Gunter Grass Quotes

Those years when Poland was occupied by the Nazis was one of the darkest time in Poland's history.

I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death.

It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

My original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity.

The Nazi gas chambers are but a detail of history

Germany's crimes were recent and of such a scale and depravity that, unless constantly faced, they will come to seem fictitious.

In Germany, of course, the Holocaust will always be in our history and a big stain on our lives.

I didn't realise the depth of horror that happened in the Second World War every day.

The events of the Holocaust viewed through the eyes of Anne Frank are a unique and damming testament to the dreadful atrocities of that period of our history

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps.

How awful for them [Hitler's victims] to see those swastikas, the SS men and the SA - people we'd never thought of as criminals.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.

My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.

We demand that people don't deny the Holocaust, and we can't ignore the tragedy of another nation.

Only one and half million Jews died in the Holocaust.

World War II was the last 'pure' war. It was purely heroic. There was someone who tried to conquer the world, who tried to exterminate people.

Without the railways, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. I don't actually think the second world war would have happened without them.

Losing a parent is always a terrible thing for anybody. It's no more or no less for me.

One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.

I have always had a longing to talk about this Nazi period because my parents' generation wouldn't talk about it after the war at all. From an actor's point of view, it's amazing to play in one year the Nazi Albert Speer and Claus von Stauffenberg.

Many people in Hungary acted shamefully during World War II.