Marcus Tullius Cicero
Heraclitus: "Nothing endures but change"
Plato: "The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
Thucydides: "What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta."
Livy: "This was the Athenians' war against the King of Macedon, a war of words. Words are the only weapons the Athenians have left."
Julius Cæsar- Iacta alea est (The die is cast)
Livy: "This was the Athenians' war against the King of Macedon, a war of words. Words are the only weapons the Athenians have left."
Julius Cæsar- Iacta alea est (The die is cast)
Veni Vedi Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered)
Cicero- Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum (Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system)
Augustus- Marmoream relinquo, quam latericiam accepi (I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.)
Virgil- Audentis Fortuna iuvat (Fortune favours the brave)
Pliny the Elder- Ruinis inminentibus musculi praemigrant. (When collapse is imminent, the little rodents flee)
Tacitus- Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominis imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant. (To plunder, slaughter and rape they give the false name of empire, and where they make a solitude they call it peace)
Accius- Oderint dum metuat (Let them fear, as long as they hate)
Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Edmund Burke
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Friedrich Nietzsche
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Friedrich Nietzsche
Quotes About History
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
Study History, study History! In History lies all the secrets of statecraft - Winston ChurchillThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it - George Santayana
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles - Karl Marx
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe - H. G. Wells
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past - George Orwell
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid - President Eisenhower
America is the only nation in history which has gone from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation - Georges Clemenceau
Man will never be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Denis Diderot
Only strong personalities can endure history. The weak are extinguished by it History is a pack of lies we play on the dead - Voltaire
Only a good-for- nothing is not interested in his past - Sigmund Freud
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there - LP Hartley
God cannot change the past, but historians can - Samuel Butler
"Every man deserves to be judged in the context of his times." - George Bernard Shaw
History is a people’s memory, and without memory man is demoted to the lower animals - Malcolm X
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. -Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Bernd Huppauf- The Blind War- A War with no Direction- revisionist WWI
Robert Wohl- A Place in the Sun- a German Need- orthodox WWIGermany had surpassed all other European countries in military power and was also very economically strong. The country believed that they had not earned the respect of Europe even though they were on the top, because they had not become a big imperial power. With a growing population, Germany needed an outlet to progress. This is extremely similar to the United States before the Spanish American War. Both countries were at a point, when the common idea was that remaining stagnant meant the decline to the nation (fuelling imperialism).
“Wilson made too many promises, and had to negotiate a peace settlement with leaders who were intent on preventing German hegemony, and not world peace”
Norman Stone- Russia getting too strong for Germany- revisionist WWI
Imanuel Geiss-Orthodox Germany to blame
Gerhard Ritter- defence of Germany
British historian Gary Sheffield: “The battle of the Somme was not a victory in itself, but without it the Entente would not have emerged victorious in 1918.”
Egmont Zechlin- revision WWI
Gerhard Schroeder- no one responsible- German revisionist WWI
Wolfgang Mommsen- German historian, Germany responsible for outbreak
AJP Taylor- revision, European international relations Europe: Grandeur and Decline: “The Austrian government was not much concerned to punish the crime of Sarajevo. They wanted to punish a different crime- the crime that Serbia committed by existing as a free national state.”"The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight".
Fritz Fischer- Germany responsible for WWI because of its aggressive pursuit of its Weltpolitik
Richard Hamilton- The Origins of World War I- revisionist
Kenneth Waltz- Man, the State, and War.- examining different views on causes of war. WWI was caused by human nature- supported also by theory of Confucius. 
George F. Kennan- 1894 alliance caused WWI
Christopher Clark (Sleepwalkers)- Italy started war with 1911 invasion of Libya which led to Ottoman collapse.- The protagonists of 1914 were "sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world."
- When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and attacked Belgrade on July 28th, 1914, it was Russia and France that bore the main responsibility for the general war that followed because they chose to resist Vienna’s move.
QUOTES
Sidney Bradshaw Fay: “A peaceable, sensible mass 500 million was hounded into war by a few dozen incapable leaders by falsified documents, lying stories of threats, and chauvinistic catchwords, into a war which in no way was destined or inevitable”- "Imperialism, nationalism, militarism and alliances- “all these things meshed together to create a collective impetus to war”.
