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Third Reich Quotes

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Third Reich Quotes

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

HolocaustHitlerHitler S GermanyHolocaust DenialHolocaust DeniersThird Reich
Book:Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories
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“The church of Jesus Christ is...a community...that is not held together by common interest and that is not held together by common blood and not even by common opinions and convictions but certainly a community held together rather by that voice that we hear at the beginning and at the end of our text, a voice that (Romans 5:5-13) sounds repeatedly and that is never to be falsified nor ever confused with any other tones in the world, "The God of patience and of comfort give you all...! The God of hope fill you all...! The voice that speaks to us in this way, so pleadingly and at the same time so giving so serious and also so friendly, is, in the words of the apostle Paul, the voice of the divine Word himself, from whom the church of Jesus Christ is born and from whom she must always feed and from whom alone she may be fed. God knows who God is; and in his Word he tells us : he is the God who give patience, comfort, and hope. God knows that we need him as we need nothing else and that we have no power over him; and in his Word he tells us this, he pulls our thinking and longing together and brings these to himself, that we must implore; May he grant us! May he fill us! May this voice, with which God tells us what he knows of himself and of us, ring out from the past." Karl Barth”

ChristianityHitler S GermanyRomansThird Reich
Author:Dean Stroud Karl Barth
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“He is against politics in general and longs for the restitution of the monarchy. They have seen nothing but rioting and inflation in the five years since Wilhelm II abdicated. And Ania knows not to mention the Communists. Her father has not recovered from the shock of their brief takeover of Bavaria, which, for a few weeks in 1919, became the Bavarian Soviet Republic. If he begins on the subject, no one will hear of anything else for days. For Doktor Fortzmann all was better under the kaiser.”

GermanyCommunistNaziAuthoritarianismAutocracyThird ReichKaiserMonarchist
Book:The Women in the Castle
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“There is a gaping hole in the history of the Holocaust. Between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Mengele there was a hierarchy of scientists whom were responsible for writing the infamous racial legislation of the Third Reich. These scientists, doctors, and legislators enjoyed prestigious positions in the various institutions within Hitler's Germany. To be more precise, many of the ghastly experiments credited to Mengele were ordered by this group of high-ranking scientists and doctors. Mengele was following their orders, yet many of these German doctors and scientists were set free after being captured by the Allies. Previously unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and conveniently forgotten publications reveal professional and political relationships as well as shared scientific convictions between high-profile American Progressives, British Fabian Socialists, and their German counterparts. The mounting evidence points to the long-standing designs and machinations of "scientific racism", a still poorly understood aspect of history. This book documents the hundred year trajectory of the history of "scientific racism" from its initial intentions to create "a race of masters" to the Holocaust, which resulted from Hitler's conviction to create a "master race". These scientific prejudices and political dogmas are as relevant today as they were leading up to WWII. A thorough understanding of the origins of this movement is in order.”

RacismHolocaustNaziWwiiEugenicsNazismDarwinismHitlerNazi GermanyDarwinHolocaust HistoryAdolf HitlerWwii HistoryThird ReichHolocaust SurvivorsScientific RacismRace HygieneEugenicistEugenic LegislationMaster RaceJoseph MengeleRace Of Masters
Book:From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848
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“The Third Reich made it its mission to use the authority of the state to coordinate efforts within industry to devise standardized and simplified versions of key consumer commodities. These would then be produced at the lowest possible price, enabling the German population to achieve an immediate breakthrough to a higher standard of living. The epithet which was generally attached to these products was Volk: the Volksempfaenger (radio), Volkswohnung (apartments), Volkswagen, Volkskuehlschrank (refrigerator), Volkstraktor (tractor).34 This list contains only those products that enjoyed the official backing of one or more agencies in the Third Reich. Private producers, however, had long appreciated that the term ‘Volk’ had good marketing potential, and they, too, joined the bandwagon. Amongst the various products they touted were Volks-gramophone (people’s gramophone), Volksmotorraeder (people’s motorbikes) and Volksnaehmaschinen (people’s sewing machines). In fact, by 1933 the use of the term ‘Volk’ had become so inflationary that the newly established German advertising council was forced to ban the unlicensed use of the term.”

