Best 220 quotes in «wwii quotes» category

Eugenics is not just a tool of totalitarianism. Eugenics, as it was conceived, could not be anything but totalitarian as it desired to control all aspects of society. Hitler’s “National Socialist” (Nationalsozialist) form of government was amongst the first to put the full force of its government to conduct compulsory health initiatives. It is by no coincidence that the Dachau concentration camp used its slave-labor to run the largest organic produce farm of the era.

For a once renowned woman who loved telling tales of dodging bullets, wielding grenades and subverting dogs trained to kill, Christine's story is, surprisingly, little known today.

Every day not knowing what his future looked like induced a frantic need. He’d never been patient. Wasn’t good at sitting on the sidelines. Give him a battle plan, and he’d execute it. Any day now, God.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

FDR appointed a eugenic zealot named Isiah Bowman to his "M Project" that kept Jews from the safety of US shores.

God bless you, Ronald Burns and every man and woman who contributed to the brutal and bloody conflict; many who lost their lives defending their country. For those who did give their lives, rest in peace.

For many people, that war [WWII] is called the “good war” because it was fought against a regime guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the Allies did not enter the war to save Jews from extermination. The United States entered the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and, as a nation, we certainly did not do as much as we should have to save the Jewish population of Europe. The basic question is still with us: Is it right, justifiable, to intervene in a nation’s internal activities when those activities include genocide, ethnic cleansing, or some other demonstrable harm to a subset of its people?

Gory frontline memories from war in the Philippines returned to Mitch as he submerged himself in the brush. He sunk deep into the leaves and mud, and stayed there. He remembered scenes from the jungle. The tremors of falling bombs. The smell of smoke.

Harry H. Laughlin was highly important for the Nazi crusade to breed a “master race.” This American positioned himself to have a significant effect on the world’s population. During his career Laughlin would: ~ Write the “Model Eugenical Law” that the Nazis used to draft portions of the Nuremberg decrees that led to The Holocaust. ~ Be appointed as “expert” witness for the U.S. Congress when the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was passed. The 1924 Act would prevent many Jewish refugees from reaching the safety of U.S. shores during The Holocaust. ~ Provide the "scientific" basis for the 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case that made "eugenic sterilization" legal in the United States. This paved the way for 80,000 Americans to be sterilized against their will. ~ Defend Hitler's Nuremberg decrees as “scientifically” sound in order to dispel international criticism. ~ Create the political organization that ensured that the “science” of eugenics would survive the negative taint of The Holocaust. This organization would be instrumental in the Jim Crow era of legislative racism. H.H. Laughlin was given an honorary degree from Heidelberg University by Hitler's government, specifically for these accomplishments. Yet, no one has ever written a book on Laughlin. Despite the very large amount of books about The Holocaust, Laughlin is largely unknown outside of academic circles. The Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. gave this author permission to survey its internal correspondence leading up to The Holocaust and before the Institution retired Laughlin. These documents have not been seen for decades. They are the backbone of this book. The story line intensifies as the Carnegie leadership comes to the horrible realization that one of its most recognized scientists was supporting Hitler’s regime.

He chuckles at his own joke. "No one wants the Jews. Not even America. Americans have no right to criticize us. They rounded up their Indians, you know. Put them on reservations.

For a month already I was carrying on my affair with him, the whole month behind the closed doors of his office with hot wet kisses, with top secret papers scattered on the floor thrown off the table in haste, Georg rolling his eyes at yet another cancelled meeting and the order not to disturb the Chief of the RSHA, winks and hidden smiles through the half opened door, and the two of us smelling of each other’s perfume. And with every day I was sinking deeper and deeper in that swamp, and didn’t even try to grab the ground that was right next to me. I was disgusted with myself like an alcoholic who wakes up in a pile of dirt, but crawls right back to the pub to fill himself again with the poisonous liquor slowly killing him with every new sip.

God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning. Surely, while we live we are not lost. Oh Janos, Janos my brother! Surely we are not lost--while we live.

He grieved too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself.

He loved children and used to dandle me on his knee. This was how the title came about for this book, Uncle Hitler, although in the old German tradition, I called him Uncle Adolf, even though I was not related to him. This was a sign of respect to an older person, which is why I called Frau Eva ‘Aunty Eva’. However, little did I know at that time what revulsion the name Adolf Hitler would eventually invoke in the decent conscience of the world.

He looked up to the tall spruce trees and noticed an eerie silence envelope the camp. Not a bird sang when the gates to Dachau opened. It seemed an evil-smelling place, and the dreary surroundings befitted this wicked establishment.

Here. Here I am. You've taken everything from us, but not who we are! We still exist! One day grass will grow here and overgrow the ruins. Or day this will be forgotten. But you... No one will ever forget you! The shame of humanity.

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.

Hitler learned his eugenics from the infamous "Baur-Fischer-Lenz" book that documented American and British eugenics.

here’s a toast to Alan Turing born in harsher, darker times who thought outside the container and loved outside the lines and so the code-breaker was broken and we’re sorry yes now the s-word has been spoken the official conscience woken – very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted – and the story does suggest a part 2 to the Turing Test: 1. can machines behave like humans? 2. can we?

Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

I am a priest, but in this war I have been a soldier, and a soldier who has not surrendered. For I was fighting for more than a military decision between two powers, rivals for control over the same parcel of land. I was fighting for justice, and in this war, I could see only one kind of justice, a justice partaking at the same time of the human and the divine. I do not expect to find that justice or any justice, in this court. But I know that in the end, divine justice will prevail; and the verdict of God will be pronounced, not against us, but against you, who presume to judge us. - Father Christian

I do not worry about dying – when you get to my age you never think about it, you just carry on with life and enjoy it.' Vernon Jones - Ox & Bucks Light Infantry - D-Day Veteran

I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.

