It’s important to remember that many people, before the war, could look at Hitler and see a man with whom business could be done. Winston Churchill, in a 1935 essay from his book Great Contemporaries, had this to say: “It is not possible to form a just judgment of a public figure who has attained […]
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Tags:Genocide·History·Judgement·leadership·Politics·WW2
If This Is a Man You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening, Hot food and friendly faces: Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud, Who does not know peace, Who fights for a scrap of bread, Who dies because of a yes or […]
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“My existence, in comparison with yours, is sadly hum-drum, I fear… Nevertheless, there are certain tragi-comic diversions.” “What sort of diversions?” “This for example –“ Bernhard went over to his writing-desk picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to me: “It arrived by post this morning.” I read the typed words: Berhard Landauer, […]
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But Levi is mostly witness rather than judge: ‘I have deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge.’ He wrote in an afterword added in the 1980s. ‘I thought that my account would be all the more credible […]
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The proportion of political arrests in the Red Army doubled from 1944 to 1945, a year when the Soviet Union was effectively at war for little more than four months. In that year of victory, no fewer than 135,056 Red Army soldiers and officers were condemned by military tribunals for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’…. Over 1.5 million […]
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Berliners remember that, because all the windows had been blown in, you could hear the screams every night. Estimates from the two main Berlin hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000 rape victims. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death […]
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Tags:Russia·war crimes·WW2
Like the other Russians present, Grossman was taken aback when a burgermeister, on being told to provide working parties to clear streets, asked, ‘How much will the people be paid?’ After the way Soviet citizens had been treated as slave labourers in Germany, the answer was obvious. ‘Everyone here certainly seems to have a very […]
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Tags:Entitlement·WW2
Freytag von Loringhoven was at the bottom of the stairs when he suddenly saw Magda Goebbels descend the concrete stairs, following by her six children. She looked ‘sehr damenhft’ – ‘very ladylike’. The six children behind ranged from twelve years old down to five: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda and Heide. Their first names, all […]
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Tags:Fascisim·Suicide·WW2
‘These are strange times,’ she added in the large sales ledger which she used as her diary. ‘One experiences history in the marking, things which one day will fill the history books. But while living through it, everything dissolves into petty worries and fears. History is very tiresome. Tomorrow I’m going to look for nettles […]
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