Gestapo Quotes

I would say that not many German people are still alive, who experienced what happened during the third reich. We don't have to go to the Stasi, we can go to the Gestapo, and see what happens, when your human rights, your ability to a freedom of expression and a freedom of thought is infringed upon. This is terribly, terribly dangerous territory. ~ Ray McGovern

Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones. ~ Neil Gaiman

If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo. ~ C.S. Lewis

He'd been expelled from the movement by Gerry Adams in 1985 for threatening to initiate a campaign of murder that would have hampered the new political strategy. It was a bit like being kicked out of the Gestapo for cruelty. ~ Andy McNab

Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957. ~ Edmund De Waal

The anger I felt when the ACLU tried to disenfranchise me because my religious stayed with me. These are dangerous people who make dangerous arguments. Some powerful members of the cultural elites in our country are so paralyzed by the fear that theistic notions might reassert themselves in the official activities of government that they will go to Gestapo lengths to inhibit such expression. ~ Henry Hyde

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

We tiptoe around like we're the Frank family and the Gestapo is downstairs. The baby monitor is in our room, and the unspoken rule is that when the kids go down, so do we. So at seven P.M., I'm in bed waiting for the sandman to come. I can't watch TV, because the noise may wake up the kids; I can't listen to music with my iPod earbuds, because then I can't hear the monitor; and I can't have sex, because that could wake up Janice. ~ Billy Crystal

I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species. ~ Umberto Eco

The EPA, the Gestapo of government, pure and simply has been one of the major claw-hooks that the government maintains on the backs of our constituents. ~ Tom DeLay

Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called 'heightened interrogation'. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor. ~ Robert Harris

However, perhaps the most insidious aspect of the New Age movement is what I call the Optimism Gestapo, or those who regulate and insist on positive thinking by any means necessary, where any criticism or expression of negative or painful emotions are disdained.

I once brought up to an Ashtar Command "ascencionist" (i.e. someone who believes that extraterrestrials will come and save her), the fact that democratic senator Paul Wellstone may have been murdered in order to get republican Norm Coleman elected. Before I could elaborate, she cut me off by saying, "It was just his time."

She was intolerant of the fact that I dared interfere with the reality she was creating, free of conspiracy, cutthroat politicians, and skullduggery. And the more I have played devil's advocate with New Agers, the more I have discovered that such intolerance is the norm. For there currently is a belief amongst New Agers that anything negative that one expresses will only further magnetize negativity. However, those who pursue this line of thinking just end up repressing their negative emotions, only to have them burst forth in uncontrollable ways….

Anyone seeking a supportive metaphysical community should first ask themselves if their ability to think independently is being compromised. For keeping one's metaphysical radar functioning is most important in a world crawling with "forced cheer" gurus, COINTELPRO channelers, and self-help authors. ~ David Icke

The IRS has become morally corrupted by the enormous power which we in Congress have unwisely entrusted to it. Too often it acts like a Gestapo preying upon defenseless citizens. ~ Edward V. Long

Americans have no idea why they have been at war in the Middle East, Asia and Africa for a decade. They don't realize that their liberties have been supplanted by a Gestapo Police State. Few understand that hard economic times are here to stay. ~ Paul Craig Roberts

Once again I was the center of an intoxicating whirlwind. The French Gestapo contained the following two fascinating elements: treason and theft. With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassailable! It would possess the three virtues which I set up as theological, capable of composing so hard a body as Lucien's. What could be said against it? It was outside the world. It betrayed (to betray: signifying the breaking of the laws of love). It indulged in pillage. And lastly, it excluded itself from the world by pederasty. It therefore established itself in an unpuncturable solitude. ~ Jean Genet

I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police ... No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Her Protestant pastor had been sympathetic, until the Gestapo terrified him into silence. Perhaps the same would happen again. But she did not know what else to do. Heinrich took ~ Ken Follett

Christianity has always been the Gestapo of desire, since long, long before there was a Gestapo. Instead of Jews to hate, Christianity has desire. Though I guess Christianity has Jews, too. In any case, all the ovens in the world can't incinerate desire. ~ David Burr Gerrard

Anna is something wrong " he asked his brow furrowed.