EconomyThird ReichVolk
Book:The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
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“There still exists - even today - a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness - or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ - had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe. Patriotism is particularism. ... However, European culture goes back much further than the nations of Europe. Greece, Rome and Israel, Christendom and Renaissance, the French Revolution and Germany’s eighteenth century, the supranational music of Austria and Slavic poetry: these are the forces that have sculpted the face of Europe. All these forces have forged European solidarity and the European cultural consciousness. None of these forces know national boundaries. All are the enemies of that barbarian power: so-called ‘national pride’.”

EuropeNationalismEuropean UnionThird ReichEuropean Civilization
Book:On the End of the World
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“In Dresden, Sylvia Morris witnessed the ransacking of the Jewish department store - Etam's [on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938]. 'Dresden had been peaceful and not pro-Nazi so this was a major event,' she recalled. 'We girls in the Töchterhaus made our terrified landlady go to the store to buy things. We opened all the windows and sang Mendelssohn songs as loudly as we could.”

ResistanceNazismAnti SemitismDresdenNazisAdolf HitlerThird ReichMendelssohnKristallnacht
Book:Travellers in the Third Reich
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“…[Samuel Beckett’s] diaries contained so little overt condemnation of the Nazis, although no one who has read them could be in any doubt about how much Beckett - who was to join the French Resistance in the war – loathed the regime. …[But] Beckett was quick to pick up on the absurd, such as the story he heard involving a servant and a milkman. In order to prevent Rassenschande [racial impurity], no Aryan servant under forty-five was allowed to work in a Jewish household. When a puzzled milkman asked a Herr Levi’s Gentile housekeeper how come she worked for him she replied that she was partly Jewish. When subsequently her even more perplexed employer asked her why she had lied to the milkman, she replied that she could not possibly admit to being forty-five.”

NazismAnti SemitismNazisThird ReichSamuel BeckettAdolph HitlerRassenschande
Book:Travellers in the Third Reich
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“To purchase a Volkswagen, customers were required to make a weekly deposit of at least 5 Reichsmarks into a DAF account on which they received no interest. Once the account balance had reached 750 Reichsmarks, the customer was entitled to delivery of a VW. The DAF meanwhile achieved an interest saving of 130 Reichsmarks per car. In addition, purchasers of the VW were required to take out a two-year insurance contract priced at 200 Reichsmarks. The VW savings contract was non-transferable, except in case of death, and withdrawal from the contract normally meant the forfeit of the entire sum deposited. Remarkably, 270,000 people signed up to these contracts by the end of 1939 and by the end of the war the number of VW-savers had risen to 340,000. In total, the DAF netted 275 million Reichsmarks in deposits. But not a single Volkswagen was ever delivered to a civilian customer in the Third Reich. After 1939, the entire output was reserved for official uses of various kinds. Most of Porsche’s half-finished factory was turned over to military production. The 275 million Reichsmarks deposited by the VW savers were lost in the post-war inflation. After a long legal battle, VW’s first customers received partial compensation only in the 1960s.”

EconomyThird ReichVw
Book:The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
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“1. Mein Kampf does not contain the word "Nazi." 2. Mein Kampf does not contain the term “Third Reich.” 3. Mein Kampf does not contain the word "Fascist" ever as a self reference by Hitler. 4. Mein Kampf does not contain a single use of the word "swastika." 5. Nazis did not call their symbol a "swastika." 6. Swastikas represented crossed "S" letters for "SOCIALISTS" under Adolf Hitler. 7. Nazi salutes and Nazi behavior originated from the USA's Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. 8. The Nazi salute came from the military salute (as used in the original Pledge of Allegiance in the USA). I learned the above revelations and more from the the historian Dr. Rex Curry's scholarly discoveries.”

FascismNazismMein KampfThird ReichRex CurrySwastikasDead Writers Club
Book:MEIN KAMPF Adolf Hitler: Dead Writers Club & Pointer Institute
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“Philip Conwell-Evans, who three years earlier had witnessed the book burning at Königsberg University with such equanimity. Choosing to operate discretely behind the scenes, Conwell-Evans had been instrumental in bringing together a number of influential British figures with leading Nazis. It was he, for instance who in December 1934, had been the driving force behind the first major dinner party Hitler ever hosted for foreigners and at which Lord Rothermere had been guest of honour. And it was now Conwell-Evans, in harness with his close friend Ribbentrop, who was masterminding the Lloyd-George expedition. 'He is so blind to the blemishes of the Germans,' Dr Jones wrote of his fellow Welshman in his diary,' as to make one see the virtues of the French.”

