Ss Great Britain Quotes

countries under the unyielding rule of Berlin and the discipline of the SS and the Gestapo. It was Churchill in particular who opposed all compromise, who talked to his fellow cabinet members for days on end and finally won over Chamberlain, who, after 1938, was also convinced of Hitler’s evil intentions. ‘Hitler’s terms, if accepted, would put us completely at his mercy,’ Churchill believed. And: ‘Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.’ In May 1940 it would have been blindly optimistic to think that Great Britain could defeat the Germans without massive support from the Soviet Union and the United States. But the British were persuaded that Germany would once again encounter difficulties due to

MAY 7, 1945 REIMS, FRANCE 2: 41 A.M. The devil is being hunted. In a classroom of the École Professionelle technical school, Nazi chief of staff Gen. Alfred Jodl applies his signature to a sheet of foolscap, an oversize piece of paper, formally surrendering the German army after nearly six horrific years of fighting. Berlin has fallen. Nazi führer Adolf Hitler is dead from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, his body then doused in gallons of gasoline and set ablaze by his personal bodyguard. Troops from the Allied powers of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union now swarm unopposed throughout Germany, quieting the few remaining pockets of resistance.

The President had been told, in December 1942, that almost two million Jews had in all probability already been “liquidated” by Hitler’s SS troops.12 How many more Jews and others would Hitler exterminate by 1946? And all this so that Britain could sit out the war in Europe, at its periphery — not even willing to open the road to China, but hanging on to India and merely waiting for the United States to win back for Great Britain its lost colonial Empire in the Far East? It seemed a pretty poor performance.

Immediately after the war, a group of Jewish partisans known as the Nokmim traveled throughout Germany and Austria hunting down former members of the SS. Also known as the Avengers, this band of mercenaries paid by the government of Great Britain made northern Italy their home base.3