Quotes from Laurence Rees

human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it's just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice.

Michel and Annette Muller's mother, snatched from her children at Beaune-la-Rolande, died at Auschwitz. And while it was the Nazis who wished her dead, it was the French who put her in harm's way.

there was a greater likelihood that individuals who committed crimes within the Nazi system would take personal responsibility for their actions, than there was that war criminals who served Stalin or Hirohito would take such responsibility.

Japanese soldiers split open the stomachs of pregnant women and bayoneted the fetuses; they tied up local farmers and used them for target practice; they tortured thousands of innocent people in ways that rival the Gestapo at its worst; and they were pursuing deadly medical experiments long before Dr. Mengele and Auschwitz.

A diferencia del estalinismo y otras dictaduras que se apropiaron, sin más, del poder, el nazismo se sustentó en una base popular.

Each of the two Western leaders came to believe that they could form a 'special' bond with Stalin. Both were wrong. Stalin had no 'special' bond with anyone. But in their attempt to charm him they had missed the fact that he had, in his own individual way, charmed them instead.

Charismatic leaders rely primarily on the power of their own personalities to justify their office. They don't fit well into bureaucratic structures and project an almost 'missionary