FascismSanctionsNazismHitlerNazisAppeasementThird ReichLloyd GeorgeLord RothermereRibbentrop
Book:Travellers in the Third Reich
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“Sir Barry Domvile sensed the chill as soon as he arrived in Nuremberg for the 1937 Reichsparteitag. 'Thought the SS more truculent than usual,' he observed ... And he was further disappointed when the Führer passed by him at the reception without a word. Indeed as Hitler walked along the line of British guests, he remained stiff and expressionless until introduced to Francis Yeats-Brown when he burst into smiles. Yeats-Brown's autobiography, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1930), had been made into a Hollywood movie (starring Gary Cooper) that had become a great favourite of Hitler's. He thought the film such a valuable demonstration of how Aryans should deal with an inferior race that he had made it compulsory viewing for the SS.”

NazismHitlerNazisThird ReichAryan RaceBengal LancersCultural Cross FertilisationFrancis Yeats BrownSir Barry Domvile
Book:Travellers in the Third Reich
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“Thelma Cazalet MP, unlike most of the other British 'honoured guests' attending [the 1938 Reichsparteitag], was strongly anti-Nazi and had accepted Ribbentrop's invitation only because she thought it important 'to be aware of what was going on.' As she entered the dining room of the Grand Hotel on the first night, she immediately caught sight of Unity Mitford seated at the long 'British' table with her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale. 'Unity is alarmingly pretty,' she wrote in her diary, 'but I have never seen anyone so pretty with absolutely no charm in her face and a rather stupid expression.”

FascismNazismNazisAdolf HitlerThird ReichNancy MitfordMitford SistersFascist SympathiserNuremberg RalliesReichsparteitag
Book:Travellers in the Third Reich
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“When Hitler addressed the Reichstag in January 1934, he could look back on a year of achievement without parallel in German history. Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all political parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions, stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the courts and "co-ordinated" under Nazi rule, the political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivated people.”

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Book:Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Part 2 of 4
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“The historian Meike Wöhlert has analyzed and compared the judgments rendered by courts responsible for malicious acts of treason in five cities. Although her research only deals with registered cases and not unofficial ones, the results suggest that the telling of political jokes was a mass phenomenon beyond state control. In 61 percent of official cases, joke-tellers were let off with a warning, alcohol consumption often being cited as an extenuating circumstance. (People who had had one too many in bars were considered only partially responsible for their actions, and because most of the popular jokes that made it to court had been told in bars, the verdicts were accordingly lenient.)”

HumorHistoryJokesGermanyDictatorshipNaziThird Reich
Book:Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
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“The historical record contradicts the assumption that the Nazis sentenced large numbers of people to death during World War II for telling jokes. In the final phase of the Third Reich, some cases did receive capital sentences, but they were extreme exceptions to the rule. (We will return to them later.) The compilations of jokes that circulated in Germany after the war bore titles like Deadly Laughter and When Laughter Was Dangerous, but there is not much evidence that the jokes they contained were inevitably risky for the teller.”

HumorHistoryJokesGermanyDictatorshipNaziThird Reich
Book:Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
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“Finally, my watchers had to fess up. In embarrassed and genuinely polite tones, they said they had no other choice but to arrest me. Then they accompanied me to the prison across the way. As I entered, an extremely tall SS man leapt in front of me and asked: “Do you have any weapons?” “Why?” I responded. “Do I need any?”

HumorHistoryJokesGermanyDictatorshipNaziThird ReichComediansWerner Flinck
Book:Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
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“Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations. And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won’t intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs. You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are goods reasons for this. It’s been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we’d get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We’re already here.”

HumorHistoryJokesGermanyDictatorshipNaziThird ReichConcentration CampsComediansWerner Flinck
Book:Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
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“On April 1, armed SA men took up positions in front of Jewish businesses and tried to prevent customers from spending money in them. Some troops painted anti-Semitic slogans and Stars of David on display windows; others were content to hold up signs calling for a boycott and to curse at Jewish businessmen. Some areas also saw looting and acts of violence. All in all, this display of activism made a very negative impression on most people, and the thuggish SA men with their uneducated bellowing were left even less popular among the general population than they had been before. Although very few Germans openly declared their solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens, the boycott did not, as it was intended to do, set German gentiles against German Jews. On the contrary, ordinary people felt sorry for them, and if reports by the Nazis, who were disappointed by the boycott, are to be believed, the amount of commerce done afterward by Jewish-owned business did not decline at all.”

