Norman Davies Quotes

Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.

Most people learn all about the Second World War in school, or else, they see so many films put out by Hollywood, that it's easy to think we know exactly what happened.

Appeasement is just as bad in 1983 as it was in 1938.

Think of the prelude to World War Two. Think of all the countries that said, well, we don’t have enough evidence. I mean, Mein Kampf had been written. Hitler had indicated what he intended to do. The people who argued for waiting for more evidence have to ask themselves how they are going to feel at that point where another event occurs.

And imagine where we'd be today if President Franklin Roosevelt had owned apartment buildings in Frankfurt and Berlin. You know, some of us might be speaking German.

I have just written a book on the occupation of the Channel Islands, which is being published in Germany. Pursuing the Second World War is my passion because it's the most extraordinary period in history.

...the discovery, that at no time did this man (Hitler) pose or intend a real threat to Britain or the Empire.

The Pact of Munich is signed. Czechoslovakia as a power is out.

Germany was beaten after World War I, but it didn't take long for it to rise again as a much more malignant threat. The end of World War II was not to be a compromise; it was to come about from the total annihilation of the enemies' ability and will to make war.

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.

I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot.

Every show you do, you have to do research, and I love to dig into things. I learned about World War II by doing 'Anne Frank.'

World War II... did not happen to everyone, but it happened to most. There were people from Germany who were throwing bombs at us.

Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

There's something so relentless and foul about Hitler and his people, and the way things progressed from year to year. It just got to me in the strangest way.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

The World War broke out with such elemental violence, and with such resort to all means for leading or misleading public opinion, that no time was available for reflection and consideration.

Mehmet Ertegun died in 1944. President Roosevelt sent his body back to Turkey on the U.S.S. Missouri. Mehmet Ertegun and President Roosevelt had had a cordial relationship, and, indeed, Mehmet Ertegun may have helped insure that Turkey did not ally itself with Germany, as it had in the First World War.

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.

Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.

If we go to the 1940s, Nazi Germany - look, we saw it in Britain. Neville Chamberlain told the British people: Accept the Nazis. Yes, they will dominate the continent of Europe, but that is not our problem. Let's appease them. Why? Because it can't be done. We cannot possibly stand against them.

The venerable Robert E. Lee has taken some vicious hits, as dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday's America into a fantasy that might better service the political issues of today.

The people of England will curse themselves for having preferred ruin from Churchill to peace from Hitler.

Lies surfaced about Jews being murdered here and there, and the Holocaust. And, of course, they are all lies and unfounded claims. No Chelmno, no Dachau, no Auschwitz! They were disinfection sites...