Quotes About History

This man was Anton Drexler, a locksmith by trade, who may be said to have been the actual founder of National Socialism.

the peoples led by Roosevelt and

moment of declaration of war, if there

The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius.

But they were now on that April morning determined to use them—the first time and the last in the history of the Third Reich that the Jews resisted their Nazi oppressors with arms.

Dietrich Eckart, twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often called the spiritual founder of National Socialism.

William L. Shirer

the fall of the mark wiped out the war debts and thus left Germany financially unencumbered for a new war.

albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual

This paralyzing blow to Germany's economy united the people momentarily as they had not been united since 1914.

The skins of concentration camp prisoners, especially executed for this ghoulish purpose, had merely decorative value. They made, it was found, excellent lamp shades, several of which were expressly fitted up for Frau Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and nicknamed by the inmates the "Bitch of Buchenwald.

That philosophy, however demented, had roots, as we have seen, deep in German life. The blueprint may have seemed preposterous to most twentieth-century minds, even in Germany. But it too possessed a certain logic. It held forth a vision. It offered, though few saw this at the time, a continuation of German history. It pointed the way toward a glorious German destiny.

Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early years for his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms.

With such incomparable sources so soon available and with the memory of life in Nazi Germany and of the appearance and behavior and nature of the men who ruled it, Adolf Hitler above all, still fresh in my mind and bones, I decided, at any rate, to make an attempt to set down the history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

Ciano also heard hints "of the Fuehrer's tender feelings for a beautiful girl. She is twenty years old, with beautiful quiet eyes, regular features and a magnificent body. Her name is Sigrid von Lappus. They see each other frequently and intimately." (The Ciano Diaries, p. 85.)

But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.

There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler's forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers.

Among those elected that fall of 1946 was a little-known local judge, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the Senate, and an even lesser known local politician in California, Richard M. Nixon, to the House. Both had accused their opponents of sympathy with Communism and of having "Communist" support. The voters had fallen for it, as they usually do in this country.

Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.15

time. In the past, for so many, for as many as six million men and their families, such rights of free men in Germany had been overshadowed, as he said, by the freedom to starve. In taking away that last freedom, Hitler assured himself of the support of the working class

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. —Santayana

The party did not fall apart and Hitler did not shoot himself. Strasser might have achieved both these ends, which would have radically altered the course of history, but at the crucial moment he himself gave up.

He would make Germany strong again

situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.