Quotes from Leonard Gross

Richard Grunberger points out in The Twelve-Year Reich, the Jew served a necessary psychological function. "Just as primitive man's concept of God supposed the existence of the Devil, so the German's progressive self-deification during the Third Reich depended upon the demonization of the Jew.

When misery is the greatest, God is the closest,

Catholics had always been a minority in Protestant Germany, often an uncomfortable one, but the period since the assumption of power by the Nazis in January 1933 had been particularly difficult.

Now all notions of the good life were compressed into a single word: survival.

The decision to leave Germany after the advent of Hitler would seem an easy and obvious one now, but the prospect of abandoning one's traditions, relationships and possessions for the hazards of a foreign land and tongue, with little or no capital to begin life anew, could not have seemed attractive at the time.