the inside window, I could see a German soldier standing in the crowded passageway. He had his back to the outside window and I could see his reflection and knew that he had field rations attached to his belt. As he glanced towards me, he could see how hungry and drawn I looked. I was grateful when he kindly offered to share his rations with me. Although many people became nasty and bitter because of the trials of war, there were still some kind and decent people left. There was no doubt but that this war had left an indelible imprint on everyone!

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientist were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

Monsieur Alfred Backert, a resident of Bischoffsheim, lived near the village center. He recalled the war years in Alsace-Lorraine and remembered the women from Mannheim who were sent to Bischoffsheim, ostensibly for their safety by the Nazi Regime. He later served in the French army and was stationed in Germany for a number of years. Frau Heinchen, the elderly woman with her dog, who talked to me on the windy hillside overlooking Überlingen on Sunday afternoon, December 1, 2002. She recalled the Polish and Russian prisoners, whom she called Cossacks, and vividly remembered the hanging of the Russian soldier, described in this book. According to her, it was the farmer’s wife Clarissa who was raped by the Russian soldier and later, bore his child. She remembered the lager (warehouse) that was used to house the prisoners, saying that it was located on a field near the municipal hospital. She also told us the location of where the one room schoolhouse had been. For the limited time that we talked, she glowed and became twenty-one years young again.

His manner became threatening as he stretched out his fat neck and pushed his bullhead at me. Smelling his hot breath and feeling his spit on my face, I heard him yell, “Who did you talk to?” “Why do you want to know?” I bravely asked, expecting the worst. “Answer me!” he repeated. “Give me the name of the person you sheltered!” I faltered, knowing that bad things were about to follow. Here I was just helping a German soldier and this Nazi bureaucrat took it upon himself to punish me. His three huge gold rings cut my face deeply as he repeatedly slapped my face, shouting obscenities. Shaken, I stood there trembling, trying to wipe my bleeding nose and expecting additional blows. Very timidly one of the other women asked just what it was he wanted to know. I stood with my head bowed, as he continued with his demands. I knew that he wanted me to reveal the corporal’s identity. He also wanted the names of the other soldiers who were with him in the village. I told him that they were just German soldiers that needed help! Not even knowing the circumstances, he accused them of being cowards or scared rabbits, Etappenhasen, as he called them. This was a derogatory name given to soldiers suffering from “shellshock” or Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Frightened of what could happen to them, these soldiers in Bischoffsheim stayed close to the mess hall, or goulash kanone as it was called. The local authorities had authorized our helping them and I just couldn’t betray these men! Who was this bully to get involved? I think he was just one of those “Little Hitlers” trying to make a name for himself!

But the murky role he played in the notorious July 20 plot on Adolf Hitler’s life in 1944, the closest an assassination attempt got to killing the Nazi Fuhrer, would bring about the Desert Fox’s untimely demise in October 1944, even as the Soviets and Western Allies were tightening the vise on Germany. Compelled to take cyanide by authorities, the Desert Fox insisted he was innocent until his dying day, and his popularity forced the Nazi government to claim his death was brought about by a heart attack or a cerebral embolism. In fact, Rommel was given an official state funeral, and Winston Churchill would go on to praise him, “He also deserves our respect because, although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and tyrant. For this, he paid the forfeit of his life. In the sombre wars of modern democracy, chivalry finds no place … Still, I do not regret or retract the tribute I paid to Rommel, unfashionable though it was judged.

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

As they moved out, one soldier recalled, “As far as could be seen, to both left and right of us, men were advancing with their rifles in the porte position, their bayonets glinting in the pale moonlight. Full moon had been days ago so it was quite dark…As we advanced, the feeling of pride and exhilaration was unmistakable. We didn’t realize or think of the danger we were in; we were doing a job and the thought of being killed or wounded was far from our minds…I remember seeing forms sink to the ground but our orders were to keep going and not to stop for wounded or dying. Later we passed slit trenches with forms slouched over them facing in our direction …

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter.

