Germans Quotes

What shall I say of the gallantry with which these Marines have fought! Of the slopes of Hill 142; of the Mares Farm; of the Bois de Belleau and the Village of Bouresches stained with their blood, and not only taken away from the Germans in the full tide of their advance against the French, but held by my boys against counter attacks day after day and night after night. I cannot write of their splendid gallantry without tears coming to my eyes. ~ James Harbord

In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it. ~ Jose Rizal

and he became a communist. He was court-martialed but allowed to resign from the army. In the revolutions of 1848 he fought to overthrow his king and, failing, fled to America. There he became first a carpenter and then the editor of a German-language newspaper in Cincinnati with a slant so leftist he earned the nickname "Reddest of the Red." When the Civil War came, Willich recruited fifteen hundred Cincinnati Germans within a matter of hours and helped organize the Ninth Ohio-now marching with the XIV Corps. ~ Steven E. Woodworth

Well, the Romanies have been around for five thousand years, longer than any nation. And why? Because we know how to survive. The Aryans tried to kill us, the Persians, the Tatars, the Magyars, the Africans, the Germans, everybody. But we stay together, and we move on, and we keep one thing in mind, to survive, and that is our greatest secret. ~ Martin Cruz Smith

Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us. ~ Benjamin Carter Hett

They all thought that civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening." Szilard held no such sanguine view, noting that the Germans themselves were paralyzed with cynicism, one of the uglier effects on morals of losing a major war. ~ Richard Rhodes

My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-'60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also 'sold' ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States. ~ Andrei Codrescu

You can't help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost its faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11: 61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn't reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years. ~ Mark Steyn

We were facing a great number of uncertainties and dangers. First, whether the Russians would treat us decently, us who had lived through the German occupation; whether the survivors from Transnistria would come back; how many had survived the retreat of the Germans; whether our friends and relatives in the Russian army and those who had fled voluntarily would come home; whether any of them had survived the almost three years of war; whether we'll have food to survive. The Russian military, in pursuit of the retreating Germans, were angry, aggressive and contemptuous of the local population. The ubiquitous question: Why did they kill all the other Jews and left you alive? That thought implied that the survivors were all collaborators of the Nazis, whether they were Jewish or not. ~ Pearl Fichman

We wouldn't believe that the Germans, known as the enlightened world as 'bearers of culture,' were capable of planning and carrying out, in cold blood, without pity, the mass destruction of human beings by industrial means, as if they were bedbugs, flies, or other pests to be exterminated. ~ Joseph Bau

Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of
the air! ~ Thomas Carlyle

We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar. ~ Oswald Spengler

Hitler delivered petulant speeches that fall warning the outside world and particularly the British to mind their own business and to quit concerning themselves "with the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich. ~ William L. Shirer

At the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century in Austria, there was a lot of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism in Austria was much more pervasive than in Germany. And Austrians took to Nazi ideas and anti-Semitism much more readily than Germans did, really. ~ Viggo Mortensen

Are you murdering more eggs for breakfast?" Japhet raised his head as the sound of boiling water filled the small apartment.
"Don't insult my eggs, Buchanan."
"You insulted my roasted chicken, Kappel, so I can insult your eggs all I want. ~ Jack Lewis Baillot

We've lived openly with our different backgrounds for years in this country. There's never been a problem. Do you think people are going to change overnight just because a madman is taking the reins of government?" "Nobody could have predicted that reasonable Germans would stand by as their Jewish neighbors were rounded up and exterminated. But when that madman came to power, everything changed, and reasonable people did nothing to stop it. They all tried to save their own skin first and foremost. ~ Ayse Kulin

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good. ~ Bertolt Brecht

Not a fork...not a spoon...a fpoon.
what will you Germans think of next? ~ Key Pelle

I am very sorry you did not find me in yesterday. I was fussing about with Germans all day. We went with Weyrother to survey the dispositions. When Germans start being accurate there's no end to it! ~ Leo Tolstoy

The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant. ~ Karl Kraus

Germans respond well to lies. At least, they always have historically. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

The Security Council represents the situation from 1945 - you had the Allies who won the war who occupied that. The defeated guys - the Germans and Japan - were out. The occupied countries had no voice. That was fine in '45, but today, Germany rules Europe, frankly. They are driving Europe but have no voice. ~ Mo Ibrahim

A critical analysis of the present global constellation-one which offers no clear solution, no "practical" advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us-usually meets with reproach: "Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?" One should gather the courage to answer: "YES, precisely that!" There are situations when the only true "practical" thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to "wait and see" by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his 'Existentialism and Humanism', Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the war and fight the Germans; Sartre's point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it.

