Quotes About Nazism

He sensed a rising "hysteria" among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief "that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.

On May 10, 1933, the Nazi Party burned unwelcome books—Einstein, Freud, the brothers Mann, and many others—in great pyres throughout Germany, but seven days later Hitler declared himself committed to peace and went so far as to pledge complete disarmament if other countries followed suit. The world swooned with relief.

All the young are in the net," he wrote, "anyone who tried to keep out of being a Nazi is hazed till they change their mind; a form of mass cruelty which exists only in such a country.

I have tried very sincerely to adopt a neutral attitude of mind in the Spanish quarrel,' he told the Commons. 'I refuse to become the partisan of either side. I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism. I hope not to be called upon to survive in the world under a Government of either of those dispensations

Hitler and his Nazi gang have sown the wind; let them reap the whirlwind.

Churchill's prescience about Communism had mirrored what he had said about Nazism, but this time he was able to halt the appeasement that might otherwise have once again become the West's default mechanism.

I experienced Nazism as a child. Like many of my generation, I was motivated by the desire to prevent another war at any price.

I kept having the producers of 'Fog in August' take out some of the Nazi terms and phrases. I don't want audiences to look at this doctor and say, 'He is a Nazi monster' and think that it has nothing to do with our lives today.

When I was in Berlin then, Nazism did not have the reputation it has now. Nazism? In every system in the world, you can find something good. But Nazism was not Nazism at all. The word came afterwards. In their system, I saw discipline. And we in the Middle East, we needed discipline more than anything else.

When I was in Berlin then, Nazism did not have the reputation it has now. Nazism? In every system in the world, you can find something good. But Nazism was not Nazism at all. The word came afterwards. In their system, I saw discipline. And we in the Middle East, we needed discipline more than anything else. -Pierre Gemayel

Johann Clement watched the blows fall. First there had been wild talk and then printed accusations and insinuations. Then came a boycott of Jewish business and professional people, then the public humiliations: beatings and beard pullings. Then came the night terror of the Brown Shirts. Then came the concentration camps. Gestapo, SS, SD, KRIPO, RSHA. Soon every family in Germany was under Nazi scrutiny, and the grip of tyranny tightened until the last croak of defiance strangled and died.

Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism—the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies—which has characterized most of human history.

Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany's largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler's staunchest followers.

We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism. If we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible. We must find out what, at root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship; and then we must uproot that root. We

No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.

The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s.

Every central doctrine of the Nazi politics, racism included, is an expression or variant of the theory of collectivism. Such doctrines cannot rise to the ascendancy, neither among the intellectuals nor in the mind of the public, except in a culture already saturated with a mystical-collectivist philosophy. In the case of Germany, this means: saturated with the ideas of Hegel.

This is the Nazi doctrine (also adapted from the Marxists) of polylogism.

Qua dogmatist, the Nazi holds faith to be superior to logic. Qua activist, he dismisses logic in favor of action. Qua pragmatist, he is free to endorse contradictions, provided they "work." Qua relativist, he rejects the absolutism of the Law of Identity. And, qua subjectivist, the Nazi simply wipes out logic by giving its name to his random, "Aryan" feelings.

The Nazi formations were trained to vent fury and sow terror—to break up meetings of opponents, to administer beatings, provoke street fights, stage riots, mutilate bodies, kick in skulls. These were the methods by which Hitler proposed to make his nationalism, his socialism, and his promises to every group come true.

The root cause of Nazism lies in a power that most people ignore, disparage—and underestimate. The cause is not the events hailed or cursed in headlines and street rallies, but the esoteric writings of the professors who, decades or centuries earlier, laid the foundation for those events.

Kant did not preach Nazism. But, on a fundamental level and for the first time, he flung at Western man its precondition: "Du bist nichts" ("You are nothing").

Hitler and Himmler were nothing if not masters of imagery, symbolism, and propaganda, and Himmler's acquisition of the renaissance castle in 1934 was inspired in the Nazi Party's sick and twisted way. Whatever the case, it was well known that Himmler adored the castle, intending for it to serve as the central site for the cult of the SS. Rumor had it that he dreamed it would one day become "The Center of the World" in the Nazi SS religion.

Mielke and Honecker grew up fighting the real evil of Nazism. And they kept on fighting the west, which they saw as Nazism's successor, for forty-five years after the war ended.