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Wwii Quotes

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Wwii Quotes

“I didn't even feel quite comfortable about having a modestly good time. This guilt was a holdover from the bleak cold days of the Depression when the long gray lines quickly scratched through the hardly realized moments of color ... the long winter dream played out against an always nightmarish backdrop of black and white. Ironic indeed that it took another nightmare, the red and gold blast of war, to make us rub our eyes and become accustomed once again to a brilliant spectacle. The unfamiliar color dulled our senses to the horror. We were enjoying ourselves for the first time in a decade. This was the carnival time of life, and we intended to celebrate, and celebrate we did, although a bit uneasily and self-consciously.”

DepressionWorld War IiAmerican HistoryWwiiSecond World WarThe DepressionMargaret Brown KilikThe Duchess Of Angus
Book:The Duchess of Angus
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“For a month already I was carrying on my affair with him, the whole month behind the closed doors of his office with hot wet kisses, with top secret papers scattered on the floor thrown off the table in haste, Georg rolling his eyes at yet another cancelled meeting and the order not to disturb the Chief of the RSHA, winks and hidden smiles through the half opened door, and the two of us smelling of each other’s perfume. And with every day I was sinking deeper and deeper in that swamp, and didn’t even try to grab the ground that was right next to me. I was disgusted with myself like an alcoholic who wakes up in a pile of dirt, but crawls right back to the pub to fill himself again with the poisonous liquor slowly killing him with every new sip.”

WwiiNazi GermanyMystery SuspenseSpy ThrillerWwii Fiction
Book:Gruppenführer's Mistress
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“But these aren’t the first eventful times I have lived through and if I’m granted even more years then with God’s help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job or maybe won’t have a job at all and will turn back into the useless piece of clockwork he used to be. And if he has a little more to him, maybe he will read the first chapter of Ecclesiastes: “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it.” Eventful times. What remains from Italy’s eventful times in the thirteenth century except Dante’s Inferno? Do. As if I haven’t had enough pointless doing. Oh they have nothing else, they only are when they do. I want to be, and for me to do is: not to be.”

WwiiThe NetherlandsNescioAmsterdam StoriesInsula Dei
Book:Amsterdam Stories
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“There were several key American scientists that favorably reported on Nazi eugenics after visiting Hitler's Germany in order to provide it cover.”

ScienceRacismNaziWwiiEugenicsNazismScientistsProgressivismJewish HistoryHolocaust HistoryAdolf HitlerWwii HistoryScientific RacismPeer ReviewEugenicistHitlerism
Book:H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator
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“War is incidental to ideology, and this was certainly true for the war instigated by Adolf Hitler. Historians have aptly documented that Hitler knew he needed the fog of war and a radicalized population in order to enact the most extreme policies. This was equally true for both Germans and the people of their conquered territories. The war allowed Hitler the cover and justification to radicalize the T4 Euthanasia program against those lives deemed “not worth living” by pointing to the costs of maintaining those “useless eaters” during a time of war. It allowed license for Karl Brandt to “clear hospital beds” in the name of the war effort. The war’s conquered territory also brought conquered populations and increased the number of “unfit” and “undesired” population, including the Jewish population of Eastern Europe. The methods and technology of the T4 Euthanasia program were subsequently transferred from the German hospitals to the extermination camps, doctors, nurses, equipment, and all. This transference and repurposing of resources was all decided in the infamous Wannsee Conference, which we now know was the beginning of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”:“The aim of all this was to cleanse German living space of Jews in a legal manner.” (From the text of the Wannsee Protocol)”

HolocaustNaziTotalitarianismWwiiEugenicsNazismJewish HistoryHolocaust HistoryAdolf HitlerTotalitarianWwii HistoryNational SocialismScientific RacismFinal SolutionWannsee ConferenceWannsee Protocol
Author:A.E. Samaan
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“When the big German guns at Calais fired on us, we realized, we had been strafed by Spitfires from the RAF during working up exercises for the invasion, accidentally attacked by the USN off Normandy after D-Day and shelled by the British Army in the English Channel. It was about time the enemy took a few shots at us too!" Jack Harold, RCNVR, Signalman HMCS TRENTONIAN Chapter 9, White Ensign Flying -The Story of HMCS TRENTONIAN.”

