Quotes About German Jews

Today, after the Holocaust, it is seldom recalled how anti-Semitic the Europe of 1938 tended to be. When Ribbentrop journeyed to Paris with much pomp in December to sign the joint declaration first suggested by Hitler to François-Poncet, Bonnet begged him not to flood France with more German Jews as they already had enough of their own. ('In fact,' Ribbentrop informed Hitler, 'they are considering Madagascar for this purpose.')

March 1935, the same month that Germany publicly repudiated the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, clauses that she had been secretly ignoring ever since Hitler had come to power. That September the Nuremberg laws effectively outlawed German Jews, and made the Swastika the official flag of Germany.

The Haavara agreement allowed the escape of well-to-do German Jews in exchange for the liquidation of their property and the purchase and export of German goods to break the boycott of Germany's Nazi-controlled economy.

German children were on the lookout for stray coins. German Jews kept watch for possible capture.

brief, German Jews were prisoners of what George L. Mosse analysed as an insurmountable contradiction between Bildung and Sittlichkeit, the former being increasingly Judaized, while the latter remained ever unattainable, even by individuals as rich and powerful as the banker Gerson Bleichröder or the industrialist Walther Rathenau.

to German culture, and the path of this cultural assimilation was Bildung, the ideal of education and self-improvement set by Humboldt in the age of Aufklärung.55 In the United States, German Jews had discovered a multi-ethnic and multicultural nation in which being American meant adhering to the Constitution.

But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.

[Adolf] Hitler needed, he didn't want to kill Jews, he wanted to expel German Jews, and therefore it's not entirely corroborating your theory.

In these difficult times, the feeling of solidarity with my Jewish co-religionists is doubly gratifying and comforting in view of the deprivation of rights with which German Jews are now forced to live.

Our intuitions fail us. We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideology, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think first of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We

Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope.

The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).1

WE TEND TO assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that some German Jews made about Hitler and the Nazis after they had formed a government.