12 quotes
Many of history’s murderers have staked out the moral high ground, killing for love of confession or country, or in the name of social equality.
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
The Nazis offered a combination of economic nationalism with unorthodox anti-cyclical measures to stimulate employment.
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
For, despite its egalitarian rhetoric, Nazi Germany eschewed the doctrine of aggressive class war, whatever revolutionist animosities lingered, against the limp bourgeoisie in general.
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
Nazi ideology offered redemption from a national ontological crisis, to which it was attracted like a predatory shark to blood.
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
By 1930, Nazi students had a majority in the unions of nine universities; by 1931 they had seized control of the national Deutsche Studentenschaft
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
Christianity regarded all earthly existence as transient, while the Nazi thought in terms of rendering life eternal through a sort of biological Great Chain of Being. The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the aeons.
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
It's nonsense to talk about the war on Islamic terrorism as a clash of civilisations. The distinction is between civilisation and chaos. Whatever people may claim - and the desire to cut through the political processes can be very powerful - there is never any justification for violence.
Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazis systematically murdered as many as 200,000 mentally ill or physically disabled people whom they stigmatised as 'life unworthy of life'. This covert and complex series of operations was known as the ‘euthanasia programme.’
Marxist socialism also had dark nooks and crannies where Jews were regarded as money-mad capitalists or as an ‘obsolete’ people who refused to join the onward march of secular progress towards a moneyless society. Anarchists also suffered from this contagion,…
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
The National Socialists not only joined the Communists in denouncing Social Democratic bosses, but also practiced egalitarianism, unlike bourgeois parties. One should not underestimate the extent to which working-class people bitterly resented being treated as infantile inferiors by the middle and upper classes.
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
The Labor Front’s leisure arm, ‘Strength through Joy’ (KdF) was heavily influenced by the ideas of the apostate Belgian socialist Hendrik de Man, who sought to fuse Marx and Freud , and the practice of such firms as Siemens in Berlin.
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)
Just as the SS was the most implacable in its persecution of racially unwanted, so it single-mindedly pursued the goal of integrating all Germans on the basis of racial equality. Himmler sincerely meant it when he warned his German SS men to behave respectfully towards their foreign racial comrades.
The Third Reich: A New History (2000)