HistoryVeteranWwiiNaval History
Book:White Ensign Flying: Corvette HMCS Trentonian
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“… It was an astonishing situation, a tragedy unique in history. What terror had driven these peace-loving people to seek refuge in such a wilderness? Even grass had become scarce along the track. Scanty patches of grass had been eaten clean and transport animals, already showing signs of exhaustion were far from their journey’s end. … the constant flicker of lightning and the distant growl of thunder wasominous. In the small hours the storm burst upon us. Hastily rolling up bedding we took refuge wherever we could, in or under the lorries standing round. There together with many Indians we sat huddled and waited for the dawn. Dr Russell”

GovernmentArmyPlanesNavyWwiiStrugglesSoldiersFlyA Disintegrating TrackThreatening Weather
Book:EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942
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“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,”

IntelligenceWorld War IiWwiiWw2Pearl Harbor
Book:The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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“The codebreakers had known for days, if not weeks, that a large Japanese attack was coming. William and the rest of his team had seen the MAGIC intercepts. It was obvious from MAGIC that Japan had been poised to strike; the only mystery was where. What surprised William on December 7 was not the attack itself but the location. He thought it would happen in Manila, not Pearl Harbor. next few days, more than one codebreaker wrote his 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," adding, "What to do? Thus far, no real psychiatric or psychoanalytic”

IntelligenceWwiiPearl Harbor
Book:The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
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“A very important man used to visit her sometimes, and I met him too. 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’.”

WwiiSecond World WarHitlerWorld War TwoWar StoriesWar StoryAlfred NestorUncle HitlerEva BraunAdolph Hitler Adolf Hitler
Author:Alfred Nestor
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“Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. P. 196”

CollaborationHolocaustNaziSoviet UnionWwiiUkraineSecond World WarPolandEastern EuropeEstoniaLithuaniaLatviaBelarusBloodlands
Book:Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
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“The casting of the brash United States Army Air Force officer Colonel Robert E. Hogan and the pompous German Luftwaffe officer Colonel Wilhelm Klink was inspired. For this series—a comedy with the serious backdrop of war—to succeed, the lead players had to be the perfect fit. The dynamic portrayal of this military odd couple had to be articulate, accurate, and precise. For the show to work, for the concept to be accepted, for one of the most outlandish premises in television history to be believed, the actors signed to play the two leading characters not only had to bring these extreme individuals to life with broad, fictional strokes, they had to make them real in the details.”

TelevisionWorld War IiWwiiAir ForceTvBob CraneHogan S Heroes
Book:Bob Crane The Definitive Biography
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“For many people, that war [WWII] is called the “good war” because it was fought against a regime guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the Allies did not enter the war to save Jews from extermination. The United States entered the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and, as a nation, we certainly did not do as much as we should have to save the Jewish population of Europe. The basic question is still with us: Is it right, justifiable, to intervene in a nation’s internal activities when those activities include genocide, ethnic cleansing, or some other demonstrable harm to a subset of its people?”

WarResponsibilityGenocideHolocaustInterventionWwiiJust War
Book:Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War
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“Pinto recalled in his memoirs after the war that Waelti, who was actually a Dutchman, "did not look like a very dangerous figure, sitting opposite me, hunched up and apprehensive. But then spies very often don't look sinister; it is their ability to blend with the crowd that makes them so dangerous".”

WarLife QuotesTruth QuotesSpyWwiiWwii HistoryDeception QuotesSpying
Book:The Traitor of Arnhem: The Untold Story of WWII's Greatest Betrayal and the Moment that Changed History Forever
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“They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. He will be withdrawn from the common law and will become untouchable; the more power that he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and hated. When he is given the command of a group of unfortunates, with the right of life or death over them, he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post. Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he has unloaded onto his underlings the injury received from above.”

PoliticsPowerCorruptionWwiiAuschwitzPrimo LeviThe HolocaustThe TruceIf This Is A Man
Book:If This Is a Man / The Truce
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“One of the things I cannnot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective," Steiner writes, "is the time relation." Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. "Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox-Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be-that I puzzle over time.”

