3 Quotes by Helmut Walser Smith

How do we understand prejudice, hatred, and violence in the context of modern societies, like our own, among people much like ourselves, among men and women who lived, not in dark times, but in an era when the balance of opinion was against the all-too-open expression of hatred?

As the army arrived in the region, the otherwise obedient West Prussian citizens stoned the troops, denouncing the men in spiked helmets as a “Jewish defense force.

The general education of the population also gave cause for optimism. In 1900, Germans counted among the most literate people in the world, with literacy rates in the range, of those found in the United States today.