The Years of Extermination Quotes

“Even the Reich’s downtrodden victims, the Poles, took a hand in the mass killing of Jews.”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“All Jews age 14 or over who are found in the area being combed shall be shot to death; Jewish women and children shall be driven into the marshes [where they would drown]. The Jews are the partisans’ reserve force; they support them…. In the city of Pinsk the killing by shooting shall be carried out by cavalry companies 1 and 4…. The ‘Aktion’ is to begin at once. A report on the implementation shall be submitted.”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“Contrary to what had long been assumed, Himmler did not give the order for the general extermination of all Jews in Soviet territory during his August 15 visit to Minsk, when, at his request, he attended a mass execution of Jews on the outskirts of the city.48 The move from selective to mass murder had started earlier, probably as a result of Hitler’s remarks during the July 16 conference regarding the “possibilities” offered by “antipartisan” operations. All Jews may not have been partisans in German eyes, but why not assume that they would offer assistance to partisans if they could?”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“In countries such as France, England, and the United States, where some Jews had achieved prominence in journalism, in cultural life, and even in politics, prevailing European pacifism and American isolationism depicted Jewish protests against Nazi Germany as warmongering.”
― Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945

“Esa sensación de extrañeza me parece que refleja la percepción por parte de las desventuradas víctimas del régimen, al menos durante los años treinta, de una realidad tan absurda como ominosa, de un mundo grotesco y espeluznante bajo la capa de una normalidad más espeluznante aún.”
― Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939

“several thousand more were packed into the hermetically sealed cars of two freight trains and sent on an aimless journey, lasting several days.”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“We are Americans, first, last, and at all times. Nothing else that we are, whether by faith or race or fate, qualifies our Americanism. We and our fathers chose to be, and now choose to abide, as Americans. Our first and sternest task, in common with all other citizens of our beloved country is to win the anti-Fascist war. Unless that war be won, all else is”
― Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945: Abridged Edition

“On August 1, 1941, eastern Galicia was annexed to the General Government and became part of the district of Galicia with Lwov as its main administrative center. Some 24,000 Jews had been massacred before the annexation;”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“In Zloczow the killers belonged first and foremost to the OUN and to the Waffen SS “Viking” Division, while Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C kept to the relatively passive role of encouraging the Ukrainians (the Waffen SS did not need any prodding).”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“No store, insofar as any are open, sells anything to them. What they live on, I don’t know. We give them some of our bread and also some other things. I cannot be so hard. One can only give well-meant advice to the Jews: Do not bring children into the world; they have no future anymore.”52”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“Suffice it to mention here that by the end of 1941, about 600,000 Jews had been murdered in the newly conquered eastern regions.”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“The next day the Nazi leader brought up his theory about religion and world history: “The worst blow to have hit humankind is Christianity; Bolshevism is a bastard child of Christianity; both are the monstrous product of the Jews.”26”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“On September 29, 1941, the Germans shot 33,700 Kiev Jews in the Babi Yar ravine near the city.”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“As far as the Jewish Question is concerned, it must be seen as a singular dispensation of Divine Providence that the Germans have already made a good start, quite irrespective of all the wrongs they have done and continue to do to our country. They have shown that the liberation of Polish society from the Jewish plague is possible.”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“The anti-Semitism of the great majority of Polish Catholics had been notorious before the war, as we saw; it grew fiercer under German occupation.”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“The official positions of the national Catholic churches throughout the Continent and those of the Vatican were not essentially different regarding the increasingly harsh anti-Jewish measures. In France, as we saw, in August 1940 the assembly of cardinals and bishops welcomed the limitations imposed on the country’s Jews, and no members of the Catholic hierarchy expressed any protest regarding the statutes of October 1940 and June 1941. In”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“Though unable to participate actively in the planning of the center, Bloch suggested that one of the main aims should be to counter the dangerous notion that “all Jews formed a solid homogeneous mass, endowed with identical traits, and subject to the same destiny.” In Bloch’s view the planners of the center should recognize two distinct Jewish communities, the assimilated (French) and the nonassimilated (foreign). While the fate of the former depended on its complete integration and the preservation of its legal guarantees, the survival of the latter might well depend on “some form of emigration.”189”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“Political calculation was undoubtedly part of the overall picture, but Vichy’s policy was also determined by the right-wing anti-Semitic tradition that was part and parcel of the “Révolution nationale.”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“The Catholic press warned against treating the situation lightly: “There could not be two masters (gospodarze) on Polish soil, especially since the Jewish community contributed to the demoralization of the Poles, took jobs and income away from Poles, and was destroying the national culture.”82”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“The Catholic press warned against treating the situation lightly: “There could not be two masters (gospodarze) on Polish soil, especially since the Jewish community contributed to the demoralization of the Poles, took jobs and income away”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“In the East, and mainly in the West (apart from Germany), most Jews entirely misjudged the degree of support they could expect from surrounding society and from national or local authorities in the face of a common enemy. In”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“On Friday morning, September 1, the young butcher’s lad came and told us: There has been a radio announcement, we already held Danzig and the Corridor, the war with Poland was under way, England and France remained neutral,” Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on September 3. “I said to Eva [that] a morphine injection or something similar was the best thing for us; our life was over.”1”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“The sadistic machine simply rolls over us. —Victor Klemperer, December 9, 1939”
― Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

“Such were among others, the anti-Jewish attitudes of a powerful group of European intellectuals steeped in Catholicism, either as believers or as men strongly influenced by their Catholic background:”
― Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945

“It was a time when the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, no fanatic as such, could glorify France’s archanti-Semite of the late nineteenth century, Edouard Drumont, the notorious editor of La Libre Parole and author of La France Juive, and lash out at the Jewish threat to Christian civilization.”
― Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945