British nation: “We want eight and we won’t wait”
Kaiser Wilhelm in Daily Telegraph, 1908: “You English, are mad, mad, mad as March hares” Kaiser 1911: “When the hour comes we are prepared for sacrifices, both of blood and of treasure”
After 1911 Agadir crisis Daily Mail newspaper: “Germany is deliberately preparing to destroy the British Empire. Britain alone stands in the way of Germany’s path to world power and domination”
After Agadir crisis Lloyd George: “Britain’s interests were vitally affected” Lloyd George 1934: “The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay... The nations backed their machines over the precipice… not one of them wanted war, certainly not on this scale”
Serbian Prime minister Pasic after defeating Bulgaria: “the first round is won, now for the second round- against Austria.”
Revisionist Richard Hamilton- The Origins of World War I: “There was no ‘slide’ to war, no war caused by ‘inadvertence’, but instead a world war caused by a fearful set of elite statesmen and rulers making deliberate choices.”
Nicholas II to Kaiser 29 July 1914: “An unjust war has been declared on a weak country. The anger in Russia shared fully by me is enormous. …I beg you in the name of our friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far.“
German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg asked General Moltke after Russian mobilisation: “Is the fatherland in danger?” “Yes” Bethmann-Hollweg: “For a mere scrap of paper, Great Britain is going to make a war?” (Treaty of London 1839)
“World was scared of present, Germany of future.”
Edgar Quinet, on the consequences of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War: "The ceding of Alsace-Lorraine is nothing but war in perpetuity under the mask of peace.
Professor David Fromkin, "Europe's Last Summer: Why the World Went to War in 1914": "The international conflict in the summer of 1914 consisted of two wars, not one. Both were started deliberately. They were started by rival empires that were bound together by mutual need... The wars were about power."
Professor David Fromkin, "Europe's Last Summer: Why the World Went to War in 1914": "The international conflict in the summer of 1914 consisted of two wars, not one. Both were started deliberately. They were started by rival empires that were bound together by mutual need... The wars were about power."
Debate on Causes
Debate began with the war itself. One key formulation was the War Guilt Clause, part of the Versailles Treaty. The Versailles Treaty at the end of the war claimed in Article 231 that Germany and its allies were solely responsible for launching the war. Reflecting wartime sentiment, the clause also justified reparations.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the notion of a collective responsibility became prominent.
In the interwar years, as international tensions relaxed, opinions shifted toward the notion of shared responsibility. British wartime leader David Lloyd George suggested that all European states “slithered over the edge” into war.
In the 1960s, the Fischer Debate renewed the question of the causes of the war. Renewed debate exploded in 1961 when German historian Fritz Fischer’s Grab for World Power (published in English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War) argued that Germany launched the war to become a superpower and developed war aims that anticipated the Nazis. In the furious confrontations that followed, the debate itself changed. Fischer’s critics came to argue that Germany miscalculated its gamble, rather than that the country intended world war.
In a later book, Fischer claimed Germany had planned war from 1912. Other explanations have also been advanced by historians through the years. Other interpretations stressed different causal factors. Did alliances themselves cause the war? “Secret diplomacy” was denounced after the war as a crucial factor. Did arms races and military planning cause the war by forcing a timetable? Henry Kissinger argues that alliances and mobilization plans created a “Doomsday Machine.” Was war an accident, as British historian A. J. P. Taylor argued, turning politicians into “prisoners of their own weapons?” Was imperialism the cause? Although colonial competition certainly poisoned the atmosphere, earlier clashes were negotiated. Was capitalism the cause, as Marxists argued? On the contrary, German industry’s dominance grew in peacetime. Though this is not a scholarly theory, were the Balkans to blame (as some hinted during the Balkan wars of the 1990s)? Rather, outside involvement of the Great Powers was the crucial variable.
Debate began with the war itself. One key formulation was the War Guilt Clause, part of the Versailles Treaty. The Versailles Treaty at the end of the war claimed in Article 231 that Germany and its allies were solely responsible for launching the war. Reflecting wartime sentiment, the clause also justified reparations.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the notion of a collective responsibility became prominent.
In the interwar years, as international tensions relaxed, opinions shifted toward the notion of shared responsibility. British wartime leader David Lloyd George suggested that all European states “slithered over the edge” into war.
In the 1960s, the Fischer Debate renewed the question of the causes of the war. Renewed debate exploded in 1961 when German historian Fritz Fischer’s Grab for World Power (published in English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War) argued that Germany launched the war to become a superpower and developed war aims that anticipated the Nazis. In the furious confrontations that followed, the debate itself changed. Fischer’s critics came to argue that Germany miscalculated its gamble, rather than that the country intended world war.