An obscene third way out of this dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying.

There is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to mind a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism; L ~ Slavoj Zizek

A number of politicians, including those within your own party, believe Germans would be safer if the German military didn't insert itself into so many of the world's hot spots. ~ Wolfgang Schauble

The Greek word "nostalgia" derives from the root nostros, meaning "return home," and algia, meaning "longing." Doctors in seventeenth-century Europe considered nostalgia an illness, like the flu, mainly suffered by displaced migrant servants, soldiers, and job seekers, and curable through opium, leeches, or, for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps. Throughout time, such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litost. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians, it's dor, for Germans, it's heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal de corazon. Many ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

Later bad things will be said about Stalin; he'll be called a tyrant and his reign of terror will be denounced. But for the people of Eduard's generation he will remain the supreme leader of the people of the Union at the most tragic moment in their history; the man who defeated the Nazis and proved himself capable of a sacrifice worthy of the ancient Romans: the Germans had captured his son, Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, while the Russians had captured Field Marshal Paulus, one of the top military leaders of the Reich, at Stalingrad. When the German High Command proposed an exchange, Stalin responded with disdain that he didn't exchange field marshals for simple lieutenants. Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself on the electrified barbed wire fence of his prison camp. * ~ Emmanuel Carrere

was stopped on the street by a Dutch policeman, who ordered her to slowly speak the words Scheveningen and schapenscheerder. The Dutch police were trying to weed out Germans posing as Dutch, who most likely would not be able to pronounce those Dutch words. ~ Kathryn J. Atwood

Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality. ~ Adolf Hitler

Boy, those Germans have a word for everything! ~ Homer

Over? Did you say over? Nothing is over until WE decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? ~ John Belushi In Animal House

Everything that is ponderous, vicious and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying kinds of style, are developed in great variety among Germans. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes. ~ Fern Schumer Chapman

There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it. ~ Charles Guggenheim

In attempting to understand 9/11, the first question asked by the world's elites - as exemplified by leading media and academics - was, 'What did America do to provoke such hatred?' Ten years later, the same people are still asking the same question. And it is as morally repulsive now as it was then. It was always on par with 'What did the Jews do to antagonize the Germans? Or 'What did blacks do to enrage lynch mobs?' ~ Dennis Prager

It's a historical thing, up to the 19th century the English hated the French. Then in the 20th century the English started to hate the Germans - as we began to move alphabetically through the map of the world. Now, the year 2000, we are fine with the Germans ... but the Hungarians are pissing us off. ~ Eddie Izzard

This preternatural love of rules almost for their own sake punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a German reinsurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red ribbons to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn't just want hookers: they wanted hookers with rules. ~ Michael Lewis

Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis. ~ Michael Lewis

A Wilhelmstrasse official admitted to me today that the Germans had imposed forced labour on all Jews in Poland. He said the term of forced labour was "only two years."16 A German school-teacher tells me this one: the instructors begin the day with this greeting to their pupils: "Gott strafe England!" - whereupon the children are supposed to answer: "He will. ~ William L. Shirer

During the boisterous years of my youth nothing used to damp my wild spirits so much as to think that I was born at a time when the world had manifestly decided not to erect any more temples of fame except in honour of business people and State officials. The tempest of historical achievements
seemed to have permanently subsided, so much so that the future appeared to be irrevocably delivered over to what was called peaceful competition between the nations. This simply meant a system of mutual exploitation by fraudulent means, the principle of resorting to the use of force in self-defence being formally excluded. Individual countries increasingly assumed the appearance of commercial undertakings, grabbing territory and clients and concessions from each other under any and every kind of pretext. And it was all staged to an accompaniment of loud but innocuous shouting. This trend of affairs seemed destined to develop steadily and permanently. Having the support of public approbation, it seemed bound eventually to transform the world into a mammoth department store. In the vestibule of this emporium there would be rows of monumental busts which would confer immortality on those profiteers who had proved themselves the shrewdest at their trade and those administrative officials who had shown themselves the most innocuous. The salesmen could be represented by the English and the administrative functionaries by the Germans; whereas the Jews would be sacrificed to the unprofita ~ Adolf Hitler

