Quotes About Germans

It is also evident that many Germans did not want to know about what was being done to the Jews. Either it did not interest them or they wanted to suppress it from their consciousness. All too often, they were too involved in their own lives and worries, and they became blind to the sufferings of the Jews and deceived themselves about their fate.

The Latvians wanted to storm the ghetto. They wanted to kill the Jews. So the Germans had to protect us—the German army or SS or whatever it was. It is paradoxical.

Their willingness to kill stemmed not just from a readiness to follow orders, but often from an existing hatred of Jews that the German occupiers exploited. The willing participation of non-German ethnic minorities in many of the pogroms and massacres of Jews gave many Germans the sense that it was not they who were responsible for the murders they witnessed, but the bloodthirsty foreigners.

Many of the non-Jewish respondents were certainly not of the opinion that the Third Reich had been imposed upon them against their will. Indeed, many shared the views of Rolf Heberer of Freithal who said that he had been "ecstatic" when Hitler came to power and that "for sixty million Germans, that was what the people really wanted.

In general, we had the feeling that we had been attacked and we had to defend ourselves. We even thought that, as Germans, we were invincible. That was the feeling back then.

The Nazis were anti-Christian, but they would pretend to be Christians as long as it served their purposes of getting theologically ignorant Germans on their side against the Jews.

If the deception before D-Day was composed of subtle hints and nudges, the second phase was spoon-fed to the Germans with a spade.

The deception had succeeded beyond every expectation, and Montagu was jubilant: "We fooled those of the Spaniards5 who assisted the Germans, we fooled the German Intelligence Service both in Spain and in Berlin, we fooled the German Operational Staff and Supreme Command, we fooled Keitel, and, finally, we fooled Hitler himself, and kept him fooled right up to the end of July.

As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.

In the early hours of 16 December 1944, the Germans launched their last great offensive of the Second World War against weakly held U.S. positions in the Ardennes Forest, the site of their original Blitzkrieg success against the French in 1940.

Foreign writers - especially Germans - often feel that Shakespeare is really one of them, that he was somehow accidentally born in the wrong country. In much the same way, leftists sense in their bones that he was a radical, rightists that he was a Tory.

It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

You'll love it, Betsy. Each room illustrates a period. They run from the Stone Age to the death of King Ludwig the Second. Let's go through them in order!" "Oh, you Germans!" Betsy teased. "Such thoroughness! You know, don't you, that there are over a hundred rooms?

Where Americans are the British never fully trusted the government and used skepticism to keep officials at bay, Germans seemed to embrace their leaders with an unfettered devotion.

Modern Germans were confirmed pacifists. They wanted no mention of the former wars, either directly or indirectly. By and large they were consumed with historical guilt, bleeding their anguish in rivulets of pride.

We wouldn't believe that the Germans, known as the enlightened world as 'bearers of culture,' were capable of planning and carrying out, in cold blood, without pity, the mass destruction of human beings by industrial means, as if they were bedbugs, flies, or other pests to be exterminated.

On December 18, he asked each side to set forth its terms for ending the war. The Allies demanded conditions certain to be unacceptable: withdrawal from all occupied territory and virtual dismemberment of the German and Austrian empires. The Germans wanted the iron ore fields in Lorraine, economic control over Belgium, and the Belgian Congo and Poland as German protectorates. Both sides told Wilson, in effect, no thank you, since each expected to win the war.

I am not berating the Germans here; I am simply pointing out that judgment goes with the strong, the winners.

Apparently the Germans had a database of 13,000 kicks.

It's about time we stopped being so insecure and defensive and admitted that the Germans are better at economics than us. We like laughing and they like maths.

Das ist schön bei den Deutschen: Keiner ist so verrückt, dass er nicht einen noch Verrückteren fände, der ihn versteht.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army. So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed. And

Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.

Perhaps because they were so enamored of the official rules of finance, the Germans proved especially vulnerable to a false idea the rules encouraged: that there is such a thing as a riskless asset.