In a later book, Fischer claimed Germany had planned war from 1912. Other explanations have also been advanced by historians through the years. Other interpretations stressed different causal factors. Did alliances themselves cause the war? “Secret diplomacy” was denounced after the war as a crucial factor. Did arms races and military planning cause the war by forcing a timetable? Henry Kissinger argues that alliances and mobilization plans created a “Doomsday Machine.” Was war an accident, as British historian A. J. P. Taylor argued, turning politicians into “prisoners of their own weapons?” Was imperialism the cause? Although colonial competition certainly poisoned the atmosphere, earlier clashes were negotiated. Was capitalism the cause, as Marxists argued? On the contrary, German industry’s dominance grew in peacetime. Though this is not a scholarly theory, were the Balkans to blame (as some hinted during the Balkan wars of the 1990s)? Rather, outside involvement of the Great Powers was the crucial variable.
Where does the current interpretation of the causes of the war stand today? Most scholars today see Germany as bearing the main responsibility for the war, as it was willing to risk general war, though not aiming for it. Even as Germany is seen as mainly responsible, some degree of responsibility is shared by other actors in this tragedy. Although Fischer moved the debate forward on war aims, his arguments on intentions are not accepted.
Historical Perspectives of the Causes of the Great War
From 1998 Exam Paper
II: Topic 1: Causes, practices and effects of war
1. To what extent
should Germany be held responsible for causing both the First and Second World
Wars?
1. German Responsibility:
Fischer’s View: (German Historian)
i) Germany was responsible for war because of
its aggressive pursuit of its weltpolitik.
Germany willed the war in order to realize expansionist ambitions and to resole an acute domestic crisis.
ii) Fear of ‘encirclement´ after the Triple Entente and Russian army reforms meant that ‘a moment so favourable from a military point of view might never occur again´.
iii) Germany put pressure on Austro-Hungary to retaliate against Serbia (even if it meant General war). evidence for this is in the ‘blank cheque´
Germany willed the war in order to realize expansionist ambitions and to resole an acute domestic crisis.
ii) Fear of ‘encirclement´ after the Triple Entente and Russian army reforms meant that ‘a moment so favourable from a military point of view might never occur again´.
iii) Germany put pressure on Austro-Hungary to retaliate against Serbia (even if it meant General war). evidence for this is in the ‘blank cheque´
Criticism of Fischer:
i) German policy before 1914 seems contradictory and
lacking in clear aims.
ii) No evidence that German leader help expansionist aims before the ‘September Programme´ (which Fischer uses to explain the German desire for war)
iii) Places too much importance on the domestic crisis in the decision to launch a war. In fact, in 1914 Bulow and Hollweg dismissed war as a solution to the socialist problem.
ii) No evidence that German leader help expansionist aims before the ‘September Programme´ (which Fischer uses to explain the German desire for war)
iii) Places too much importance on the domestic crisis in the decision to launch a war. In fact, in 1914 Bulow and Hollweg dismissed war as a solution to the socialist problem.
What you should consider:
i) Distinguish
between Germany´s contribution to the growth in international tensions from
1900-13 with her role during the July crisis itself.
All Governments were responsible for tension until 1914 but not equally responsible for the fatal turn of events — for which Germany was culpable.
All Governments were responsible for tension until 1914 but not equally responsible for the fatal turn of events — for which Germany was culpable.
HISTORIANS
Audin-Rouzeau- The Versailles Treaty Going Too Far
James Joll- failure of LoN, ToV divided Europe- into countries who wanted to revise it, ones who wanted to uphold it and the ones who were not interestedAJP Taylor- failure of LoN, unfairness of ToV: “No German accepted it as a fair settlement and all Germans wanted to shake it off.”-Appeasement was a popular policy and that there was continuity in British foreign policy after 1933 and shattered the common view of the appeasers as a medium, degenerate clique that had mysteriously hijacked the British government sometime in the 1930s and who had carried out their policies in the face of massive public resistance. By portraying the leaders of the 1930s as real people attempting to deal with real problems, he made the first strides towards attempting an explanation of the actions of the appeasers rather than merely condemning them.
-Anschluss was enormously popular in Austria, discrediting the notion of Austria as a victim of Nazi aggression brought unwillingly into the Reich.
