Ian Kershaw Quotes

#1. Hitler was highly secretive - not least about his personal life, his background, and his family.

Ian Kershaw

#2. Our enemies are small worms,' he told his generals. 'I saw them in Munich.

Ian Kershaw

#3. The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.

Ian Kershaw

#4. Following a meeting with Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, a man who had 'courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church' - went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious.

Ian Kershaw

#5. Hitler was never a socialist.

Ian Kershaw

#6. Hitler was no inexorable product of a German 'special path', no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology. Nor was he a mere 'accident' in the course of German history.

Ian Kershaw

#7. Strasser hoped to replace the Programme of 1920. In November, he took the first steps in composing the Community's own draft programme. It advocated a racially integrated German nation at the heart of a central European customs union, the basis of a united states of Europe.

Ian Kershaw

#8. Hitler frequently demonstrated diffidence and unease in dealings with individuals which contrasted diametrically with his self-confident mastery in exploiting the emotions of his listeners in the theatrical setting of a major speech.

Ian Kershaw

#9. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings. Winston Churchill (1901)

Ian Kershaw

#10. I should like to think that had I been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight. However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about

Ian Kershaw

#11. Hitler was unapproachable and impenetrable even for those in his close company.

Ian Kershaw