Fascism: A Warning

by Madeleine K. Albright

The little lives of my friends went on, under National Socialism as they had before, altered only for the better, and always for the better, in bread and butter, in housing, health, and hope, wherever the New Order touched them. . . . I remember standing on a Stuttgart street corner in 1938, during a Nazi festival, and the enthusiasm . . . after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me tell you what it was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother’s arm and whispered, “Oh Mother, Mother, if I weren’t a Jew, I think I’d be a Nazi!”