Quotes from Erik Larson

If this Government remains in power for another year and carries on in the same measure in this direction, it will go far towards making Germany a danger to world peace for years

Tolerance means weakness," Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. "In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it.

Gleichschaltung.

So many men Ã¢â'¬Â¦ think absolute isolation a coming paradise.

found the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to be a trove of relevant materials that conveyed a sense of the woof and weave of life in Hitler's Berlin. There, in one locale, I found the papers of Sigrid Schultz, Hans V. Kaltenborn, and Louis Lochner. A short and lovely walk away, in the library of the University of Wisconsin, I found as well a supply of materials on the only UW alumna to be guillotined at Hitler's command, Mildred Fish Harnack.

lack of confidence, demoralization, doubts, and all those insidious workings which undermine the power of resistance.

Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people—men, women, and children—simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps.

Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest.

She loved "their funny stiff dancing, listening to their incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures, natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life.

When the conversation turned to Germany's persecution of Jews, Colonel House urged Dodd to do all he could "to ameliorate Jewish sufferings" but added a caveat: "the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in Berlin as they have done for a long time." In this, Colonel House expressed a sentiment pervasive in America, that Germany's Jews were at least partly responsible for their own troubles. Dodd

Boswell and Thompson write, "Every night the rooms on the two upper floors of the Castle were filled to overflowing. Holmes reluctantly accommodated a few men as paying guests, but catered primarily to women—preferably young and pretty ones of apparent means, whose homes were distant from Chicago and who had no one close to them who might make inquiry if they did not soon return. Many never went home. Many, indeed, never emerged from the castle, having once entered it

He sensed a rising "hysteria" among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief "that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.

He feared that now he appeared naive.

One of the deadliest storm surges in American history occurred on Lake Okeechobee in Florida, in 1928, when hurricane winds blowing across the long fetch of the lake raised a storm surge that killed 1,835 people.

South of the Thames, the air was infused with the scent of incinerated coffee, as one hundred tons of it burned in a warehouse in Bermondsey. This was the added cruelty of air raids. In addition to killing and maiming, they destroyed the commodities that kept England alive

Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the Nazis saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens. Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In

It was as if a load had suddenly been lifted from the German soul. The sense of relief could almost be felt in the air. Papen had put into words what thousands upon thousands of his countrymen had locked up in their hearts for fear of the awful penalties of speech.

You know, of course," Dodd said, "that we have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life.

MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. The

When you're in a pissin' contest with a skunk, make sure you got plenty of piss.

One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship's 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but covered in black soot.

Coveting power for power's sake was a "base" pursuit, he wrote, adding, "But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.

DODD, PAPEN'S MARBURG SPEECH seemed a marker of what he had long believed—that Hitler's regime was too brutal and irrational to last. Hitler's own vice-chancellor had spoken out

One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans