Weimar Republic Quotes

If increased government spending with borrowed or newly created money is a 'stimulus,' then the Weimar Republic should have been stimulated to unprecedented prosperity, instead of runaway inflation and widespread economic desperation that ultimately brought Adolf Hitler to power.

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.

Look at the Weimar Republic and their hyperinflation in the early '20s. It didn't happen overnight. I've used the analogy, it's a lot like soybeans: you plant 'em, you wait. Conditions take some time. You need some sun; you need some water, but ultimately things start to grow, and are we in that phase or not?

Swastika on our steel helmets Our colours black, white and red, The Ehrhardt Brigade - Our name is spoken with dread. Workers, oh you workers, How badly you will fare When the Ehrhardt Brigade Its arms once more will bear. The Ehrhardt Brigade Smashes all to kingdom come; Woe, oh woe to you, You working class scum.

The system of National Socialism [Nazism] has been devised for the very reason of making a repetition of 1918 impossible.

I was a student in Germany when Hitler came to power.

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

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

In German history, we don't have many reasons to be proud.

I found a book facing out that I'd always meant to read: William Shirer's 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.' About a third of the way through, I suddenly, finally caught up to the fact that Shirer had been there in Berlin, from 1934 on, and was finally kicked out when the U.S. entered the war.

The SA, that is the - shorthand, those are the storm troopers. Those are the folks who are commanded by Captain Ernst Rohm.

Germany suffered most as a consequence of this Peace Treaty and the general insecurity which was bound to arise from it. The unemployment figure rose to a third of the number usually employed in the nation, which means, however, that by counting the families of the unemployed as well there were 26 million people in Germany out of a population of 65 millions faced by an absolutely hopeless future.

No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.

At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.

In 1918, Germany suffered the ghastly consequences of defeat; France suffered those of victory, the price of which was to divide and embitter French politics and culture and lead to its defeat in 1940.

Please refresh my memory. Is it Upper or Lower Silesia that we are giving away?

I'm a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.

Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar's failures.

Life is a cabaret, old chum! Come to the Cabaret.

I was member of the Diet as long as it existed, until May 1933.

The world probably wishes that Great Britain had rebuilt its defenses and stopped Germany from reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936.

It is a commentary on Berlin in 1931 that ... it was 'My Yiddishe Momme' that the Berlin Broadcasting Company asked for.

Once all the Germans were warlike and mean But that couldn't happen again We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen And they've hardly bothered us since then

I've never done a musical, and I don't think I could do one, but I would love to play Sally Bowles in 'Cabaret.'

Ludendorff and Hitler have everything ready for a march into Saxony and Thuringia. The North German Fascist organizations ... have made all their preparations for the military overthrow of Berlin and Hamburg ... The officers of the German army are equipping the Fascists.