Quotes from Richard J. Evans

Victims of the rightward drift of middle-class voters, they never recovered

They could not rid themselves of their Marxist ideology without losing a large part of their electoral support in the working class; yet on the other hand a more radical policy, for example of forming a Red Army militia from workers instead of relying on the Free Corps, would surely have made their participation in bourgeois coalition governments impossible and called down upon their heads the wrath of the army.

The twentieth century became an age of totalitarianism, culminating in the attempt of Hitler and Stalin to establish a new kind of political order based on total police control, terror, and the ruthless suppression and murder of real or imagined opponents in their millions on the one hand, and continual mass mobilization and enthusiasm whipped up by sophisticated propaganda methods on the other.30

The French, one columnist noted, called a million million a trillion, while 'for us on the other hand, a trillion is equal to a million billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000), and we must only hope to God that we don't get into these or even higher numerical values with our everyday currency, merely because of the overcrowding of the lunatic asylums that it would cause.

sustained the electoral fortunes of the National Liberals and other parties further to the right from the 1860s to the 1880s no longer functioned effectively. Many of these agitators had achieved their status by working hard to get a university degree then moving up slowly through the ranks of the less fashionable parts of the civil service. Here, too, a degree of social anxiety was a

Some authors have argued that a direct historical line can be drawn to Nazism from the French Revolution of 1789, the Jacobin 'Reign of Terror' in 1793-4, and the implicit idea of a popular dictatorship in Rousseau's theory of the 'General Will', decided initially by the people but brooking no opposition once resolved upon.139

The first prerequisite of the serious historical researcher must be the ability to jettison dearly held interpretations in the face of the recalcitrance of the evidence.

Within two months,' Papen confidently told a worried conservative acquaintance, 'we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he'll squeak.'172

It was in this atmosphere of national trauma, political extremism, violent conflict and revolutionary upheaval that Nazism was born.

History," declared Droysen, "is the only science enjoying the ambiguous fortune of being required to be at the same time an art.

Legea e doar o expresie a puterii.

The Nazis saw the educational system in the first place as a means for inculcating the young with their own view of the world, still more as a means of training and preparing them for war.

One historical study of the epidemic has concluded that 'the sanitary and demographic catastrophe which befell Bosnia in the years 1815–18 had no parallel in other European countries since the Black Death in the years 1347–1351'.

In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly profess our allegiance to the basic principles of humanity and justice, freedom and socialism. No Enabling Law gives you the right to annihilate ideas that are eternal

The Nazi Party had established itself with startling suddenness in September 1930 as a catch-all party of social protest, appealing to a greater or lesser degree to virtually every social group in the land.