How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power? Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food. p. 158

If seeing her an hour before her last Weak cough into all blackness I could yet Be held by chalk-white walls - The Consumptive. Belsen 1945

I do recall hearing a conversation in our home in Strausberg, between my mother and my father, where my mother sounded very angry that my cousin had let the Rödels down by having to be dragged out of Oma’s house, crying for his mother and shouting that he did not want to return to the war in Russia. Like a great many other soldiers throughout that period, he died in Russia on 5 May, 1944. He was just twenty years of age, and is buried somewhere in that country.

If we do not laugh, we will cry. Crying will only make us hotter and sweatier. We Jews like to joke about death because what you laugh at and make familiar can no longer frighten you. Besides, Chayaleh, what else is there to do?

If the Emperor had not delivered his [15 August 1945] address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords—if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million—those people on that street in Sōshigaya probably would have done what they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it.

I heard people talking about what this Red Army did to any Germans they captured, and this only added to my fears.

I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee.

I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.

I look at my mother, connected by a breath of glimmering hope, her red and shadowed eyes reveal that some element of our whole being has been lost and, somehow, thrown away. Sob-gasp, sob-gasp, sob-gasp. Slowly, that feeling within me fades. But wisps of it stay with you, locked in the chambers of your mind, always.

Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

I may be a criminal lunatic, but I'm an AMERICAN criminal lunatic!

I’m glad to be eating the bread of freedom even if it does taste like sponge buttered with greasy salt.

In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.' pp. 205-206

Inside my carriage there was mass panic and I was in danger of being trampled, but somebody picked me off the floor, and I found myself by the window on the platform side. I was very frightened now, for I thought that I had lost my mother and was all alone, but a few minutes later she arrived at my side. She had some blood on her face, but she told me not to worry, it would all be fine soon.

I'm still living in my post-war.

I knew why earlier generations once believed that the sun circled the earth. Because, in our limited imaginations, that is how we lived our lives. -Mrs. Tuesday's Departure

In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!

In the knowing, there was peace.

In spite of everything, all the POWs except for the Russians were receiving food parcels and medication from the International Red Cross. The Soviet Union had withdrawn from that organisation. Stalin said then: “There are no POWs of ours – there are traitors…

In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch

In therapy, to meet the needs of traumatized survivors of war and torture, the patient is requested to repeatedly talk about the worst traumatic event in detail while re-experiencing all emotions associated with the event. Traumatic memory, they say, is cleared by narration of whole life; from early childhood up to the present date ... this book is my therapy. I am awash with living memories.

I quickly got used to being picked up by my mother, and taken to the air raid shelter near our home. Although frightening, this was a great adventure to me as a child, for in the shelter I played with the other children and we felt safe there as we were surrounded by grown-ups; although now the grown-ups were more worried than they had been in the past. There were greater feelings of anxiety and fear in the older people, which we children also felt, and it unsettled us all.

In time of war, under the banner of an enemy recognisable as such, a foreigner from a camp outside the lines, the imperial idea grew strong in confidence and temper. The British democracy rallied to the call of a strong leadership, and it was not just in rhetorical enthusiasm but with considerable personal satisfaction that Churchill hailed the year 1940-1 as the British people's 'finest hour'. He, with other imperialists, was delighted by the fact that, when it came to the sticking-place, it was the old-fashioned loyalty of the reactionary British Empire to all that was symbolised by allegiance to Crown and country that came forward to save European civilisation from utter overthrow by German tyranny...The days of showing the flag—even for only a momentary glimpse, such as wall that inhabitants of Greece and Crete and Dieppe had of it—had returned. The Empire was the Empire once more, and to 10, Downing Street returned that imperial control that two generations of Dominion opinion had combined to condemn as sinister.

It had been his opinion that it might serve his country if the Chinese and his men saw that he was not afraid to die. For the comprehension of our age and the part treason has played in it, it is necessary to realize there are many English people who would have felt acutely embarrassed if they had to read aloud the story of this young man's death, or to listen to it, or comment on it in public. They would have admitted that he had shown extreme capacity for courage and self-sacrifice, and that these are admirable qualities, likely to help humanity in the struggle for survival; but at the same time he would not please them. They would have felt more at ease with many of the traitors in this book. They would have conceded that on general principles it is better not to lie, not to cheat, not to betray; but they also would feel that Water's heroism has something dowdy about it while treason has a certain style a sort of elegance, or as the vulgar would say, 'sophistication'. William Joyce would not have fallen within the scope of their preference, but the cause for that would be unconnected with his defense of the Nazi cause. The people who harbor such emotions find no difficulty in accepting French writers who collaborated with the Germans during the war. It would be Joyce's readiness to seal his fate with his life which they would have found crude and unappetizing. But Alan Nunn May, and Fuchs, Burgess, and Maclean would seem in better taste. And concerning taste there is no argument. Those who cultivate this preference, would not have been prepared to defend these men's actions if they were set down in black and white. They would have admitted that it is not right for a man to accept employment from the state on certain conditions and break that understanding, when he could have easily obtained alternative employment in which he would not have to give any such undertaking; and that it is even worse for an alien to induce a country to accept him as a citizen when he is homeless and then conspire against its safety by handing over the most lethal secret it possesses to a potential enemy of aggressive character. But, all the same, they would have felt that subtlety was on the side of the traitors, and even morality. To them the classic hero, like poor young Terence Waters, was hamming it. People who practice the virtues are judged as if they had struck the sort of false attitude which betrays an incapacity for art; while the people who practice the vices are judged as if they had shown the subtle rightness of gesture which is the sign of the born artist.

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.

I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical.