Quotes from Erik Larson

Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932.

Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will "sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.

Depending on one's point of view, Germany was experiencing a great revival or a savage darkening.

Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.

I was inclined to think him Jewish," she wrote; she "considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.

memorandum to the State Department dated October 26, 1933. Seriously ill patients could ask to be euthanized, but if unable to make the request, their families could do so for them.

to remain silent is out of the question for a strong and honest man.

Later, Dodd wrote a description of Hitler in his diary. "He is romantic-minded and half-informed about great historical events and men in Germany." He had a "semi-criminal" record. "He has definitely said on a number of occasions that a people survives by fighting and dies as a consequence of peaceful policies. His influence is and has been wholly belligerent.

Berlin, moreover, was not yet the supercharged outpost it would become within the year. There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler's government could not possibly endure. Germany's military power was limited—its army, the Reichswehr, had only one hundred thousand men, no match for the military forces of neighboring France, let alone the combined might of France, England, Poland, and the Soviet Union.

On May 10, 1933, the Nazi Party burned unwelcome books—Einstein, Freud, the brothers Mann, and many others—in great pyres throughout Germany, but seven days later Hitler declared himself committed to peace and went so far as to pledge complete disarmament if other countries followed suit. The world swooned with relief.

The bureau had long banned the use of the word tornado because it induced panic, and panic brought criticism, something the bureau could ill afford.

Hardly anyone thought that the threats against the Jews were meant seriously," wrote Carl Zuckmayer, a Jewish writer. "Even many Jews considered the savage anti-Semitic rantings of the Nazis merely a propaganda device, a line the Nazis would drop as soon as they won governmental power and were entrusted with public responsibilities.

There is no place suitable to my kind of mentality

One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes.

he bought his farm. The grueling work that had so worn on him during his boyhood now became for him both a soul-saving diversion and a romantic harking back to America's past.

no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.

In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard's New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone "there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders." The Times reporter said, "Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?" "Yes," Sumner replied; "as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever.

In this their lives reflected the broader miasma suffusing the city beyond their garden wall.

Back in America, true to her nature if not to Boris, Martha met and promptly fell in love with a new man

I didn't believe all her stories," Martha wrote later. "I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical." When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no oppression.

Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he'll squeak." It was possibly the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth century.

To Winston Churchill, it was long overdue. In his memoir-like history The World Crisis, 1916–1918, he said of Wilson, "What he did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915. And if done then what abridgment of the slaughter; what sparing of the agony; what ruin, what catastrophes would have been prevented; in how many million homes would an empty chair be occupied today; how different would be the shattered world in which victors and vanquished alike are condemned to live!

It's a great privilege to be permitted to share any part of your thought and confidence. It puts me in spirits again and makes me feel as if my private life had been recreated. But, better than that, it makes me hope that I may be of some use to you, to lighten the days with whole-hearted sympathy and complete understanding. That will be a happiness indeed.

The dinner became infamous. Later, in midsummer, Britain's Ambassador Phipps would observe in his diary that of the seven people who sat down to dine at the Regendanz mansion that night, four had been murdered, one had fled the country under threat of death, and another had been imprisoned in a concentration camp. Phipps wrote, "The list of casualties for one dinner party might make even a Borgia envious.