Adrian McKinty Quotes

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.

I was thrilled to see the movies [WW II newsreels] of marching Germans … we all knew that Hitler hated communists …

The communists are our allies in this war. That's the Nazis we are fighting. Go look at them.

In the event of a victory over Germany by Soviet Russia and England, Bolshevism in Europe would inevitably follow. Under these circumstances I would prefer to see Germany win the war.

After all, we didn't bring democracy to Germany in 1945; Hitler destroyed democracy there first.

'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.

Hitler was so modern, in that he was obsessed with being famous. He was caught up with this rush to be have achieved greatness before turning 30.

I was handed a chocolate bar and an M-1 rifle and told to go kill Hitler.

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.

We, of course, have the power of hindsight in our arsenal, but people living in Berlin in that era didn't. What would that have been like as this darkness fell over Germany?

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.

I actually turned down an opportunity for a private interview with Adolph Hitler.

Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law.

Hitler was good in the beginning, but he went too far.

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.

In 1930 I became a member of the Reichstag.

We have given most of Europe to Hitler. Let us try to hold on to what we have got left.

Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.

That generation of Germans, along with volunteers from Denmark, Holland, even England and the Free India division and so on, we Europeans were alert and awake to the danger of Bolshevism.

After the many rumours that we had heard about Hitler and the published criticisms we had read about him, we were pleasantly impressed. His appearance was neither pretentious nor affected.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

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.

Germany was the cause of Hitler as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.