Quotes from Richard J. Evans

Narrative history fell out of fashion for many years in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians everywhere focused on analytical approaches derived mainly from the social sciences. But a variety of recent, large-scale narrative histories have shown that it can be done without sacrificing analytical rigour or explanatory power.

If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.

People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.

Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. 'Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.'24

In Hamburg on 30 April 1945, hearing of Hitler's death, which she believed to have been caused by his having poisoned himself, Luise Solmitz at last felt free to release the hatred that she had been building up for him over the previous months. He was, she wrote in her diary, 'the shabbiest failure in world history'. He was 'uncompromising, unbridled, irresponsible', qualities that had at first brought him success but then led to catastrophe. 'National

By 1930 at the latest, it had become clear that the Presidential power was in the hands of a man who had no faith in democratic institutions and no intention of defending them from their enemies.

Heinrich Himmler declared: 'Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.

The camps also became sites of scientific investigation, as the anthropologist Eugen Fischer, later a leading 'racial hygienist' under the Third Reich, descended on the town of Rehoboth to study its mixed-race inhabitants (he called them the 'Rehoboth bastards'). He and his colleagues obtained skulls for craniometric studies of different races; up to three hundred of them eventually found their way to Germany.

Yet he opposed the introduction

Communist Party of Germany never deviated from its belief that the Republic was a bourgeois state whose primary purposes were the protection of the capitalist economic order and the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism, they hoped, would inevitably collapse and the 'bourgeois' republic would be replaced by a Soviet state along Russian lines.

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations.

The creation of a free and comprehensive welfare system as the entitlement of all its citizens was one of the major achievements of the Weimar Republic, perhaps in retrospect its most important.

Some, indeed, referred to Bismarck's creation as the 'Second Reich'. The use of the word implied, too, that where the First Reich had failed, in the face of French aggression, the Second had succeeded.

It was a Nazi epidemiologist who first established the link between smoking and lung cancer, establishing a government agency to combat tobacco consumption in June 1939.

The next day, 25 February 1945, Goebbels warned, in an article in The Reich, that, if Germany surrendered, Stalin would immediately occupy south-eastern Europe, and 'an iron curtain would immediately fall on this huge territory, together with the vastness of the Soviet Union, and nations would be slaughtered behind it'.

A latecomer on the scene, Germany had only been able to pick up the scraps and crumbs left over by European colonial powers that had enjoyed a head start on them.

Of all the things that made the Third Reich a modern dictatorship, its incessant demand for popular legitimation was one of the most striking.

Viewed nostalgically from the perspective of the early interwar years, Germany before 1914 seemed to many to have been a haven of peace, prosperity and social harmony. Yet beneath its prosperous and self-confident surface, it was nervous, uncertain and racked by internal tensions.

to highlight the immorality of Germans abandoning their moral duty to think.

Pentru unii era prea mult. Paul Nikolaus, artist de cabaret specializat în numere cu subiecte politice la faimosul club Kadeko din Berlin... s-a refugiat la Lucerna, unde s-a sinucis pe 20 martie 1933. "Iat?, nu mai glumesc", a scris...

Cât de oribil, fantastic, incredibil poate s? fie", spunea Chamberlain..., "c? trebuie s? s?p?m tranÈ™ee È™i s? prob?m m??ti de gaze aici din cauza unei certe dintr-o È›ar? îndep?rtat?, între oameni despre care nu È™tim nimic." Cehoslovacia era în mod clar mai departe ca India, Africa de Sud sau Australia pe harta mental? a poporului britanic...

From now on it is not up to you to decide whether or not something is true, but whether it is in the interests of the National Socialist Revolution.

Writers such as Hans Blüher, strongly influenced by the youth movement, went to even greater extremes in their plea for the state to be reorganized along anti-democratic lines and led by a close-knit group of heroic men united by homoerotic ties of love and affection.