#germans

There's more than a few remnants left in German welfare policy today. Many Germans eagerly condemn Hitler's fascism but won't examine the other reasons why the Third Reich succeeded for a season. ↗

— Suzanne Fields

#eagerly #examine #fascism #few #german

After a Polish Pope, whose country was first to be invaded by the Germans in World War Two, we now have someone from the generation drafted at the close of the war. ↗

— Horst Koehler

#close #country #drafted #first #generation

A few weeks ago we were reminded that other peoples - in particular the United States of America - fought so that we Germans could live in liberty. That we should never forget. ↗

— Horst Koehler

#america #could #few #forget #fought

We both agreed that Stalin was determined to hold out against the Germans. He told us he'd never let them get to Moscow. But if he was wrong, they'd go back to the Urals and fight. They'd never surrender. ↗

— W. Averell Harriman

#agreed #back #both #determined #fight

With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology, rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese, Danish, and Germans. ↗

— Jay Inslee

#american #bill #bold #clean #clean energy

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#camus #communism #czechoslovakia #david-szmulevski #east-germany

The Germans certainly - the intelligence service believed that there were WMD. It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing. ↗

— David Kay

#certainly #disturbing #germans #intelligence #judgment

At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all. ↗

— Ernst Toller

#been #blind #brother #brothers #dead

The East Germans first used biomechanics. This meant that rather than guessing about technique and form, they could apply changes to athletic performance based on science. ↗

— Bill Toomey

#apply #athletic #based #biomechanics #changes

As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic. ↗

— Pete Townshend

#body #bone #certainly #every #felt