“All contractors involved in the production of U.S. war materials were barred from practicing racial discrimination.” – Robert Goralski, “May 27, 1943,” World War II Almanac: 1931-1945
“Germany’s military overthrow was not an undeserved catastrophe, but a well-merited punishment which was in the nature of an eternal retribution. This defeat was more than deserved by us.” – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (trans. Murphy)
“As some historians have contended, [British Prime Minister] Chamberlain in the end saw himself as a practical businessman willing to deal with the world as it was, engage in hardheaded negotiation with others, and strike a mutually beneficial bargain on the assumption that all parties would honor their parts of the deal. Like the vast majority of his countrymen, he had vivid and terrible memories of the [First] World War and felt revulsion at the thought of a new generation dying on the killing fields of Western Europe. In both instances, he was a liberal—a man of humane sentiments and reasoned intellect. The Realpolitik he tried to practice was itself largely a creation of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in reaction to previous catastrophic wars of religion; it thought of states and their leaders as rational actors seeking to maximize advantage but pursuing limited aims. Chamberlain expressed the most important weakness of his superficially tough-minded realism when he declared his determination to deal with the grievances of adversaries through the application of ‘our common sense, our common humanity” in seeking the solution to outstanding problems. Realpolitik in the age of Hitler and Stalin required an understanding of the darker angels of human nature. Businessman in background, Unitarian in religious training, liberal politician in vocation, Chamberlain had scant conception of the phenomenon of evil.” – Alonzo L. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy
“Dictators told journalists what to write. Democratic leaders manipulated them, none more successfully than Franklin Roosevelt.” – Alonzo L. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy
“ ‘We are at the end of our rope,’ Hoover remarked to an aide late on the evening of March 3 [1932]. And so it seemed might also be the country. Here and there in the midwestern farm regions, armed groups effectively prevented foreclosure sales. In Iowa, the Farmers’ Holiday Association sporadically blocked shipments of produce to market. In some cities, laid-off utility workers tapped electric lines to restore power to homes that had failed to pay their bills. There were scattered reports of groups invading supermarkets and appropriating supplies of food without paying.” – Alonzo L. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy
“A favorable situation will never be exploited if commanders wait for orders. The highest commander and the youngest soldier must always be conscious of the fact that omission and inactivity are worse than resorting to the wrong expedient.” – General Helmuth Karl Bernard von Moltke (as quoted by Trevor N. Dupuy in A Genius for War)
“The person who has an opportunity to prevent a crime and deliberately fails to do so ends up by being resentful to its victim.” – Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945
“A country is not only what it does—it is what it puts up with, what it tolerates.” – Kurt Tucholsky (trans. Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945)
“The origins of the annihilation of the German Jews were much more remote in time than the events of Krystallnacht. They are to be found in popular reactions to the dislocations that accompanied Germany’s belated but headlong rise as an industrial Power in the nineteenth century and in the growth of a virulent form of racist anti-Semitism in the Wilhelmine period, which remained latent until military defeat and economic collapse turned it into a potent rallying-cry for the rightist fanatics and demagogues who led the attack upon the Weimar constitution. The most gifted of these, Adolf Hitler, was also the one most obsessed with hatred and fear of the Jews.” – Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945
“In the muddle of competing agencies that constituted the governmental system of the Third Reich, the SS was the effective instrument of domination. Unfettered by the normal restraints of law and accountable only to its commander, and beyond him the Führer himself, it exercised sovereign control over the lives and liberties of German citizens, arresting and detaining them on any pretext, imprisoning them for long periods for unproved or invented crimes (even after the regime was presumably stable and consolidated, there were never fewer than 10,000 Germans in concentration camps), subjecting them to inhuman physical torments, and murdering them for daring to criticize the realities of National Socialism and the crimes of its leadership. The knowledge of the enormities that the SS perpetrated daily, the knowledge that the camps were always waiting for new inmates, the knowledge that many who entered them were never heard of again was never absent from the minds of German citizens, and the fear that it induced was a potent force in maintaining their obedience to the dictatorship. In the Third Reich, terror was the greatest of political realities.” – Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” – Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (trans. Murphy)
“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away.” – Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (trans. Manheim)