Yes I want to say. You ran a prison camp for Jews. You keep my parents locked in the ghetto. You let your wife's father be killed and would kill Jacob too if given the chance. Your wretched Gestapo came to our house and now Lukasz might have to leave us. Let me count the ways. Of course I did not dare to say any of this. "No Herr Kommandant " I replied managing to keep my voice even. "Everything is fine. ~ Pam Jenoff

What are these?"
Meg looked at the rings of keys in Nate's hand, deliberately furrowed her brow. "Those would be keys."
"Why do you need so many keys?"
"Because there are so many locks? Is this a quiz?"
He jingled them in his palm while she continued to give him a sunny, innocent smile. "Meg, you don't even lock your doors half the time. What are all these keys about?"
"Well… There are times a person needs to get into a place, and hey, that place is locked. Then she would need a key."
"And this place that, hey, is locked, wouldn't be the property of that person. Would that be correct?"
"Techincally. But no man is an island, and it takes a village, and so on. We're all one in the Zen universe."
"So these would be Zen keys?"
"Exactly. Give them back."
"I don't think so." He closed his fist around them. "You see, even in the Zen universe I'd hate to arrest my wife for unlawful entry."
"I'm not your wife yet, buddy. Did you have a search warrant for those?"
"They were in plain sight. No warrant necessary."
"Gestapo."
"Delinquent. ~ Nora Roberts

Did I call them Laurel and Hardy? I meant sodding Romeo and Juliet. This is flirting, á la Gestapo underlings:

She: Oh, you are so strong and manly, M'sieur Thibaut. These knots you tie are so secure.

He: That is nothing. Look, I pull them so tight you cannot undo them. Try.

She: It is true, I cannot! Oh, pull them tighter!

He: Chérie, your wish is my command.

It is my ankles, not hers, which he is binding so tightly and with such masculine charm.

She: I shall have to call you in tomorrow morning as well, to do this task for me.

He: You must cross the cords, so, and knot them behind -

Me: Squeak! Squeak!

She: Shut up and write, ya wee skrikin' Scots piece o' shite.

Well, no, she did not use those exact words. But you get the idea. ~ Elizabeth Wein

No Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are short-sighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them. No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. ~ Winston S. Churchill

I said to myself, where are we living? In the United States of America where you're innocent until proven guilty, or Nazi Germany with the Gestapo calling? ~ Tommy Bond

And I know you're not supposed to say 'Nazi Germany,' but I don't care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe. ~ Benjamin Carson

[we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat. ~ Harry Truman

In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens. ~ Anna Funder

What if the saboteurs come while he's standing there pissing on our truck?"
"Then he's in trouble."

Conversation between two Gestapo Officers
The Informer by Steen Langstrup ~ Steen Langstrup

I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo. ~ Harry Truman

Because I am for them, Commander, because their ancestors stood up to that Nazi, Bligh, just like I would be for one little Jew, terrified and hungry, crossing the Pyrenees to get away to freedom from the Gestapo. One little Jew. You wouldn't have him in your house. He stinks, he has lice. But, you know what, Commander? I am for him, every time. And he would punch me in the shoulder and lug his M-1 up onto the ridge, night after night. ~ James A. Michener

Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night. ~ Bruno Schulz

I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue. ~ George Orwell

The way people behave depends on the basic moral tests and norms in a society. Naturally, the Khmer Rouge, Al-Qaeda terrorists, respectable middle-class Europeans, and, say, members of the Komosol in the 1930's, would behave quite differently in identical situations. But that wouldn't change the essential point. The ration of altruists and egoists, even among Benedictine monks and members of the Gestapo, is the same. It's just that their altruism and egotism are expressed differently. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo - the IRS. ~ Paul LePage

I was never one for looking at beautiful scenery, and certainly not since 1933; it distracts from the more important and admittedly metropolitan business of keeping an eye out for the Gestapo, which, with my politics, is an ever-present dilemma. ~ Philip Kerr

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those 'good Germans' who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. ~ Frank Rich

I do not know where Viktor and Rudolf were taken. I cannot find the records. I never Elisabeth or Iggie.

It is possible that they were taken to the Hotel Metropole, which has been sequestered as the headquarters of the Gestapo. There are many other lock-ups for this flood of Jews. They are beaten, of course; but they are also forbidden to shave or wash so that they look even more degenerate. This because it is important to address the old affront of Jews not looking like Jews. This processing of stripping away your respectability, taking away your watch-chain, or your shoes or your belt, so that you stumble to hold up your trousers with one hand, is a way of returning everyone to the shtetl, stripping you back to your essential character - wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back. You are supposed to end up looking like a cartoon from Der Stuermer, Streicher's tabloid that is now sold on the streets of Vienna. They take away your reading glasses. ~ Edmund De Waal

Our difficulty or inability to perceive the experience of others…is all the more pronounced the more distant these experiences are from ours in time, space, or quality," wrote the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. We can be moved by the tragedy of mass starvation on a far continent; after all, we have all known physical hunger, if only temporarily. But it takes a greater effort of emotional imagination to empathize with the addict. We readily feel for a suffering child, but cannot see the child in the adult who, his soul fragmented and isolated, hustles for survival a few blocks away from where we shop or work.

Levi quotes Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian philosopher and resistance fighter who fell into the grasp of the Gestapo. "Anyone who was tortured remains tortured… Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world…Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again." Améry was a full-grown adult when he was traumatized, an accomplished intellectual captured by the foe in the course of a war of liberation. We may then imagine the shock, loss of faith and unfathomable despair of the child who is traumatized not by hated enemies but by loved ones. ~ Gabor Mate

No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanly directed in the first instance. ~ Winston Churchill

The Gestapo chief leaned forward. I'd like to send you home, old fellow," he said. "I'll take your word that you won't cause any more trouble."

I could not see father's face, only the erect carriage of his shoulders and the halo of white hair above them. But I heard his answer.

"If I go home today," he said evenly and clearly, "tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand. ~ Albert Maltz

The Autobiography of the Woman the Gestapo Called "The White Mouse" by Nancy Wake (Sun ~ Kathryn J. Atwood

That concentration camps were ultimately provided for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of "national security," had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU [Russian State security agency], so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy functioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the time of Leon Blum's popular-front government, which was guided by a decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various police organizations were never overburdened with "prejudices" against any totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and political importance, and they ne ~ Hannah Arendt

This figure upon the Cross is not a MVD agent or a Gestapo inquisitor, but a Divine Physician, Who only asks that we bring our wounds to Him in order that He may heal them. If our sins be as scarlet, they shall be washed white as snow, and if they be as red as crimson, they shall be made white as wool. Was it not He Who told us, "I say to you, that even so there shall be more joy in Heaven upon one sinner that doth penance than upon ninety-nine just who need not penance" (Luke 15:7)? In the story of the prodigal, did He not describe the Father as saying, "Let us eat and make merry: because this my son was dead and is come to life again; was lost and is found" (Luke 15:23, 24)? Why is there more joy in Heaven for the repentant sinner than for the righteous? Because God's attitude is not judgment but love. In judgment, one is not as joyful after doing wrong as before; but in love, there is joy because the danger and worry of losing that soul is past. He who is sick is loved more than he who is well, because he needs it more. Some will feign sickness to solicit love and pretend wounds that the beloved may bind them. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

We've come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended. ~ Harry Belafonte

A large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. What distinguished each of us was only our inner attitude. ~ Etty Hillesum

Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination . ~ Arthur Koestler

Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews ... If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed. ~ Anne Frank

In my opinion, only bakers need to work early in the morning. And the Gestapo, of course - that is self-evident. To tear the Bolshevist rabble from their beds, so long as they are not Bolshevist bakers. For they would already be awake, and thus the Gestapo, for their part, would have to get up even earlier, and so on and so forth. ~ Timur Vermes

It is natural that people do not want to be involved with us too much. There is no problem down to the smallest egotistical longing which the Gestapo cannot solve. Regarded in this way we are, if a joke is permitted, looked upon as a cross between a general maid and the dustbin of the Reich. ~ Reinhard Heydrich

By the end of the war, I could pick out Jewish people almost as if I had a sixth sense about it, even if they had blue eyes and blond hair. I would have been a very valuable Gestapo person. ~ Diet Eman

Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. ~ George Orwell

Japanese soldiers split open the stomachs of pregnant women and bayoneted the fetuses; they tied up local farmers and used them for target practice; they tortured thousands of innocent people in ways that rival the Gestapo at its worst; and they were pursuing deadly medical experiments long before Dr. Mengele and Auschwitz. ~ Laurence Rees

Let's just run, huh?"

Bob picked up the pace, hoping to tire his partner into silence.

"That reminds me," Bernie puffed, "you know what you've told me is buried in the Fort Knox of my brain. The whole Gestapo couldn't get it out of me. But--"

"But what?"

"I'd really like to tell Nance. I mean husbands and wives shouldn't have secrets from each other."

Bob did not respond.

"Beckwith, I swear, Nancy's the soul of honour. The epitome of discretion. Besides, she'll notice I'm holding something out on her. I mean, God knows what she'll think it is."

"She'd never guess," Bob said wryly.

"That's just the point. Please, Beckwith, Nance'll be discreet. I swear on my clients' lives."

The pressure was too great.

"Okay, Bern," he sighed, "but not too many details, huh?"

"Don't sweat. Just the essential wild fact--if you know what I mean."

"Yeah. When will you tell her?"

Three strides later Bernie answered sheepishly, "Last night. ~ Erich Segal

My dear girl,' I answered in high spirits, for I felt elated at being active again. 'You are about to witness the birth of an immortal literary masterpiece. In a few moments, I shall begin the composition of an eloquent letter. This letter is going to be received by everyone in the Reich who has a Polish name. Or at least that is what shall try to accomplish. We want to remidn everyone of Polish origin that, although they are nominally German, Polish blood continues to flow in their veins.'
Danuta interrupted my oratory.
'Calm down, Witold. Don't excite yourself so. If you raise your voice much louder you shan't have to send any letters. Everybody in the Third Reich will have heard you, including the Gestapo. ~ Jan Karski

Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirts had surged to power. Now they held Germany by the throat. The Gestapo was rapidly creating a cruel and brutal police state that treated all but true Aryans like dogs and swine. That was certainly true for Jews like the Weisz family. In just the last few years, they and all of the Jewish families in Germany had been stripped of their citizenship and denied many of their most basic rights. Jacob's father, an esteemed professor of German history, had been summarily fired from his prestigious post at Frederick William University in Berlin. The Weisz family had been forced out of their beautiful, spacious home in the suburbs of the capital. They'd had a big red J stamped on their official papers and had been denied permission to leave the country. So they had left Berlin and made a new home in Siegen. ~ Joel C. Rosenberg

In this prison camp, the Gestapo state brain-police planet Earth, what is normal is insane and what is insane is normal. But it doesn't pay to tell that to the local politicians or other organizational structures that run the place that. They didn't crucify Christ because they liked what he said. ~ Frederick Lenz

Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo. ~ J. Edgar Hoover

The Uberlingen Chief of Police Jakob Graf, was severely wounded in this explosion. It has now become questionable as to whether the weapons he collected were for the Gestapo or the invading French troops. ~ Hank Bracker