-One of the first historians to present Hitler as an ordinary human being rather than as a "madman;", an human being, albeit one who held morally repellent beliefs.
-Germany was capable of paying reparations to France after the First World War; the only problem was that the Germans were unwilling.
-Questioned degree to which fascist states were fulfilling a programme versus taking advantage of events.
-Hitler just as often reacted as acted, offering a balance to previous accounts where he was portrayed as the sole agent and the leaders of Britain and France as entirely reactive.
H.A.L Fisher, OM, FRS, PC - members of LoN responsible for war
John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace: "What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man was that age which came to an end in August 1914."
E.H.Carr- LoN did not fail but the members did, ToV was based on unworkable idealistic principles-because it did not solve German Problem just selfish needs
Anthony Lentin- ToV failed to tackle the underlying potential of Germany
Baroness Ruth Henig- ToV was a good idea; “wasn’t excessively harsh on Germany” “The 14 points appeared to promise some protection against punitive French and British demands”
Paul Birdsall- USA not involved-main reason for failure of ToV and LoN
Paul Kennedy- ToV and LoN was successful in 1920s, but crushed by militarism of Japan, Germany and Italy in 1930’s cause by Great Depression
Denis Mack Smith- criticism of Mussolini
Anonymous French officer during the Great War: "If the Italians come in on our side, they'll get into trouble and we'll have to send ten divisions to save them. If they attack us, we'll have to send ten divisions to hold them off. Either way, ten divisions."
Hannah Arendt- Italian fascism much less totalitarian than Germany and Russia
Sir Ian Keshaw- comparison of domestic policies of Hitler and Mussolini
MacGregor Knox- greatness of Mussolini’s aims
Friedrich von Hayek: "We did not realise how fragile our civilisation was."
"How's school? Don't bother too much about European geography. I think it's all going to change." French ambulance driver to his son from the Western Front.
Philip (P.M.H.) Bell about Versailles: “The settlement was a rickety edifice which was unstable from the start.”
About Article 231: More commonly known as the War Guilt Clause, or Kriegsschuldfrage here in Germany
About Article 231: More commonly known as the War Guilt Clause, or Kriegsschuldfrage here in Germany
· Stated that “Germany accepts the
responsibility of her and her allies for causing all of the loss and damage” to
the victorious powers, to whom “war was imposed on… by the aggression of
Germany and her allies” – Forced Germany to take the blame for the outbreak of
WW1, and was used to justify the extortionate £6.6 billion reparations sum. Ironic
because Lloyd George had stated previously that WW1 was nobody’s fault, and
that it was “stumbled into”
· Created hostilities in Germany – very
controversial, Germans wanted revenge. Was used to placate the British and
French public, with cries of ‘hang the Kaiser’ and Eric Geddes (first lord of
admiralty) – “squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak!”
· Perceived in Germany as inaccurate, led to
the TOV being branded as a ‘diktat’
· If Germany didn’t agree to it, war would
reconvene – they had no other choice.
· War cannot be blamed on one person, can it?
· “Germany’s death sentence” – historians
such as Martin Gilbert argue that this led to the rise of Nazism in Germany, a
claim that Margaret Macmillan brands “erroneous”.
· Led to anger within the Germans – newspaper
headings such as “we will never stop until we get back what we deserve.. treaty
is only a scrap of paper – we will seek revenge, it is full of injustices,
brutalities and exploitations”
· Dylan Thomas – “The hand that signed the
paper felled a city, and locusts came”
Anthony Adamthwaite: Treaty of Versailles "was a brave attempt to deal with intractable, perhaps insoluble problems.”Lenin – “This is no peace, but terms dictated to a defenceless victim by armed robbers”
German MP – “shameless blow in the face of common sense” ·
Harold Nicolson – “We left the conference conscious that the treaty imposed upon out enemy was neither just nor wise”
About Treaty of Trianon: Wilson: “The proposal to dismember Hungary is absurd” Winston Churchill: “Ancient poets and theologians could not imagine the suffering that Trianon brought to the innocent”
Woodrow Wilson: “I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty”"Her military men published books and told us what they were going to do, but we dismissed them. We said 'The thing is a nightmare. The man is a crank. It could not be that he speaks for a great Government. The thing is inconceivable and can not happen'. Very well, could it not happen? Did it not happen? ...The great nations of the world have been asleep."