All upright Germans will be National Socialists, but only the best National Socialists will be party members! ~ Adolf Hitler

I am living with these pigs, with these horses and with these cows.
Every day I have to look at their blank eyes, their stupid bellies.
They call themselves by the names of various nationalities. As if that would make any difference!
Germans, French, Italians, Croatians, Russians, Poles, and other animals.
Thank you for the pleasure!
I love animals, but only real animals.
I love animals who do not pretend to be humans.
You should look, sometimes, into the eyes of real cows. They are serene, quiet, round. They are good, so good. Like medicine.
I like being with cows. I have spent much of my life with them. They do not know greed, they do not play politics. I love them.
Protect me from human beings!
Let me live with cows!
I'll live as a shepherd, if that's the only way.
You are driving me out of my mind, you, the Thinking Animals! ~ Jonas Mekas

All were expecting to die, and every day of their life was a day of suffering and torment. All had witnessed terrible crimes, and the Germans would have spared none of them; the gas chambers awaited them. Most, in fact, were sent to the gas chambers after only a few days of work, and were replaced by people from new contingents. Only a few dozen people lived for weeks and months, rather than for days and hours; these were skilled workers, carpenters and stonemasons, and the bakers, tailors and barbers who ministered to the Germans' everyday needs. These people created an Organizing Committee for an uprising. It was of course, only the already-condemned, only people possessed by an all-consuming hatred and a fierce thirst for revenge, who could have conceived such an insane plan. They did not want to escape until they had destroyed Treblinka. And they destroyed it. ~ Chil Rajchman

To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment. ~ Primo Levi

The German people of today bear no guilt. Why are the German people not permitted the right to defend themselves? Why are the crimes of one group emphasized so greatly, instead of highlighting the great German cultural heritage? Why should the Germans not have the right to express their opinion freely? ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

In France, at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometres ... If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

Far more humbling to me was a letter I received years later from Sergeant Talbert. Referring to the attack at the intersection, he wrote, "Seeing you in the middle of that road, wanting to move, was too much. You were my total inspiration. All my boys felt the same way." "Tab" was far too generous with his compliments. His own action at Carentan personified his excellence as both a soldier and a leader. He helped clear that intersection and carried a wounded Lipton to safety. Later when the Germans finally counterattacked, Talbert was everywhere, directing his men to the right place, supervising their fire, before he himself was wounded and evacuated. ~ Dick Winters

Thirty percent of Americans have German blood in their family. I don't see any major difference in the engineering abilities of Americans and Germans. ~ Hasso Plattner

we should also consider the remoter analogy of the animals. Many birds and animals, especially the carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of offspring which seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive theory of marriage. If we go back to an imaginary state in which men were almost animals and the companions of them, we have as much right to argue from what is animal to what is human as from the barbarous to the civilized man. The record of animal life on the globe is fragmentary, - the connecting links are wanting and cannot be supplied; the record of social life is still more fragmentary and precarious. Even if we admit that our first ancestors had no such institution as marriage, still the stages by which men passed from outer barbarism to the comparative civilization of China, Assyria, and Greece, or even of the ancient Germans, are wholly unknown to us. Such ~ Plato

What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for. ~ Joseph Heller

Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. "But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?"

"I should rather die."

"You nearly did."

"Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans. ~ Chris Cleave

Branson ate his salad, and left the rest of his fish untouched, while Grace tucked into his steak and kidney pudding with relish. 'I read a while ago,' he told Branson, 'that the French drink more red wine than the English but live longer. The Japanese eat more fish than the English but drink less wine and live longer. The Germans eat more red meat than the English, and drink more beer and they live longer too. You know the moral of this story?
'No'
'It's not what you eat or drink - it's speaking English that kills you. ~ Peter James

That one way or another the Germans were tracking them from the ~ Kate Atkinson

People are so prejudiced against bisexuals. It's like the only group of people you can still make fun of. Bisexuals ... and Germans. And I happen to be both of them. ~ Elijah

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it's not exclusive to the Germans. ~ Bill Nighy

With the Germans, the sovereignty resided in the great assembly of the people. ~ John Lothrop Motley

You see, people may tell you that Nazi Germany was built on anti-Semitism, a somewhat overzealous leader and a nation of hate-fed bigots, but it would have all come to nothing had the Germans not loved one particular activity - to burn.
The Germans loved to burn things. Shops, synagogues, Reichstags, houses, personal items, slain people and, of course, books. ~ Markus Zusak