HolocaustWwiiWorld War TwoStyronGeorge SteinerSophie S Choice
Book:Sophie’s Choice
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“There is a very dangerous myth that #Hitler was solely fueled by racism. His desire to engineer society was pervasive. Racism alone cannot explain what happened in The Holocaust without also addressing Hitler's statist policies.”

LibertyRacismLibertarianHolocaustLibertarianismWhite SupremacyTotalitarianismWwiiStatismSocial EngineeringHolocaust HistoryTotalitarianWwii HistoryScientific RacismUtopian SocialismRace HygieneRacial SuperiorityPlanned SocietyCentrally Planned SocietiesRacialist
Author:A.E. Samaan
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“WITH THE EMBERS STILL BURNING: The scientific community has done a pronounced amount of hand-wringing about its involvement in the atomic bomb’s creation, and a disproportionately absent amount of the soul-searching with respects to its creation of the science of eugenics. The 450,000 deaths due to the bomb are relatively small in the shadow of the many millions dead as a result of National Socialism’s eugenic campaign. The casualties of The Holocaust are the casualties of the science of eugenics, which so many scientists had actively campaigned for leading up to World War II. Yet, the scientific community has confronted its complicity with collective silence and sometimes outright censorship.”

ScienceHolocaustNaziWwiiEugenicsHolocaust HistoryAdolf HitlerTotalitarianWwii HistoryNational SocialismUtopian SocialismPseudo SciencePseudoscientificEugenicists
Book:From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848
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“JULIAN HUXLEY’S “EUGENICS MANIFESTO”: “Eugenics Manifesto” was the name given to an article supporting eugenics. The document, which appeared in Nature, September 16, 1939, was a joint statement issued by America’s and Britain’s most prominent biologists, and was widely referred to as the “Eugenics Manifesto.” The manifesto was a response to a request from Science Service, of Washington, D.C. for a reply to the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Two of the main signatories and authors were Hermann J. Muller and Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley, as this book documents, was the founding director of UNESCO from the famous Huxley family. Muller was an American geneticist, educator and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Put into the context of the timeline, this document was published 15 years after “Mein Kampf” and a year after the highly publicized violence of Kristallnacht. In other words, there is no way either Muller or Huxley were unaware at the moment of publication of the historical implications of eugenic agendas.”

ScienceRacismHolocaustWwiiEugenicsHolocaust HistoryWwii HistoryScientific RacismUtopian SocialismPseudo ScienceEugenicistJulian Huxley
Book:From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848
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“Cu o strângere de inimă, fiecare își privea casa și trecea mai departe: . Iar peste sufletele oamenilor se rostogolea și un val de indiferență: >. Cine se gândea la suferințele patriei? Nu ei, nu cei care pleacă în această seară. Panica anula tot ce nu era instinct, freamăt animalic al trupului. Să iei ce aveai mai prețios pe lume și pe urmă... Și numai ce trăia, ce respira, plânge, iubea avea valoare în noaptea aceea! Puțini erau cei care își regretau bogățiile. Strângeai în brațe o femeie sau un copil, restul nu mai conta; restul putea să dispară în flăcări.”

WwiiRefugeesRefugiațiWwii FranceWwii History Casualty
Book:Suite Française
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“Dar porțile de fier din toate gările erau deja zăvorâte și păzite de soldați. Mulțimea se agăța de bare, le zgâlțâia, apoi se retrăgea în dezordine pe străzile vecine. Femeile fugeau plângând, cu copiii în brațe. Erau oprite ultimele taxiuri. Li se ofereau două, trei mii de franci ca să părăsească Parisul. Dar șoferii refuzau, nu mai aveau benzină.”

WwiiRefugeesRefugiațiWwii FranceWwii History Casualty
Book:Suite Française
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“Dar nu putură să intre în curtea mare încuiată, zăvorâtă, apărată de soldați și de mulțimea presată, strivită de bare. Rămăsaseră acolo până seara, luptându-se zadarnic. În jurul lor, oamenii ziceau: -Asta e! Plecăm pe jos. Rosteau cuvintele astea cu un fel de stupoare deznădăjduită. Se vedea bine că nici ei nu credeau. Se uitau în jur și așteptau minunea: o mașină, un camion, orice i-ar fi dus de acolo. Dar nu apărea nimic. Atunci plecau spre porțile Parisului, ieșeau, își târau bagajele după ei în praf, mergeau, ajungeau în suburbii, apoi la țară și-și ziceau: . Soții Michaud plecaseră și ei tot pe jos. Era o noapte caldă de iunie. În fața lor, o femeie în negru care purta strâmb pe cap, peste părul alb, pălăria cu doliu, se poticnea pe pietrele de pe drum și mormăia, cu gesturi de nebună: -Rugați-vă ca fuga noastră să n-aibă loc iarna... Rugați-vă!... Rugați-vă!”

