Browse 141 quotes about Ww2.
“My part is not a heroic one, but I shall play my part.”
Source: Antigone
“A good platoon sergeant, in the lieutenant’s mind, ought act like Kato on 'The Green Hornet' and not a disapproving uncle with a taste for the strap.”
Source: Sinner's Cross
“People change sides. You’ve always been a dirty piece of shit cop. You can be bought, Verner!”
“Just like you, Ingrid. Just like you.”
Conversation between ‘Alis K’ and ‘Jens’
in the novel 'The Informer' by Steen Langstrup”
Source: The Informer
“This is your platoon sergeant, Halleck. This is your platoon medic, Holzinger. This is your radioman, Loomis, and this is your call-sign, Decoy Red One Six. These are your squad leaders—Ryerson, Spicer, and Keesey. Tonight’s password is 'Ontario.' Your position extends from the edge of that gully to the blowdown over there. We don’t expect a push here, so your job is to keep the Germans from infiltrating. That means a one hundred percent alert all night, every night. Listen for the enemy. Don’t make any noise at all or you’ll take fire from both sides. Don’t smoke, the Germans will see the light and blow you to hell. Don’t fall asleep, you’ll wake up with your throat cut. Don’t give any orders, you don’t know what you’re doing. Let Halleck run things until you know the score. A guide will relieve you at 0630 hours exactly. If you hear anyone come up behind you before that, shoot him.”
Source: Sinner's Cross
“He loved children and used to dandle me on his knee. This was how the title came about for this book, Uncle Hitler, although in the old German tradition, I called him Uncle Adolf, even though I was not related to him. This was a sign of respect to an older person, which is why I called Frau Eva ‘Aunty Eva’.
However, little did I know at that time what revulsion the name Adolf Hitler would eventually invoke in the decent conscience of the world.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“Children accept the conditions they are born into, and, to a degree, I was getting used to the bombings, fires, and death around me. I remember that I thought those things were normal. It is grown-ups who worry about things, and this ... this was total panic! I could taste the fear, and I could see that my mother was frightened, which I had never seen before, and this made me even more frightened.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“One day, I noticed that my father’s uniform had changed from a smart, light green colour with silver edging on the shoulder straps to a black uniform with SS markings and runes on the collar. I asked him why this was, and he told me that he was still a policeman, but now worked for the Schutzpolizei.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“One woman, called Eva, used to visit my mother and sometimes we would call in next door to visit her. Sometimes Frau Eva gave me cakes and fruit drinks. I remember she was very kind. It was not until many years later that I understood just who she was. To me, at the time, she was just a very nice woman who lived next door sometimes, although she did tend to go away, and was often not seen for several months.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“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.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“After the Christmas and New Year of 1944 my mother and I returned to Strausberg, but the area was full of people evacuated from Berlin due to mass bombings on the capital by the RAF. These had started, in a small way, on 25 August, 1940, and had continued through 1941 and 1942. However, by November, 1943, these air attacks were major, involving mass bomber streams of more than 800 aircraft. I used to stand outside the front of our house and look at the sky, watching the silver bombers turning over Strausberg and heading in the direction of Berlin. Many were shot down, some near us in the fields around Strausberg.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“But the public did not know the truth about what happened to the people in the trucks; they believed the stories from the government, who said that these people, known as Untermensch (non-people or ‘lower people’), were simply moved to open spaces in the east and settled on farms, away from Germany, so as not to ‘contaminate’ the German race. This is an example of people not wishing to know the facts behind the rumours in which were whispered between trusted friends. The general belief was that the rumours were rubbish anyway, for how could a civilized country do such things? Our leaders would never allow anything bad to happen to these people; after all, we were not barbarians! And so nothing was said, or done, and the public developed a collective blindness to the truth.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“I quickly got used to being picked up by my mother, and taken to the air raid shelter near our home. Although frightening, this was a great adventure to me as a child, for in the shelter I played with the other children and we felt safe there as we were surrounded by grown-ups; although now the grown-ups were more worried than they had been in the past. There were greater feelings of anxiety and fear in the older people, which we children also felt, and it unsettled us all.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“I heard people talking about what this Red Army did to any Germans they captured, and this only added to my fears.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“We had the air war overhead, which was frightening, but we were, in a way, getting used to it. Now, however, we could hear – and at night, see – the flashes of explosions reflected in the dark sky. We could feel the ground vibrate under our feet. The war was getting closer!”