Quotes from Keith Lowe

habían sido objeto de revueltas políticas, violentas disputas con sus vecinos y finalmente de invasión por una de las nuevas superpotencias mundiales. En medio de todo esto, odiar a un adversario se convirtió en algo completamente natural.

The Western powers recognized this, and seemed prepared to endorse almost any injustice as long as it held communism at bay.

Los británicos, al igual que los estadounidenses, recuerdan la Segunda Guerra Mundial como una época en la que su mejor generación salvó al mundo de la maldad del nazismo.

Between 1945 and 1947 tens of millions of men, women and children were expelled from their countries in some of the biggest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen.

I thought you'd be there waiting for me … What greeted me instead was the lingering stench of ashes and the empty sockets of our ruined home. Samuel Puterman on his return to Warsaw, 1945

This insistence on unity was the source of one of the most potent myths of the postwar period – the idea that the responsibility for all the evils of the war rested exclusively with the Germans. If it was only 'they' who had perpetrated atrocities upon 'us', then the rest of Europe was released from all accountability for the injustices it had perpetrated upon itself.

Attempts to rehabilitate the political right in western Europe have not only resulted in a whitewash: in some cases, absurdly, it has allowed right-wing extremists to portray themselves as the injured party.

In the winter of 1941 the German army succeeded in starving between 1.3 and 1.65 million Soviet prisoners of war to death.

This was not discrimination against Jews as such, but it was almost as bad: it was an attempt to ignore them altogether. As one Dutch camp survivor put it, 'Where there should have been pity, I encountered the dry, difficult to approach, repellent, amorphous mass known as officialdom.'13

Lidice, along with thousands of other villages, was switched off like a light.

I read somewhere that all the digitized announcers on the tube have names.

Perhaps George Santayana's famous aphorism that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' should be reversed – that is, it is because we remember the past that we are condemned to repeat it. The depressing re-emergence of national hatreds in the last

Hidden within the main conflict were dozens of other, more local wars, which had different flavours and different motivations in each country and each region.

In some respects the Hamburg firestorm can be considered a microcosm of what happened to Europe in the war. As with the rest of Europe, the bombing had transformed the city into a landscape of ruins – and yet there were still parts of it that lay serenely, miraculously, untouched.

Of the 3 million prisoners taken by the Soviets during the war, more than a third died in captivity.

The men the Americans now call 'the Greatest Generation' were not all the selfless heroes they are often portrayed to be: a proportion of them were also thieves, plunderers and abusers of the worst kind.

This contrast between foreign evil and homegrown nobility was hugely important in the rebuilding of national identities after the war, and one of the principal ways in which Europe's battered nations chose to lick their wounds.