Quotes About Germans

Somehow we didn't connect Germans with Mexicans. We went right back to our myths. One American was as good as twenty Germans. This being true, we had only to act in a stern manner to bring the Kaiser to heel. He wouldn't dare interfere with our trade—but he did. He wouldn't stick out his neck and sink our ships—and he did. It was stupid, but he did, and so there was nothing for it but to fight him.

Thus the Verdurins gave their dinners (soon, after the death of M. Verdurin, Mme Verdurin alone) and M. de Charlus went about his pleasures, without realising that the Germans — immobilised, it is true, by a bleeding barrier which was always being renewed — were at an hour's automobile drive from Paris.

I arrived there at the same time as the Germans. Everybody wanted to prevent me going, I was treated as though I were mad. 'What,' they said to me, 'you are safe in Paris and you want to leave for those invaded regions just as everybody else is trying to get away from them?' I recognised the justice of this reasoning but what was to be done?

Why do some Germans become Nazis, and others resist?' 'You know the answer, darling,' Heidi said, putting her arm around Lola. 'A few are monsters, the rest look away.

The sheer brutality of it ate at him. He hated war. He hated the Germans for starting it. For what? Putting your boot on another man's head and stealing him blind, until someone with a bigger boot comes along to kick you out of the way? As far as Pino was concerned, wars were about murder and thievery. One army killed to steal the hill; then another killed to steal it back.

Sirach calls the people who dwelt at Shechem a foolish people (Ecclus. 50:26), just as the Germans are accustomed to judge concerning the Swabians and the Bavarians. They were a proud people given to luxury.

Some indeed have invented outrageous lies about the Turks in order to stir up us Germans against them, but there is no need for lies; the truth is all too great.

And some of the modern admirers of the gentle philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius would be less admiring if they reflected on the brutality of his suppression of the Germans, proudly illustrated in the scenes of battle that circle their way up his commemorative column that still stands in the centre of Rome; though less famous, it was clearly intended to rival Trajan's and was carefully built just a little taller (see plate 10). 70.

Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler's reported persecution of the Jews.

The U.S. ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, shrugged and said to his Polish counterpart: "Where on earth can the Allies fight the Germans and beat them?" Though Kennedy was a shameless anglophobe, appeaser and defeatist, his question was valid, and the Allied governments had no good answer to it.

He adopted it. The child became one of just 949 known survivors of the greatest maritime disaster in history, its 7,000 dead far outstripping those of the Titanic, Lusitania, Laconia. Yet, amid global tragedy on the scale of 1945, the horrors of the Wilhelm Gustloff remain known only to some Germans and a few historians.

When Norway fell to the Germans the following year, he established the Norwegian Air Force training base known as Little Norway in Canada, to train pilots who'd escaped the Nazis. After handing that task to others, Balchen ferried bombers for the British.

A few of the Germans managed to reach Palestine, where they disappeared. The French party fell into the hands not of angels but of two of the worst scoundrels in history, Hugh the Iron and William of Posquères, Marseilles shipowners, who offered the young crusaders free transport to the Holy Land, but carried them instead to Bougie in North Africa and sold them as slaves to Arab dealers.

the sacrifice of the village of Altavilla, shelled out of existence because it might have contained Germans.

The Swiss are the only nation to make the Germans appear inefficient, the French undiplomatic and the Texans poor.

never to put oneself in the place of non-Germans was part and parcel of being a National Socialist.

The survivors who came off best were Jewish Germans who managed to flee the country before the Holocaust or who survived it somehow on German soil.

Attacking Jews was of far greater importance to the Nazis than defending them was to other Germans, so most such people decided that discretion was the better part of valor and said nothing.