The German War Quotes

“If the German armies had disintegrated like Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the winter of 1941, and the Third Reich had sued for peace, most of the soldiers and civilians who were to die in the Second World War would have lived.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“For that I want to live and fight for Germany, for the spiritual, secret Germany, which only after defeat, after the end of the Hitler-period, can exist again and will regain the place in the world which belongs to Germany. If I fight, then for my life; if I should fall, then because it was my destiny. And I want to sacrifice myself too for the future, free, spiritual Germany – but never for the Third Reich.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“Unable to express his sense of shock and abhorrence openly, let alone to alter the course of events, he had to force his emotional response inwards where it grew into a gnawing and profound sense of shame.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms

“Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem ‘The Soldier’, whose final lines promised:                                And when it is darkest                                [and] I am tired of the earth . . .                                We will storm heaven’s gate.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“We do not believe in the victory of the stronger, but the stronger in spirit.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“Yet there is granted us                                no place to rest;                                we vanish, we fall –                                the suffering humans –                                blind from one                                hour to another,                                like water thrown from cliff                                to cliff,                                for years into the unknown abyss.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“Gradually, the deportation and mass murder became an event of the past. By the summer of 1943, special teams had disinterred and burned the corpses of those gassed at Treblinka, Sobibor and Bełec and the three camps were dismantled during the following months. Even the exhuming and burning of the corpses of those shot in Galicia and Ukraine did not remain a secret from the home front. In the Reich, municipalities started to take down the quaint, out-of-date signs forbidding Jews entry to public libraries, swimming pools and parks.68”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“Even if Hitler had been more flexible – and not mistaken the situation for the one his armies had faced in the retreat from Moscow in December 1941 – it is doubtful whether this could have saved Army Group Centre. Between 22 June and 4 July, it lost twenty-five divisions, more than 300,000 men. It”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–45

“For Hitler the two campaigns remained closely linked. As the ‘England attack’ failed, he convinced himself that blockading Britain and eliminating her Soviet ally would create another means to bring Britain to the negotiating table. But the German dictator’s strategic choices also fulfilled a long-cherished desire to destroy ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and conquer colonial ‘living space’ in the east, goals Hitler had openly proclaimed in Mein Kampf.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“Through us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries. That which we often testified to in our communities, we express now in the name of the whole Church: we did fight for long years in the name of Jesus Christ against the mentality that found its awful expression in the National Socialist regime of violence; but we accuse ourselves for not standing by our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“I will be found by you’, declares the Lord, ‘and I will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you’, declares the Lord. ‘And I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“Anthroposophical”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“There is still a lot of uncertainty regarding the behaviour of the troops towards the Bolshevist system . . . The main aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system is the complete destruction of its forces and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in the sphere of European culture. As a result, the troops have to take on tasks which go beyond the conventional purely military ones. In the eastern sphere the soldier is not simply a fighter according to the rules of war, but the supporter of a ruthless racial [völkisch] ideology and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been inflicted on the German nation and those ethnic groups related to it.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

“У місцевій організації нацистської партії підтвердили, що порушник, як і багато колишніх соціалістів, рідко відвідував партійні заходи та майже не брав участі в їхній благодійній діяльності. До того ж він часто сварився з дружиною. З іншого боку, його роботодавці давали йому хорошу характеристику, він був володарем численних нагород і ветераном Першої світової війни із чотирма пораненнями. Останні два факти зрештою вирішили його долю, коли за десять місяців, у вересні 1940 року, відбувся суд, де його визнали невинним за всіма пунктами звинувачення. Іншим чинником, що зіграв на користь Арнульфа В., стало те, що доніс на нього шурин після великої сімейної сварки. Ґестапо намагалося не допускати використовувати себе як інструмент помсти в подібних випадках і закликало Спеціальний суд не приймати доноси, наприклад від ділових партнерів, які посварилися, навіть якщо обвинувачений колись був комуністом.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms

“У 1917-1918 роках рівень смертності серед цивільних у Берліні перевищив рівень смертності серед солдатів, призваних на війну з міста.”
― Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms