Peter Padfield Quotes

• “Thus the legend of the ‘stab in the back’ and the undefeated German Army had become historical truth”

  Peter Padfield

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• “the homeland differed from its counterpart in 1918 as it had been cleansed of Jews and all criminal riff-raff.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “siblings Scholl died as courageous and upright martyrs. Report of an eyewitness.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Höss found himself going hot and cold and trembling as he was forced to watch from the front rank; it affected him far more than the first execution he witnessed.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “The Munich students provided a spectacular example of resistance put down by the Gestapo;”

  Peter Padfield

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• “a precept that it is a Divine Commandment to obey Germans”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Himmler was, as he had always been, merely the most extreme, emotionally committed exponent of the orthodoxy of the master race.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “on 24 July Marshal Rokossovskii’s Army Group had overrun the extermination camp at Majdanek; for the first time the unbelievable had become visible. Photographs of gas chambers and crematoria and living skeletons in the camp had shocked the world.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “On moral and international legal grounds it would be difficult to differentiate these discussions about annihilating shipwrecked survivors from those mentioned earlier between Churchill, his advisers and the Air Staff on area-bombing to kill, de-house and break the morale of the German working-class population – except perhaps that the British offensive was likely to affect women and children more directly, and was in the event carried out.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Raeder and Dönitz had objected on the practical grounds that such an order would undermine U-boat morale: officers and men would react against shooting defenceless people in the water and would assume that the enemy would mete out the same treatment to them in reprisal if the positions were reversed.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Great massacres may be commanded by tyrants but they are imposed by peoples. Without general social support, the organs of isolation and expulsion cannot even be created.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Himmler, as indeed Hitler, was more victim than creator of the natural disaster that engulfed Germany and the world.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Especially striking was an upsurge of interest in astrology, fortune telling and all manner of numerical and alphabetical methods of divining the future.34”

  Peter Padfield

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• “On their way to the first session of the new Parliament, a group of Nazi deputies uniformed in brown celebrated by smashing department-store windows down the Leipzigerstrasse; ‘by some odd chance,’ a Jewish journalist noted in her diary, ‘the casually aimed projectiles hit only non-Aryan targets.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Munich was the final turning point for Hitler. He had met the leaders of the western democracies and made monkeys of them. He had proved that tactics of deception, threat and histrionics worked at the highest levels of European diplomacy. His will had broken the bonds of reality; everything was possible.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “from 4,000 yards.4 He exceeded”

  Peter Padfield

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• “In truth, through our work, we have laid the foundations of a new system of laws, the right to life of the German Volk.’39”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Hesse’s ultimate message about the unity of the cosmos and the importance of loving the world, not despising it, was censored out by his convictions in the other direction. Hermann Hesse’s books were banned after Hitler took power.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Rascher’s ‘normal’ colleagues and co-workers recognised him as a fraud who inflicted unnecessary suffering and fatalities and used his privileged position with the Reichsführer to gain medical reputation and advancement.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “a groundswell of financial support built largely of frustration was about to lift the Hitler movement on a dizzy ride to power.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “these books were flawed by biased editing and even falsification of facts, complete refusal to acknowledge even a particle of blame for the world catastrophe, refusal to learn anything and a vengeful spirit against the former allies, which could not have failed to reinforce Himmler’s hatred of the powers that had forced the Treaty of Versailles on his country and no doubt his convictions that Germany had been defeated not by arms but by the ‘hydra of the Black & Red International’.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “The narrow range of his reading is striking. Up to the spring and summer of 1924 he listed just over 200 books. Only a handful of these came from outside his own culture.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “Himmler with ‘devising the saturation method of propaganda in selected areas over short periods of time,”

  Peter Padfield

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• “propagating the demonology of the Jew – and, if Himmler is any guide, with dreadful sincerity.”

  Peter Padfield

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• “The trial has at any rate proved’, The Times correspondent continued, ‘that to plot against the constitution of the Reich is not considered a serious crime in Bavaria.”

  Peter Padfield

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