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“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.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“Inside my carriage there was mass panic and I was in danger of being trampled, but somebody picked me off the floor, and I found myself by the window on the platform side. I was very frightened now, for I thought that I had lost my mother and was all alone, but a few minutes later she arrived at my side. She had some blood on her face, but she told me not to worry, it would all be fine soon.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“I look at my mother, connected by a breath of glimmering hope, her red and shadowed eyes reveal that some element of our whole being has been lost and, somehow, thrown away. Sob-gasp, sob-gasp, sob-gasp. Slowly, that feeling within me fades. But wisps of it stay with you, locked in the chambers of your mind, always.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“The fact is that many people did not – and still do not – understand that many Germans were held in the concentration camps from 1933 onwards. The camps were not just for Jews or other ‘non-people’, but also for any German who had made some remark about the Nazis, or who would not follow the Nazi rules.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“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.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“I thought of the people on the roof and wondered how they managed to stay up there as there was nothing to hang on to but, thinking back, I think they had either been shot or had fallen off the train many miles back as we left Strausberg.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“At times the engine stopped, and grown-ups and children climbed out of the carriages with tins to collect water from the engine steam pipes. This was the only drinking water that we had access to, and though it was hot and very rusty, it was the best drink I felt I’d ever had.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“We had seen too many horrors already, and we could see and hear more explosions all around us as the war continued, very close to our hiding place; machine gun fire and the sounds of grenades – all very frightening.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“But you never knew where the bombs would fall in the dark, so night bombing was even more frightening than daylight bombing. Let’s just say, it scared the living daylights out of us!”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“With our collective shock, what we saw seemed to be frozen into a state of suspended animation. Indelibly etched into our memories in terror, forever! My life was in slow motion, it was as if I was no longer in my body and this was a rather bad dream! It is almost impossible to describe with words what I saw, but I will try. This very experience is the one that has continued to shake me awake during the dense night of my lifetime.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“As we passed this living cruelty, I shuddered in momentarily isolation and then let out an audible gasp at what I saw. They were hanging from trees! Some shaking violently, with their intestines hanging out of their bodies! Those who were still partly alive were screaming with pain, and wriggling on the branches trying to get off the ropes ... some had fallen off the branches of the trees, they were crawling along the ground, and towards us.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“Current interventions in use with children include psycho-pharmacological treatments, play therapy, psychological debriefing and testimony therapy, but this was Nazi Germany in 1945!”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“In therapy, to meet the needs of traumatized survivors of war and torture, the patient is requested to repeatedly talk about the worst traumatic event in detail while re-experiencing all emotions associated with the event. Traumatic memory, they say, is cleared by narration of whole life; from early childhood up to the present date ... this book is my therapy. I am awash with living memories.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“Later, I started to understand just why these children ‘hated’ us other children. I understood that they did not, in fact, hate ‘us’, but hated the fact that we were German and spoke in a language that they associated with pain, fear and the loss of their parents, uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers, their whole families, in fact. Once I understood this it affected me in all sorts of subconscious ways, ways that were to blight my life for many years and make me deny my German birth.”
Source: Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain
“Raus did not look up at the faces. An officer learned not to look at the faces. It was easier if you thought of them as bodies, as tools, means to an end. But just what the end was Raus could no longer say.”
Source: Nosferatu
“You kill yourself when you hate. It's the worst disease in the world.”
Source: William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony
“In spite of all the terrible things that happened to me, I did not allow Hitler to make me feel less than human. I had been raised well and I knew who I was. My strategy was not to allow myself to hate. I knew I could be consumed by such hate”
“The Nazis understand everything except humour.”
Source: The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto
“It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.”
