Germany Quotes

“And then, incredibly, Betsie began to pray for the Germans up there in the planes, caught in the fist of the giant evil loose in Germany.”

“But there was a Germany the boys could not see, a Germany that was hidden from them, either by design or by time. It wasn’t just that the signs - ‘Für Juden verboten,’ ‘Juden sind hier unerwünscht’ - had been removed, or that the Gypsies had been rounded up and taken away, or that the vicious Stürmer newspaper had been withdrawn from the racks in the tobacco shops in Kopenick. There were larger, darker, more enveloping secrets all around them.”

“There came the news, at first somewhat guarded, then, a few days later, clear and outspoken, of the German concentration camps.”

“The Germans and the Jews are wonderfully alike. There are, of course, great and obvious differences between them, because the Jews are few, scattered, anciently civilized, and southern in origin, while the Germans are many, concentrated, primitive, and northern.”

“Nobody has proved to my friends that the Nazis were wrong about the Jews. Nobody can. The truth or falsity of what the Nazis said, and of what my extremist friends believed, was immaterial, marvelously so. There simply was no way to reach it, no way, at least, that employed the procedures of logic and evidence. The bill-collector told me that Jews were filthy, that the home of a Jewish woman in his boyhood town was a pigsty; and the baker told me that the Jews’ fanaticism about cleanliness was a standing affront to the “Germans,” who were clean enough. What difference did the truth, if there were truth, make?”

“That the Jew is tasteful and epicurean, more so than the German, is the mere consequence of his geographical origin and his cultural age.

“To say that my German friends were nonpolitical, and to say no more, is to libel them. As in nearly all European countries, a very much larger proportion of Germans than Americans turns out for political meetings, political discussions, and local and general elections. Where the German was (in contrast with the American) nonpolitical was at a deeper level. He was habitually deficient in the sense of political power that the American possesses (and the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Scandinavian, and the Swiss). He saw the State in such majesty and magnificence, and himself in such insignificance, that he could not relate himself to the actual operation of the State.”

“Ordinary people—and ordinary Germans—cannot be expected to tolerate activities which outrage the ordinary sense of ordinary decency unless the victims are, in advance, successfully stigmatized as enemies of the people, of the nation, the race, the religion. Or, if they are not enemies (that comes later), they must be an element within the community somehow extrinsic to the common bond, a decompositive ferment (be it only by the way they part their hair or tie their necktie) in the uniformity which is everywhere the condition of common quiet. The Germans’ innocuous acceptance and practice of social anti-Semitism before Hitlerism had undermined the resistance of their ordinary decency to the stigmatization and persecution to come.”

“‘I think,’ says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, ‘that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, then in Italy, we said to one another, ‘That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.’ But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it at all, I still say, with unbelief, ‘Germany—no, not Germany.‘”

“I don’t think you understand, Friedrich. We must not only leave Trossingen. We must leave Germany.”

″‘A bit of a fright, eh?’ It’ll toughen you up,′ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s true. It’s gone eight. If a German comes along, he’ll shoot you dead as a threat to the German Reich. Heil Hitler!‘”

“For a moment they sat thinking about it, and about what would have happened if they had travelled to Germany.”

This is a very moving account of a young girl’s life in a children’s home. The story is set in Germany, shortly after WW2....Halinka has one good person in her life, her mother’s sister, who loves her but can rarely see her.

A sad, sweet tale of a lonely girl (I don’t remember them mentioning her age, but I’d guess eleven or so) in an orphanage. Although the story is set in Germany in the early 1950s, it could come from just about any time or place.

Her fight for truth starts after only a few days spent shocked and hopeless in an emergency hospital in Herleshausen.

A day in the 1990s. Chernobyl is almost forgotten when an accident occurs at the atomic plant in Grafenrheinfeld not far from Schweinfurt. Germany has its own atomic disaster.