Quotes from Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

But also it is not only expedient, there is something more, a feeling that we of Germany have found our destiny and that the future sweeps toward us in an overwhelming wave. We too must move. We must go with it. Even now there are being wrongs done. The storm troopers are having their moment of victory, and there are bloody heads

We shall have no leaders left before long!" the pastor cried bitterly. "We are not abandoned," the doctor told him quietly. "Neither is one man indispensable, however much we may mourn him personally. Each of us does as much as he can and when he disappears someone else finds the courage to take his place.

And he went on in his quiet voice with his eloquent interpretation of the ancient words: "For what if some did not believe? Shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid. Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar.

I have never hated the individual Jew -- yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

We purge our bloodstream of its baser elements.

And I will no longer have any dealings with Jews, except for the receipt of money.

Dying," she said in her last week, "is normal. It's as normal as being born.

You will see only that your own people are troubled. You will not see that a few must suffer for the millions to be saved.

Security, the dignity we loved, were nowhere. So ugliness boiled up within us and resentment at the outer world which we were told was responsible for our catastrophes. The Germans in their pride and their despair began to make a fetish of their enforced isolation from the security of the normal world. It is a truism that the wider world a man feels himself to be a part of, the less likely he is to be seduced by notions of the superiority of some narrow group.

There must have been a number of ballots marked 'no,'" he said. "But if there were, they were simply discarded. Only the 'yes' ballots counted in the official vote." His wry young face wrinkled with distress.

All right, Father. Those are their aims, of course. But can't you see that the Nazis are not promoting them in any such rational way? They talk about their new form of government as divinely appointed, as if it had come into existence as an act of God. They aren't pushing the political program of a party. Their acts are all cloaked in a religious fervor––the people must accept them as they accept religious laws, without doubt … Nothing else can be right.

The Nazis had adopted similar tactics all over Germany. The hour for religious teaching in the schools had become no longer available. It was used for physical exercises or for the teaching of "Aryan blood" theories. The German Christians had been set to work upon the children.

Leopold Wilhelm Bernhard was born June 15, 1915 in Berlin, Germany, to parents from two old and well- known German families. His mother, Franziska, was a Bokelmann of Lubeck, of an aristocratic line with university educations, MDs, etc.

Those who still possessed means spent lavishly for the most extravagant diversions, as if they wanted a last fling while their pockets were still lined, and decency and the concern for one's fellows were lost in the frantic scramble to survive.

So, when a young German cleric, who had fled religious persecution in the Fatherland to seek asylum in the New World, wished to tell his story and expose the clandestine Nazi domination of the Lutheran Church in Germany, the FBI was immediately engaged to arrange his secret meeting(s) with the most eminent anti-Nazi story-teller in the U.S., Kressmann Taylor, who took his real life story and fictionalized it into this, her next book, Until That Day, published in 1942.

The strange thing about Karl Hoffmann's story is that it is a story of the defeat of the tremendous Nazi force, inside of Germany. There is a citadel in the very heart of their power that they have not breached; there are men living in Germany who have defeated them. The men who trust to the forces of physical power can conquer but they cannot win. They have no weapon which can penetrate the reaches of the spirit.

The choice he was forced to make between faith and complacency is one that faces all Americans, not for the duration of a war but for the duration of our democracy.

Alas, Max, this will pain you, I know, but you must realize the truth. There are movements far bigger than the men who make them up. As for me, I am a part of the movement. Heinrich is an officer in the boys' corps, which is headed by Baron Von Freische, whose rank is now shedding a luster upon our house, for he comes often to visit with Heinrich and Elsa, whom he much admires.

The house filled rapidly; cheerful talk overflowed the rooms and children were bobbing in and out everywhere with their shining new toys, until finally, at a very late hour, we all sat down to the Christmas dinner, before the huge, crisp and crackling brown body of the Christmas goose. Everything but the holiday was forgotten. That was the last night I remember, in the years in which I was to remain in Germany, over which no shadow fell.

From the southern windows of the university that look out on Unter den Linden could be seen the small dome of the monument to the Unknown Soldier. I stood with Erich Doehr one afternoon in April of 1934 at a high window, looking down upon it and upon the briskly moving traffic and the pedestrians with which the mile-wide square teemed. Everywhere your eye moved it caught sight of a uniform.

This was in the year 1937. There was no escaping the fast-moving trend of events. There was not even an opportunity to protest against them. You could only watch and be swept along. I found the increased taxes and the incessant demands for "donations" by the party a heavy drain on my slender purse.