British people wanted Germans to pay: “everything you can squeeze out of a lemon”
German foreign minister Count Brockdorff-Rantzau- “It is demanded that we confess ourselves guilty. Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie...” “..Those who sign
this treaty will sign the death sentence of a million Germans… may the hand
that sign this treaty wither” Lloyd George: “We shall to fight another war again in 25 years time”“We want to protect the future against a repetition of the horrors of war”
“I didn’t do too bad considering I was sat between Jesus (Wilson) and Napoleon (Clemenceau)”
Clemenceau – “there are 20 million Germans too many” ·
French Marshall Ferdinand Foch 1920- “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”
JR Western in 1971: “The crisis [Abyssinia] was fatal to the League. Nobody took it seriously again. They got ready for the Second World War.”
Historian J Joll 1976: “After Manchuria and Abyssinia, people decided that it was no longer any use putting hopes in the League.” Historian AJP Taylor 1966: “The League died in 1935. One day it was a powerful body imposing sanctions, the next day it was a useless fraud, everybody running away from if as quickly as possible. Hitler watched.”HAL Fisher 1935: “If the nations want peace, the League gives them the way by which peace can be kept. Bet, League or no League, a country which is determined to have a war can always have it”
Chamberlain: “War is a terrible thing, and we must make sure that it is the great issues that are involved.” “Hitler was a man who could be relied on. Chamberlain on Czechoslovakia- “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Chamberlain about Munich: “I believe it is peace for our time.”
- "In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I may add that the French Government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter." - 31st March 1939
- “This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such understanding has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.” Neville Chamberlain - 3rd September 1939
- "This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do: That is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much... I trust I may live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed and a liberated Europe has been re-established." Neville Chamberlain - 3rd September 1939
Hitler: “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”, “The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a medium one.”, “The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.”, “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.”-We will never attempt to subjugate foreign peoples. speech of May 27, 1933.
-We have no territorial claims to make in Europe. speech of March 7, 1936
-The German Reich Government shall thus unconditionally abide by the other articles governing the coexistence of the nations, including territorial provisions, and put into effect solely by means of peaceful understanding those amendments which become inevitable by virtue of the changing times. speech of May 21, 1935.
-It is the last territorial demand I shall make in Europe... I repeat here before you, once this issue has been resolved; there will no longer be any further territorial problems for Germany in Europe! speech of September 26, 1938.
-We do not want any Czechs at all. ibid.
Mussolini- “Obedience not discussion” "Believe, Obey, Fight!"
ARENDT, HANNAH
(1906–1975) One of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth century,
Arendt sought refuge from the Nazis in Paris in 1933, eventually coming to the
US with her husband Heinrich Blücher in 1941. Arendt traced the origins of
totalitarianism to nineteenth-century racism and imperialism. Her work helped
to popularise the notion of totalitarianism as a novel form of
twentieth-century dictatorship by pointing to parallels in the tyrannies of
Hitler and Stalin, despite their ideological differences. By mobilising the
atomized masses around their respective ideologies both regimes adopted a form
of rule that made unprecedented mass murder possible, thus marking a radical
break in European history and Western civilisation. Yet in Eichmann in
Jerusalem, Arendt struck a different note, emphasizing
“the banality of evil” and the potentially pernicious effects of bureaucratic
careerism. Her portrait of Eichmann as a colourless but ambitious bureaucrat
scrupulously following orders, rather than as a demonic sadist or virulent
anti-Semite, aroused controversy by seeming to diminish his wickedness; her
purpose, though, was not to trivialise the evil of the Holocaust but rather to
warn that the failure to understand the “normality” of many perpetrators was to
ignore the dangers of similar horrors occurring in other states under different
historical conditions. Her critics accused her of slighting anti- Semitism as a
driving factor in the Holocaust so as to emphasise the genocidal potential
residing in modern states. Her criticism of the role of some members of the
Jewish Councils in collaborating with the Nazis aroused controversy as well,
but it also stimulated further research that has borne out some of her
contentions. 
BESSEL, RICHARD
(b. 1948) Bessel, many of whose books are in my classroom) has contributed
numerous publications to the study of political violence, paramilitary
formations, and the police in twentieth-century Germany. Bessel has been
critical of Wehler’s Sonderweg
interpretation, which traces the origins of Nazism to an inherited set of
social structures peculiar to Germany. He has also been critical of Marxist
interpretations and of both totalitarianism theory and modernization theory. In
his view Nazism did indeed mark the culmination of a long tradition of European
racism, but not one confined to Germany. What was unique to Germany was the
fact that the specific conditions resulting from the First World War and German
defeat allowed a band of political thugs imbued with racist ideology to capture
power in a highly developed industrial nation. The memory of the humiliating
end of the First World War and a determination not to permit a repetition
remained powerful influences on Nazi policies right up to 1945. Bessel has also
made a sharp distinction between the “revolutionary” Nazis and the inept
“counter-revolutionary” elite that helped them to gain power and shared many of
their goals. 
