Richard J. Evans Quotes

#1. Heinrich Himmler declared: 'Whether 10,000 Russian women collapse with exhaustion in the construction of an anti-tank ditch for Germany only interests me insofar as the ditch gets dug for Germany.

Richard J. Evans

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

Richard J. Evans

#3. 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.

Richard J. Evans

#4. As the Prussian historian Treitschke later complained, the proponents of free trade in Hamburg had 'in German fashion made out of necessity not just a virtue but a theory'.

Richard J. Evans

#5. Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides.

Richard J. Evans

#6. Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. 'Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.'24

Richard J. Evans

#7. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

Richard J. Evans