WwiiRefugeesRefugiațiWwii FranceWwii History Casualty
Book:Suite Française
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“Although Higgins's men had finally received some badly needed supplies, some of his wounded were becoming critical, and the overall health of his troops continued to ebb. Meanwhile, the price among the 442nd's battalions paid to reach Higgins's men had reached gut-wrenching levels. And for General Dahlquist, panic would supplant his anger and frustration.”

HistoryMilitaryHeroWorld War IiWwiiJapanese American442ndDahlquist
Author:Scott McGaugh, Honor Before Glory
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“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”

HumorWwiiNazisIn TroubleArmy TrainingSleeping On The Job
Book:An Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler's Army
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“Many American boys that fought in WWII had been sterilized under eugenic laws passed by the the United States Supreme Court under the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell. Over 80,000 Americans would be forcibly sterilized under that legal precedent. Coincidentally, Buck v Bell is also the legal precedent cited in Roe v. Wade, the famous abortion rights case.”

AbortionWwiiEugenicsPro LifeProgressivismRoe V WadeWwii HistoryPro ChoiceSterilizationScientific RacismRace HygieneEugenicistBuck V BellEugenic Legislation
Book:H.H. Laughlin: American Scientist, American Progressive, Nazi Collaborator
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“What do you recommend, James?" asked Jozef, perusing the scanty menu with a metropolitan air. "So many choices!" Dorota giggled. "Ah, it's recommending the fish I am," James answered gravely. "So good, you aren't needing even a drop of lemon to aid it." Both girls tittered. Truth to be told, none of them had seen so much as a lemon peel in the last two months.”

ChristianWwiiHumourousWwii FictionLondon BlitzWwii Polish
Book:Through the Darkness
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“No, he said to himself as he watched her part the curtains and start into the store. There was a time when I was your son, there was a time that I no longer remember when you used to smile a mother’s smile and tell me stories about gallant and fierce warriors who protected their lords with blades of shining steel, and about the old woman who found the peach in the stream and took it home, and when her husband split it in half, a husky little boy tumbled out to fill their hearts with boundless joy. I was that lad and the peach, and you were the old woman. And we were Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride, and Japanese thoughts, because it was alright then to be Japanese and feel and think all the things that Japanese do even if we lived in America. Then there came a time when I was only half Japanese, because one is not born in America and raised in America and taught in America, and one does not speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight and see and hear in America among Americans in American streets and houses without becoming American and loving it. But I did not love enough – for you were still half my mother, and that was thereby still half Japanese, and when the war came and they told me to fight for America I was not strong enough to fight you, and I was not strong enough to fight the bitterness which made the half me which was you bigger than the half me which was America. And really the whole of me that I could not see or feel - now that I know the truth when it is late - and the of half me which was you is no longer there. I am only half of me, and the half that remains is American by law because the government was wise and strong enough to know why it was that I could not fight for America, and did not strip me of my birthright. But it is not enough to be only half an American and know that it is an empty half. I am not your son. And I am not Japanese. And I am not American.”

WwiiSeattleJapanese InternmentNisseiIsseiMinidokaJapanese American LiteratureRefusal To Fight In Wwii
Book:No-No Boy
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“The doctors made plans to collect biological samples--tissues, urine, feces--all of which would be tested for the presence of plutonium, to see how it would travel, how much of it would remain in the body, and what effect it might have on HP-12 [Ebb Cade]. The day after the injection [April, 1945], Dr. Friedell sent news to Los Alamos. "I think we will have access to considerable clinical material here and we hope to do a number of subjects," he wrote.”

WwiiPlutoniumAtomic Medical Effects ResearchBlack Medical SubjectsHuman TestingOak Ridge
Author:Denise Kiernan
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