BOCK, GISELA (b.
1942) Leading German feminist historian and author of Zwangssterilisierung im
Nationalsozialismus which linked Nazi racial policy to Nazi policy toward women
in general. Bock argued that “compulsory sterilisation affected women more than
men . . . because women’s identities were more closely connected to their
sexual fertility.” While Bock’s
argument that women were more adversely affected than men by the Nazis’ eugenic
practices has been generally accepted, her conceptual equation of anti-feminism
with anti- Semitism as two sides of the same deadly racial policy remains
controversial. Bock acknowledged that some women had contributed to Nazi crimes
in their functions outside the home, but she continued to deny any “specifically
female guilt” in the traditionally separate private sphere.
BROSZAT, MARTIN
(1926–1989) Argued the failure of Weimar was Hindenburg’s fault. He introduced the novel concept of Resistenz to
describe a passive kind of nonconformity that was far more widespread in the
Bavarian population than active resistance (Widerstand) to Nazi rule. Broszat called for the “historicisation” of National Socialism, a plea to
integrate the Third Reich within the continuity of German history rather than
treating it as an episode outside of history and thus inaccessible to
historical understanding. Broszat warned that routine and ritualistic moral
condemnation of Nazism for didactic reasons stood in the way of full
understanding, which he believed could only be achieved by applying the same
rigorous and objective scholarly methodology as historians applied to other
periods of history. He denied that use of normal historical methodology would
inevitably lead to a more favourable evaluation of Nazism. Broszat introduced the notion of “polycracy” to describe the often
chaotic Nazi administrative system characterized by personal rivalries,
jurisdictional disputes, power struggles, overlapping competencies, and
bureaucratic confusion.
BROWNING, CHRISTOPHER
(b. 1944) A leading American historian of the Holocaust, Browning published
what has come to be recognised as the most authoritative work of synthesis on
the early stages of the Holocaust. He did not believe that the Nazis pursued a master
plan aimed at the physical extermination of the Jews from the very start; but
Browning was also critical of historical interpretations that portrayed the
Holocaust as motivated predominantly by rational or economic goals, such as
modernizing agriculture in eastern Europe by reducing the “surplus population” or
combating food shortages by destroying “useless eaters”. According to Browning
the Holocaust can only be explained as a consequence of the Nazis’ ideological
obsessions and extreme anti-Semitism; the
decision-making that led to the “final solution” should be understood as the
product of the interaction between local and central authorities in which,
however, the central authorities played the predominant role. Browning
contended that the decision for the “final solution” must have been reached by
October 1941, for in that month plans for the deportation of Jews from the
German Reich were developed, all Jewish emigration from areas controlled by
Germany was prohibited, and construction of the Belzec extermination camp was
under way. More controversially, Browning argued that it was the euphoria of
battlefield success in the Soviet Union, not the prospects of impending defeat or
the entry of the United States into the war (as argued by Gerlach), that led
Nazi leaders to take the decisive step to the physical annihilation of all
European Jews. 
BULLOCK, ALAN
Lord (1914–2004) A focus in class, British historian whose scholarly interests
extended well beyond German history and the Nazi era. His importance as a historian
of Nazi Germany rests on his influential Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), the
first comprehensive biography of the Nazi leader. However, his portrait of
Hitler as an opportunist without principles or convictions motivated primarily
by the desire to wield power is no longer widely shared. Bullock himself
revised his earlier interpretation in his book, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel
Lives (1991), in which he stressed the importance of ideology and Hitler’s
commitment to the basic ideas he expressed in Mein Kampf. Quotes: “Hitler was jobbed into power by the old guard.” Hitler was a “Mountebank”
BURLEIGH, MICHAEL
(b. 1955) Trained as a medievalist, Burleigh developed an interest in Nazi
Germany as a result of work on his first book, a history of the Teutonic Order
in the fifteenth century, published in 1984. His opus magnum, The Third Reich,
was written in a tone of moral
outrage which described the unique criminality of the Third Reich in grim detail.