Germans try to categorize films: in a comedy, you just laugh and in a drama, you're not allowed to laugh. I don't believe in that, sometimes we laugh and cry in the same hour. ~ Fatih Akin

Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,
not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us
the Irish! ~ Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

Britain was formerly the America of the Germans. ~ Benjamin Franklin

You find nothing like that among humans. Yes, human groups may have distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom endure for more than a few centuries. Think of twentieth-century Germans, for example. In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel? And if you do come up with something, was it also there 1,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago?
The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration 'from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which "have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law'.3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilisation is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day EU, celebrating 2,500 years of European freedo ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The best they could? I don't think so." He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. "Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs. It's to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That's the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they're superior." Roth felt as if he were on the edge of something profound. ~ Norman Mailer

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight. ~ Barbara Tuchman

That's how the Germans are ... The aristocrats at the top hard as glass, cold as ice, servants of the King, the working masses willing, pliable, sentimental, susceptible to brutality, the middle class educated and cowardly to the point of servility. ~ Alfred Doblin

If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else, then we are moving in Hitler's world. - ~ Timothy Snyder

If Germans are happy it means everyone else is miserable. ~ Stephen Colbert

Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. ~ Henry A. Wallace

In mass cruelty, the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. ~ Bertrand Russell

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.
You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.
I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. ~ Iain Pears

Ethnic Germans also surrendered. Even veterans of the Eastern Front. Corp. Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division explained, "In Russia, I could imagine nothing but fighting to the last man. We knew that going into a prison camp in Russia meant you were dead. In Normandy, one always had in the back of his mind, 'Well, if everything goes to hell, the Americans are human enough that the prospect of becoming their prisoner was attractive to some extent. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

One thing I've noticed about the Germans: They seem very fond of pigs. ~ Markus Zusak

I don't like men who live, by choice, out of their own country. I don't like interior decorators. I don't like Germans. I don't like buggers and I don't like Christian Scientists. ~ Duff Cooper

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.
from Disappearance of Literature ~ Mark Twain

David Irving has consistenly applied an evidential double standard, demanding absolute documentary proof to convict the Germans (as when he sought to show that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust), while relying on circumstantial evidence to condemn the British (as in his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden). ~ David Cannadine

All sorts of efforts were made to populate the Floridas - with anyone: Huguenots, Bermudians, Irish, Germans, Swiss, Scottish Highlanders, even some of the prostitutes being rehabilitated in London's Magdalen House. Sir Alexander Grant, who dreamed up the idea of transporting the prostitutes to Florida, confessed, with not exactly stunning insight, "Tis true they are not virgins"; nevertheless, he said, they would surely make splendid wives and mothers for such as were likely to live in a place like Florida.5 ~ Bernard Bailyn

During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium.

The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths.

The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro.

Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. S ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

The future will belong to the Germans ... when we build the House of Europe. In the next two years, we will make the process of European integration irreversible. This is a really big battle but it is worth the fight. ~ Helmut Kohl

If the Holocaust is reduced to Auschwitz, then it can easily be forgotten that the German mass killing of Jews began in places that the Soviet Union had just conquered. Everyone in the western Soviet Union knew about the mass murder of the Jews, for the same reason that the Germans did: In the East the method of mass murder required tens of thousands of participants and it was witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people. The Germans left, but their death pits remained. If the Holocaust is identified only with Auschwitz, this experience, too, can be excluded from history and commemoration. ~ Timothy Snyder

Erik said: "But the Aryan race must be superior - we rule the world!" "Your Nazi friends don't know any history," Father said. "The Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids when Germans were living in caves. Arabs ruled the world in the Middle Ages - the Muslims were doing algebra when German princes could not write their own names. It's nothing to do with race. ~ Ken Follett

I don't blame Germans," Emil said. "I don't even blame Nazis. I blame people who want to live at the expense of others. ~ Steve Anderson

One day as Father and I were returning from our walk we found the Grote Markt cordoned off by a double ring of police and soldiers. A truck was parked in front of the fish mart; into the back were climbing men, women, and children, all wearing the yellow star ...
"Father! Those poor people!" I cried ...
"Those poor people," Father echoed. But to my surprise I saw that he was looking at the solders now forming into ranks to march away. "I pity the poor Germans, Corrie. They have touched the apple of God's eye. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