And this all brings to mind another incident that took place as the deportations from Berlin were being orchestrated, little known but highly illuminating and important. Between February 27 and March 6, 1943, a large group non-Jewish German women publicly protested in the cold for the release of nearly 2,000 Jews—their husbands and the male children of these ‘mixed marriages’. These couples had held special ‘exemptions’ from the ongoing racial laws, tabled even at the Wannsee Conference, but with the defeat at Stalingrad, these male Jews were ordered to be rounded up. Outside of the site of their incarceration at Rosenstrasse 2–4 in Berlin, despite being threatened with lethal force, the women and children gathered here chanted and yelled in the belief that their loved ones were to be deported to suffer the same fate as those other Jews shipped to the East. News of the protest spread, and the regime did not carry out its threat and the men were eventually released (though most were picked up again to work in labor camps).[21] It was the only German public protest against deportation of Jews, and not one of the protesters was shot. No government likes bad ‘PR’, even the Nazis at home, especially as the tables begin to turn on the war front. I

As soon as I felt that we were a safe distance away from Bischoffsheim, I recovered my suitcases and fortunately got a ride from a farmer back to Rosheim, where I boarded the train leaving for Strasbourg. I recall looking out of the train window at newly dug trenches and wondered how many soldiers would make them their eternal resting place. There were also heaps of ammunition for weapons called Panzerschreck which were similar to American bazookas. If a soldier could approach close enough to a tank so that he could fire at it, it would cause the tank to explode. Here in Rosheim, the Germans were definitely expecting the arrival of the French Army and were preparing for the assault. Photo Caption: German Soldiers firing a Panzerschreck Captain Hank Bracker, who served with the U.S. Military Intelligence Corps, is the author of the multi-award winning book, “The Exciting Story of Cuba” has now written “Suppressed I Rise.” This book is for anyone interested in a very personal human view, of the history of World War II. A mother’s attempt to protect and raise her two young daughters in hostile NAZI Germany challenges her sensibilities and resourcefulness. Both books are available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and many Independent Book Stores.

Alf Lüdtke’s recent study shows on the basis of soldiers’ letters sent to their families back home, that in fact most people in the country ‘readily accepted’ Hitler, and they widely cheered the goals of ‘ “restoring” the grandeur of the Reich and “cleaning out” alleged “aliens” in politics and society’.

Many of the inmates were Germans who had been soldiers, and even Gestapo men who had been confined at Flossenbürg for crimes committed while in the army. These Nazis had also been liberated when the Americans came in.

The soldiers readily agreed to pour leftover coffee into one can and leftover food into the other. The hungry children were able to take some food home for parents who had just been freed from Nazi domination and who were too proud to beg.

IN 1943 POLISH SOLDIERS TRAINED AN ADULT brown bear to help them fight Nazis in an old monastery atop a mountain in the Italian Alps. Yes, this is a true story, not the plot of the next Pixar film. The bear doesn’t sing or dance or talk, but it does carry artillery shells, take baths, and smoke cigarettes, even though smoking is really bad for you. Voytek the Soldier Bear’s story starts back during the German blitzkrieg against Poland at the very beginning of the war. As the Nazis were crushing their way through western Poland, the brave Polish defenders suddenly felt the stab of a knife in their back when the forces of the Soviet Union came rolling across Poland’s eastern border, eager to grab land for the USSR while the Polish were preoccupied with getting punched in the head by the German Army. One of the few, outnumbered defenders who stood his ground against the Soviet juggernaut was Captain Wladislaw Anders, a resolute cavalry officer who valiantly launched a charge against Soviet troops but was wounded in battle and taken as a prisoner of war. For over a year he rotted in Lubyanka Prison, one of Stalin’s worst and most inhospitable one-star prison facilities. Then a weird thing happened. On August 14, 1941, the Red Army guards unlocked the prison cell and told Anders he was a free man. The Germans had invaded Russia, and now the Soviets were prepared to offer Anders and 1.5 million other Polish citizens their freedom if they’d help old Uncle Joe Stalin battle those big evil Nazis. Anders cocked an eyebrow. He wasn’t exactly crazy about the idea of trusting his life to the men who had just shot and imprisoned him, but he agreed anyway. He was shipped out by rail and reunited with twenty-five thousand other Polish soldiers who had been similarly released from the Soviet prison system. Anders immediately

US forces executed twenty-nine soldiers for rape, and twenty-five of them were African American. The executed soldiers, mostly Blacks, would be hung, as in a lynching, and this posed a problem in the land of the guillotine. A hangman was brought from Texas just to carry out the job.

But she already knew the answer: they had ended up at this hellhole on earth because they, like every German, hadn’t done enough to stop Hitler and his Nazis from rising to power and had complacently followed him or refused to seriously challenge him once he had seized power.

I told you that day, I am embarrassed to be a German. We should have risen up and stopped Hitler and his Nazis. We should have spoken out against the mistreatment of the Jews and other supposed “Enemies of the State” long before the concentration camps were built. We Germans—all Germans—failed. At the end, we were killing our own people, anyone who was not a fanatic for National Socialism. But the war is over and now we must rebuild our country, with America’s help, and bring the Nazis to justice.

