18 Quotes by Richard J. Evans

The next day, 25 February 1945, Goebbels warned, in an article in The Reich, that, if Germany surrendered, Stalin would immediately occupy south-eastern Europe, and ‘an iron curtain would immediately fall on this huge territory, together with the vastness of the Soviet Union, and nations would be slaughtered behind it’.

A latecomer on the scene, Germany had only been able to pick up the scraps and crumbs left over by European colonial powers that had enjoyed a head start on them.

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations.

Of all the things that made the Third Reich a modern dictatorship, its incessant demand for popular legitimation was one of the most striking.

The creation of a free and comprehensive welfare system as the entitlement of all its citizens was one of the major achievements of the Weimar Republic, perhaps in retrospect its most important.

If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.

Viewed nostalgically from the perspective of the early interwar years, Germany before 1914 seemed to many to have been a haven of peace, prosperity and social harmony. Yet beneath its prosperous and self-confident surface, it was nervous, uncertain and racked by internal tensions.

Some, indeed, referred to Bismarck’s creation as the ‘Second Reich’. The use of the word implied, too, that where the First Reich had failed, in the face of French aggression, the Second had succeeded.

Yet he opposed the introduction.