Antony Beevor Quotes

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.

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

So many men have been lost on the Polish front that we need replacements. There are plenty of girls in Germany who will sleep with SS men to provide soldiers for the Fuhrer.

I experienced Nazism as a child. Like many of my generation, I was motivated by the desire to prevent another war at any price.

I was excited by the idea of playing a Nazi.

I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi invasion of my country.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

The SS, as such, behaved no more criminally than any other social groups would behave when taking part in political events.

I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.

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 Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity.

We tend to think about fascism in terms of the Second World War.

The horrors of the Second World War, the chilling winds of the Cold War and the crushing weight of the Iron Curtain are little more than fading memories. Ideals that once commanded great loyalty are now taken for granted.

Had he been victorious, Hitler himself could hardly have demanded more.

I cannot understand the passive response of the whole civilized world to this modem barbarism. Doesn't the world see that Hitler is aiming for war?

The Nazi’s radical anti-Semitism was an attempt to guarantee the complicity of the broadest possible swath of the populace in Nazi crimes. With their hands dripping with blood, most Germans would likely see no real choice but to fight to the death against the allies.

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.

Hitler's Europe Yes, welcome to Hitler's Europe... Come on, human race - for our children's sake if not our own. This is wakey, wakey time.

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.

The Second World War simplified things like race, and people came down on very clear lines.

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 belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

Yeah, I read history. But it doesn't make you nice. Hitler read history, too.

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

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.