The United States army, wrote another disillusioned recruit, is ‘about as Nazi-like as Hitler’s’.[105] In 1944 the Office of War Information issued a confidential manual to white officers on ‘Certain Characteristics of the Negro’, which included the following: ‘gregarious, extrovertive [sic] . . . hot tempered . . . mentally lazy, not retentive, forgetful . . . ruled by instinct and emotion rather than by reason . . . keen sense of rhythm . . . evasive . . . lies easily, frequently, naturally’.[106] One black soldier writing back from the European theatre at news of racial violence in the New York district of Harlem claimed that black fighters were asking themselves, ‘what are we fighting for?’[107

The Blitzkrieg by the Germans, who no longer had to sleep, had breached all boundaries. The seed was sown for future violence. There was an impression that these soldiers could be stopped by nothing and no one, and they gradually appeared to believe their own propaganda, which claimed they were truly superior. Methamphetamine, which encourages arrogance, supported this false assessment of the situation.

Are they important?” the officer asked. “What?” “The broken buildings.” “They’re classical ruins, sir. And yes, they’re important.” “Why?” “They’re irreplaceable. They’re history. They’re… It’s our duty as soldiers to protect them, sir. If we don’t, the enemy will use that against us.” “Are you a historian, Lieutenant?” “I’m an archeologist. Director of the London Museum.

Everything that mattered in Hank Reed’s life, outside of his family, revolved around horses. Starting with his days as a cadet, he had lived in a world that could measure everything—honor, kindliness, discipline, sporting spirit, diligence, and, most of all, courage—in equestrian terms. His brain was crammed with the nomenclature of horses: cantle, withers, curb chain, bran mash, fetlock, stock tie, near side, picket line. He knew the aids for a flying lead change, the correct attire for a foxhunt, the thunder of charging by platoon, and the serenity of riding alone on a quiet path, with only his mount’s breaths and cadenced footsteps for company. The rhythm of a horse’s strides was like music to him—the walk a ballad in four/four time, the trot a rousing two-beat march, the canter a smooth three-beat waltz. Reed knew the scent of fresh straw in the stable, the tickle of a horse’s whiskers as it nuzzled up a carrot. He knew that endless moment when a fall was inevitable and then the sudden breathless smack of landing hard on packed dirt. He knew what the end of a day on horseback felt like, salty with sweat, dirt under his fingernails, and a mind whitewashed from all worry. More than anything, Hank Reed understood what was unspoken among all of these horse soldiers. Sunburned, brusque, tough, accustomed to giving and taking orders, they knew that if you live, eat, sleep, and breathe horses for long enough, they become part of you, and your soul is forever altered.

More likely it was boxed in a closet after his death, an enduring embarrassment like a dead minister’s porn stash or an old soldier’s necklace of dried ears or collection of Nazi paraphernalia.

Books When Books Went to War, Molly Guptill Manning Books as Weapons, John B. Hench The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Anders Rydell The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson Gay Berlin, Robert Beachy Articles Leary, William M. “Books, Soldiers and Censorship during the Second World War.” American Quarterly Von Merveldt, Nikola. “Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books As Agents of Cultural Memory.” John Hopkins University Press Appelbaum, Yoni. “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II.” The Atlantic “Paris Opens Library of Books Burnt by Nazis.” The Guardian Archives Whisnant, Clayton J. “A Peek Inside Berlin’s Queer Club Scene Before Hitler Destroyed It.” The Advocate “Between World Wars, Gay Culture Flourished in Berlin.” NPR’s Fresh Air More The Great Courses: A History of Hitler’s Empire, Thomas Childers “Hitler: YA Fiction Fan Girl,” Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards Podcast Magnus Hirschfeld, Leigh Pfeffer and Gretchen Jones, History Is Gay Podcast “Das Lila Lied,” composed by Mischa Spoliansky, lyrics by Kurt Schwabach

The trek across France by Biren Mazumdar and Dariao Singh is one of the great untold stories of the Second World War: two unmistakably Indian soldiers trudged 900 kilometers in six weeks through Nazi-held territory.

I don’t consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust photographs of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by Nazi soldiers, the women look like my own mother and I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother—and by extension, myself.

The attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings.

On February 12, 1941, the Dutch Nazi newspaper reported that Jews with sharpened teeth had ripped open the necks of Nazi soldiers and sucked their blood like vampires. The depths of the Nazi lies and depravity shook us all.

How much the ordinary German soldier aligned himself to this kind of Nazi pseudo-spiritualism was neither here nor there; it was allowed to filter down,