The idea of the camp was to use it as a staging area for soldiers on their way to liberate France. It was much better than putting them in Boston in case the Germans attacked. Allied soldiers from several countries left from Camp Myles Standish to go to England and then on to France. They would only stay for a week or two. One group would go out, and another group would come in. At that camp we were doing everything, all the maintenance. There was a small hospital with nurses and doctors, and we were busy. I worked in the PX. We sold coca-cola, and Narragansett beer was delivered once a month. Cigarettes were five dollars a carton. There was plenty of food. We were glad when they gave us American uniforms; that meant we were something. We had work, and we were doing something good. When Italy got out of the war, and we signed to cooperate, that felt pretty good. ~ Deborah L. Halliday

Somehow the Germans lose every war but win every peace. ~ Martha Hall Kelly

How soon, sugar, the terrible becomes routine. We've all got this dangerous built-in talent: for turning horrors into errands. You hear folks wonder how the Germans could have done it? I believe part of the answer is: They made extermination be a nine-to-five activity. You know, salaries? Lunch breaks? And the staff came and did their job and went home and ate supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job and went home and ate their supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job.
That's partly how you get anything done, especially a chore what's dreadful, dreadful.
Honey? we've all got to be real careful of what we can get used to. ~ Allan Gurganus

I could tell you more about reading and how it perked up our spirits while the Germans were here. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

It is much easier to believe lies than the truth."
"Why?" asked Janna.
"Because lies are manufactured to satisfy the emotions. A mother would rather believe her pretty girl lazy than accept the fact that she's a dumb cluck. Germans would rather believe they were stabbed in the back than that they lost a fair fight. And anyone would rather blame someone else for his misfortunes. The truth is hard. Don't fool with it unless you realize that. ~ Hilda Van Stockum

There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. ~ Eric Hoffer

During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. ~ George Orwell

The Germans are fond of saying that only Austria could convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German. ~ Daniel Silva

Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical, but relative.And when Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find new ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and the number of their regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soldiers, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of some ~ Patrik Ouředník

It was a wartime story, goodies versus baddies, lots of explosions and shooting. The Germans always shouted 'Aiiieeee!' as they died. Atkins wondered what he would choose, confronted with similar circumstances. 'Aiiieeee!' seemed to him to lack the necessary gravitas and originality, as well as sounding a bit, well, German. But then who knew what might come to mind, in those final moments? ~ Alastair Reynolds

Isn't it amazing that the Germans call their city halls 'rat houses'? That's what we should call our city halls! ~ Drew Carey

Richard Grunberger points out in The Twelve-Year Reich, the Jew served a necessary psychological function. "Just as primitive man's concept of God supposed the existence of the Devil, so the German's progressive self-deification during the Third Reich depended upon the demonization of the Jew. ~ Leonard Gross

It was quite a sight, Germans dancing, though I was used to it by then. Every now and then there was someone perfectly synchronized with the music, but most of the time I felt like I'd fallen into a colony of robots, each programmed differently and following a separate signal. If you observed them as a group you would never have thought they were responding to the same song. ~ Chloe Aridjis

The Germans tend to like to blame the Nazi experience on one man who can be scapegoated. If you pile all the blame onto him, you exonerate the German masses from any responsibility. ~ Gavriel David Rosenfeld

I did not believe in the war. I thought it was wrong to go into any war. And I got to the war, and saw the Germans, and I changed my mind. I decided we were right going into World War II. ~ Andy Rooney

The Germans, a race eager for war. ~ Seneca The Younger

And another thing about German symphonic development. I tell you, our cold kvass soup is a horror to the Germans, and yet we eat it with pleasure. And their cold cherry soup is a horror to us, and yet it sends a German into ecstacy. In short, symphonic development is just like German philosophy and soup-all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with some reasoning. ~ Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Siri ~ Michel Houellebecq

The racial laws which excluded the Jews from the German community seemed to a foreign observer to be a shocking throwback to primitive times, but since the Nazi racial theories exalted the Germans as the salt of the earth and the master race they were far from being unpopular. A ~ William L. Shirer

If anyone ever tells you the Holocaust didn't happen, or that it wasn't as bad as they say, no, it was worse than they say. What we saw, what these Germans did, it was worse than you can possibly imagine. ~ Edward Heffron