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Author:Rudolph Herzog
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“. Despite the considerable horror they had felt when the SA men were bellowing crude anti-Semitic slogans, in retrospect the joke-tellers were very much aware of the boycott’s inherent absurdity: A city on the Rhine during the boycott: SA men stand in front of Jewish businesses and “warn” passers-by against entering them. Nonetheless, a woman tries to go into a knitting shop. An SA man stops her and says, “Hey, you. Stay outside. That’s a Jewish shop!” “So?” replies the woman. “I’m Jewish myself.” The SA man pushes her back. “Anyone can say that!”

HumorHistoryJokesGermanyDictatorshipNaziAnti SemitismThird Reich
Book:Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
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“Certain directors and actors were constantly preoccupied by one problem, and apparently, one only. This was connected with the so-called German greeting, which was the method of hailing a friend by raising the right arm straight out with the hand extended at, or slightly above, the level of the shoulder. This greeting had very definite political implications; it was employed daily by millions; and the directors and actors saw no reason why it should not be one on the films in a simple and life-like fashion. They failed. Even when shown in the rushes the effect on the select and professional audience was simply to produce uncontrollable hilarity. The cinema can do a great deal. It can entrance, t can tell fairy tales, it can be realistic or surrealistic -- but it cannot portray a gesture that is false without underlining the most brutal way its basic falseness. The German cinema could not reproduce the German greeting; it was the greeting that was to blame, not the cinema.”

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Book:Der Fragebogen
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“After Germany's collapse in 1918 Jewry became very powerful in Germany in all spheres of life, especially in the political, general intellectual and cultural, and, most particularly, the economic spheres. The men came back from the front, had nothing to look forward to, and found a large number of Jews who had come in during the war from Poland and the East, holding positions, particularly economic positions. It is known that, under the influence of the war and business concerned with it -- demobilization, which offered great possibilities for doing business, inflation, deflation -- enormous shifts and transfers took place in the propertied classes. There were many Jews who did not show the necessary restraint and who stood out more and more in public life, so that they actually invited certain comparisons because of their numbers and the position they controlled in contrast to the German people. In addition there was the fact that particularly those parties which were avoided by nationally minded people also had Jewish leadership out of proportion to the total number of Jews. That did not apply only to Germany, but also to Austria, which we have always considered a part of Germany. There the entire Social Democratic leadership was almost exclusively in Jewish hands. They played a very considerable part in politics, particularly in the left-wing parties, and they also became very prominent in the press in all political directions. (14 March 1946)”

SocialismCommunismNationalismJewsAntisemitismSocial DemocracyNational SocialismThird ReichNuremberg Trials
Book:Trial of the Major war Criminals: before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945-1 October 1946
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“I am keenly aware that the security we enjoy is frail, and could easily be disrupted. Secretly, a nagging fear gnaws at me: what has really been learned from the lessons of Auschwitz and the Third Reich? Do we really understand what happened there and how we might prevent such events in future?”

AuschwitzThird Reich
Book:Entheogens, Society and Law: The Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy and Responsibility
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“Simply raising the theme of animals in the Third Reich means that our narrative is no longer only an account of what human beings have done to one another, but also about our relations with the natural world. If,viewed against the magnitude and terror of historical events, our personal lives appear almost trivial, the lives of animals may seem more so, and even to raise the subject can at first seem either insensitive or pedantic. At the same time, this new dimension places the events in an even vaster perspective still, one in which even the greatest battles and horrendous crimes can begin to fade into insignificance. This is the standpoint of evolutionary time, in which humankind itself may be no more than a relatively brief episode. Perhaps the focus on animals may help us to find a more harmonious balance between the personal, historic, and cosmic levels, on which, simultaneously we conduct our lives.”

AnimalsThird ReichComic Time
Author:Boria Sax
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“At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.”

HateEvilSwimmingHolocaustAuschwitzBanalityThird ReichDachau
Book:Sophie’s Choice
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