19 Quotes by Sebastian Haffner

The truly Nazi generation was formed by those born in the decade from 1900 to 1910, who experienced war as a great game and were untouched by its realities.

The only opponents or rivals whom Hitler had to consider seriously and whom at times he had to fight in the domestic political arena between 1930 and 1934, were the conservatives. The liberals, the Centre people or the Social Democrats never gave him the least trouble, and neither did the communists.

The German Reich had to cease to be a state in order to become fully an instrument of conquest.

What happened was a nightmarish reversal of normal circumstances: robbers and murderers acting as the police force, enjoying the full panoply of state power, their victims treated as criminals, proscribed and condemned to death in advance.

If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness.

It took me quite a while to realize that my youthful excitability was right and my father’s wealth of experience was wrong; that there are things that cannot be dealt with by calm skepticism.

There is no development, no maturing in Hitler’s character and personality.

The most important part of individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love. So comradeship has its special weapon against love: smut.

Nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a Fascist. Fascism is upper-class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm.