To Hell and Back Quotes

“Nationalist conflicts and ethnic-racial tensions were greatly intensified by the territorial settlement of Europe that followed the First World War. The architects of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, however good their intentions, faced insuperable problems in attempting to satisfy the territorial demands of the new countries formed out of the wreckage of the old empires. Ethnic minorities formed sizeable parts of most of the new states in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe, offering a potential base for serious political disturbance. Almost”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

“The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings. Winston Churchill (1901)”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

“The Catholic Church in Germany offered no official condemnation of the mounting persecution of the Jews, even following the pogroms of 9–10 November 1938. As early as April 1933 the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, the redoubtable Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, had explained to the Papal Secretary of State and former nuncio in Germany, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later to become Pope Pius XII), why the Catholic hierarchy ‘does not step in on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at the moment because the fight against the Jews would also become a fight against the Catholics,’ he stated. It was an explanation that went to the heart of the Catholic Church’s passivity towards the fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany.”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

“It seemed to us that we were witnessing a total break in the evolution of mankind, the complete collapse of man as a rational being. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968 (1986)”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

“Our enemies are small worms,’ he told his generals. ‘I saw them in Munich.”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

“dead”
― Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949