Source: Pearl Harbor
“In the years that followed, William would become obsessed with the question of what went wrong. He analyzed thousands of pages of Pearl Harbor documents and wrote a three-volume report that boiled down to this: MAGIC had strongly indicated an attack on December 7, but the decrypts had gotten bottled up through a series of farcical missteps in the dissemination stage of the process, and U.S. leaders weren't alerted to the danger in time to take action. It was nuanced: The crucial MAGIC decrypts had been slow to arrive in Pearl Harbor partly because the military hadn't given the Pearl Harbor commanders a Purple machine of their own, a direct tap into the MAGIC fire hose. This decision had been made out of a reasonable desire to limit the distribution of Purple machines in order to minimize the chances of the Japanese learning about the MAGIC secret.
It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as "cryptologic schizophrenia,”
Source: The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
“We soldiers knew next to nothing about what was going on in the centres of power. We received so many orders and counter-orders that there were times when we did not obey any of them at all, knowing that they were likely to be countermanded almost immediately.”
Source: Corelli’s Mandolin
“We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy.”
“I looked at him. He sat in the darkness, with his brows knitted tightly together, as though trying to grasp something, to understand the inconceivable, to pinpoint the moment when everything suddenly got out of control and the point of no return was officially passed by both sides – the future murderers and their victims. The new Reich sorted us into two kinds and now he suddenly found himself among those who held an ax above our miserable heads.”
Source: No Woman's Land
“Halleck came from people who regarded a slight change of facial expression as adequate to convey the pain of a severed limb.”
Source: Sinner's Cross
“Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.”
Source: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
“This cramped little space that stank of earth and smoke and sweat, that dripped water during every hard rain, and whose floor was often a half-frozen soup of mud and sunflower seeds and straw, now seemed to him more comfortable than Ketterling’s HQ could ever be, and he knew why. Here, surrounded by the weapons hanging from nails by their straps, the boxes of hand grenades, the cut-down artillery shells filled with cigarette butts, the crumpled moisture-bloated magazines and greasy playing cards, one lived an honest life. You couldn’t get that back home anymore. The radio and the newspapers were full of lies that would have been insulting even if the streets hadn’t been full of rubble and the air with the shriek of air-raid sirens, and it wasn’t enough for the government that the people merely endure it all, bombs and lies, without objecting. They had to believe the lies, had to parrot them back with sickly smiles plastered on their faces, lest they be branded defeatists and be taken away.
It wasn’t like that here. Nickolaus wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. Here, a man might be hungry, he might itch with lice, he might sting with pain from cuts that never healed, he might be empty-headed with fatigue and half-deafened from noise, but he always knew precisely where he stood—with his comrades and with the enemy. There were no intrigues, no politics, no flag-waving. A man never looked you in the eyes and told you black was white, or worse yet, demanded that you agree that black was white. There was no need because he had already asked you to die for him, and once you had agreed, what need was there for words?”
Source: Sinner's Cross
“It was 1941. I was 18, and Peter, 21. We were young and old at the same time.”
Source: Flight of the Seahawks
“Ernie got it,' I said afterwards. 'His experience taught him that you've got to fight for what's right. It gets you into a lot of trouble but he came to the same conclusion as me.' People think it could never happen here. Don't you believe it; it doesn't take much.”
Source: The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II
“Agreed. We could set a trap for him. See if he goes for it.”
“How would we do that?”
Conversation between ‘Borge’ and ‘Jens’
The Informer by Steen Langstrup”
Source: The Informer
“I suddenly felt such conflicting emotions: anger at him, pity for us, regret for myself, and disappointment at the lost chance. Here, I suspected, was a great romance.”
Source: The Last Innocent Hour
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” I said. He had gotten several feet ahead of me and he stopped and turned.
“What do you mean?”
“That we were children together.” I looked up at his face. “You’re so familiar to me—but not. I see my past in you—but you’re still a stranger.”
Source: The Last Innocent Hour
“Who would have thought that words could hold so much power, to stir so much hatred that it would eventually lead to genocide? I, for one, had always believed that we, the human race, were better than that.”
Source: No Woman's Land
“My father was taken away during the Second World War as a work refusal. He had gone into hiding after the university in Leuven was closed, but was nevertheless caught and imprisoned by the Germans in the Bruges prison. He was eventually put to work as a forced laborer in a factory in Hamburg.”