Armageddon Quotes

“After more than five years of strife in the name of freedom, tens of millions of people were merely to exchange one tyranny for another. Some”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“At Arnhem, the British fielded too many gentlemen and not enough players.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Liberated in Germany by the Americans, seven-year-old Valya Brekeleva and her family of slave labourers went home to Novgorod as non-persons. “Most of the people from our village who went to Latvia survived. But most of those who were sent to Germany had died. For those of us who remained, the suspicion was always there.” Most of her family were killed by one side or the other in the course of the war. Her mother died in 1947, worn out by the struggle to keep her daughters alive. She was thirty-six. Her father completed his sentence for “political crimes” and came home from the Urals in 1951, an old man. Even after Valya had completed university and applied for work at a Kazan shipbuilders in the 1960s, when the manager saw that her papers showed her to be an ex-Nazi prisoner he said grimly: “Before we consider anything else, we have got to establish whether you have done damage to the state.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“All men who participate in wars find themselves obliged to do things which, if they are decent people, they afterwards regret.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

“What the Red Army did in Germany was the darkest stain on its record in the war.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“All his life, the ruler of Russia displayed towards able comrades a blend of admiration and envy which impelled him to murder most of them sooner or later.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Yet since 1917 the Soviet Union had created an edifice of self-deceit unrivalled in human history.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“To this day, mass graves of Stalin’s victims continue to be uncovered in eastern Poland. As”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Polish women and children were used as human shields for the advance of German troops.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Stalin’s policies had driven millions more to starvation and even cannibalism.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Above all, war was a reminder of the savagery of life.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“The American and British armies in the Second World War paid a high price for the privilege of the profoundly anti-militaristic ethos of their nations.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Wieck, an impish, electric personality possessed of both brilliance and charm, was finally released by the Russians after an officer befriended him. Unlike one fellow prisoner who, despairing of the future, hurled himself off a bridge and drowned when freed from Rothenstein, Wieck proved a survivor. For three years after the fall of Königsberg, he eked out a living playing a violin to entertain the Russian occupiers, before escaping to West Germany in 1948 and forging a distinguished career as writer and musician. His parents also survived. Was he robbed of his childhood? He shrugged. “It does as much harm to have a normal childhood as to have a difficult one.” His story and his moral generosity represent a triumph of the human spirit.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“He adopted it. The child became one of just 949 known survivors of the greatest maritime disaster in history, its 7,000 dead far outstripping those of the Titanic, Lusitania, Laconia. Yet, amid global tragedy on the scale of 1945, the horrors of the Wilhelm Gustloff remain known only to some Germans and a few historians.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“In the Second World War, twenty-two generals were executed by Hitler. Another 963 died or were posted missing on active service. An astonishing 110 killed themselves.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

“How can the heart accept the signals of the brain, however powerful and rational, that a known universe, in which the blotter stands where it has always stood on the office desk, the sofa in the lounge of the house, the shop on the corner of the street, is about to disappear for ever?”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

“Adolf Hitler had led one of the most educated and cultured societies on earth to a moral, political and military abyss. He now sought to ensure that as many as possible of his own people accompanied him over the brink.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

“though a pilot once panicked and baled out over Germany, leaving the rest of his crew to bring the plane home.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

“Contrary to widely accepted myth, the German war economy was a shambles. It is frightening to contemplate the consequences had it been otherwise.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

“Intelligent men found that among the hardest parts of war was the need to accept orders from stupid ones.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45

“It is known that 610,000 ethnic Germans were killed in Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Near a large inn, the ‘Roter Krug,’ stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Washington displayed a remarkable indifference to the political future of the eastern battlefields until it was too late.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon