Quotes from Peter Padfield

Rather than medical killing being subsumed to war, the war itself was subsumed to the vast biomedical vision of which "euthanasia" was a part.

the deepest impulses behind the war had to do with the sequence of sterilisation, direct medical killing and genocide.

Lies had always been an integral part of Nazi propaganda. Whether he was convinced that lies were justified by the greater ends they served or whether he had become incapable through his years of power and his closeness to Hitler of separating wish from sober calculation, falsehood is surely indivisible.

Whether the idea was taken from the Spanish Inquisition whose methods it so resembled or from the example of the Russian secret police, whether it sprang from Himmler's own zealotry, it was a deliberate policy designed to suppress by fear all actual or potential opposition or even criticism of the regime.

The other political parties hurriedly dissolved themselves,

It is a race now whether the Bolsheviks double-cross the Americans, or the Americans the English – because they are certainly not very united – or whether the English double-cross both the others

Thus the legend of the 'stab in the back' and the undefeated German Army had become historical truth

siblings Scholl died as courageous and upright martyrs. Report of an eyewitness.

Höss found himself going hot and cold and trembling as he was forced to watch from the front rank; it affected him far more than the first execution he witnessed.

The Munich students provided a spectacular example of resistance put down by the Gestapo;

a precept that it is a Divine Commandment to obey Germans

Himmler was, as he had always been, merely the most extreme, emotionally committed exponent of the orthodoxy of the master race.

on 24 July Marshal Rokossovskii's Army Group had overrun the extermination camp at Majdanek; for the first time the unbelievable had become visible. Photographs of gas chambers and crematoria and living skeletons in the camp had shocked the world.

On moral and international legal grounds it would be difficult to differentiate these discussions about annihilating shipwrecked survivors from those mentioned earlier between Churchill, his advisers and the Air Staff on area-bombing to kill, de-house and break the morale of the German working-class population – except perhaps that the British offensive was likely to affect women and children more directly, and was in the event carried out.

Raeder and Dönitz had objected on the practical grounds that such an order would undermine U-boat morale: officers and men would react against shooting defenceless people in the water and would assume that the enemy would mete out the same treatment to them in reprisal if the positions were reversed.

Great massacres may be commanded by tyrants but they are imposed by peoples. Without general social support, the organs of isolation and expulsion cannot even be created.

Himmler, as indeed Hitler, was more victim than creator of the natural disaster that engulfed Germany and the world.

Especially striking was an upsurge of interest in astrology, fortune telling and all manner of numerical and alphabetical methods of divining the future.34

On their way to the first session of the new Parliament, a group of Nazi deputies uniformed in brown celebrated by smashing department-store windows down the Leipzigerstrasse; 'by some odd chance,' a Jewish journalist noted in her diary, 'the casually aimed projectiles hit only non-Aryan targets.

Munich was the final turning point for Hitler. He had met the leaders of the western democracies and made monkeys of them. He had proved that tactics of deception, threat and histrionics worked at the highest levels of European diplomacy. His will had broken the bonds of reality; everything was possible.

from 4,000 yards.4 He exceeded

Hesse's ultimate message about the unity of the cosmos and the importance of loving the world, not despising it, was censored out by his convictions in the other direction. Hermann Hesse's books were banned after Hitler took power.

Rascher's 'normal' colleagues and co-workers recognised him as a fraud who inflicted unnecessary suffering and fatalities and used his privileged position with the Reichsführer to gain medical reputation and advancement.

a groundswell of financial support built largely of frustration was about to lift the Hitler movement on a dizzy ride to power.