Its interpretation of Nazism, however, fell well within the conventional
parameters of totalitarianism theory and shared the weaknesses of that
paradigm, highlighting the similarities between Nazism and communism, while
neglecting their significant differences. Burleigh invoked the excessively
vague concept of “political religion” as his main explanatory trope,
attributing the force of Nazism (like communism) to its utopian urge to create
a new kind of man and a heaven on earth based on the triumph of the master race
(rather than, as in communism, the triumph of the underclass). In contrast to
structural interpretations of Nazi Germany, especially ones that implicate
Western rationalism or bourgeois capitalist society in Nazism or in the
Holocaust, Burleigh stressed the uniquely irrational, racist, and anti-modern
aspects of the Nazi regime and the personal responsibility of Hitler and his
leading henchmen for Nazi atrocities. 
EVANS, RICHARD
Sir (b. 1947) Originally a specialist in nineteenth-century German social history,
British historian Richard Evans has become one of the leading authorities on
Nazi Germany with his three-volume history of the Third Reich, all of which are
in my classroom. Evans adopted a less Hitler-centred or moralistic approach
than earlier comprehensive histories of Nazism in English (such as those by
Kershaw, Burleigh, or Shirer), and he also challenged the Sonderweg notion that
Germany was by tradition or history uniquely susceptible to Hitler’s racist
message or totalitarian rule. Evans’s narrative is especially effective in
portraying the complexities and ambiguities of the Nazis’ seizure of power,
Nazi rule, and popular reactions to the Nazis. His book, Lying about
Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (available right), resulted from
his testimony in American historian Deborah Lipstadt’s successful defence in a
libel suit brought by British historian David Irving, whom Lipstadt accused of denying the Holocaust.Chief quote: "To say someone is morally good or bad is either unnecessary or simplistic. The principal task of history is to explain and interpret, not to issue moral judgements."
FEST, JOACHIM (1926–2006)
Conservative journalist and historian best known for the first major biography of Hitler by a German historian,
stressing his misguided idealism and nationalism. Taking issue with Bullock’s
contention that Hitler was driven only by the desire for power, Fest emphasised
the importance of Hitler’s strong ideological convictions. “The problem was not
one of criminal impulses but of a perverted moral energy.” Fest answered in the
affirmative his own question as to whether Hitler would have been considered
“one of the greatest German statesmen” if he had died in 1938. For Fest the
“negative greatness” of Hitler’s personality explained Nazism better than did
social or economic developments. Fest’s account of the last days of the Third
Reich, Inside Hitler’s Bunker, provided the basis for the film Der Untergang
(The Downfall) in 2004. FISCHER, FRITZ(1908–1999) Influential German historian whose landmark book Germany’s Aims in
the First World War (first published under the title Griff nach der Weltmacht
[Grasp for World Power] in 1961) precipitated a controversy in Germany and led
to a new awareness of German responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914. An
older generation of German historians, chief among them Gerhard Ritter,
rejected Fischer’s assertion that the German leadership had taken advantage of
the assassination of the Austrian crown prince by Serbian nationalists in June
1914 to pursue policies that they knew were likely to result in war. Fischer
repudiated the prevailing consensus among Germans that war had been forced on
their nation and that Germany bore no greater responsibility for the conflict
than the other European powers. Fischer’s thesis that the German leadership
consciously risked war because of their confidence in the superiority of German
arms in a continental war has been widely accepted and was corroborated by
historian Mark Hewitson in his book on the origins of the First World War in
2004. The “Fischer thesis” did not change the historical consensus on Germany’s
guilt for the Second World War, which was never in doubt in any case. Its main
effect on the historiography of Nazism was to have revealed continuities
linking the expansionist goals of the Wilhelmian Empire to those of the Nazis. 
FRIEDLANDER, HENRY (b. 1930) A survivor of the Nazi camps, Friedlander described the continuity between the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program, launched in 1939, and the “final solution,” the killing of the Jews. Friedlander advocated expanding the definition of the Holocaust to embrace not only Jewish victims but all victim groups defined in biological terms, which would include the gypsies and the mentally and physically disabled. Friedlander argues the Holocaust resulted from the conjunction of two main strands of Nazi ideology – anti-Semitism and eugenic selection – under the favourable conditions for systematic murder created by total war.
FRIEDLÄNDER, SAUL
(b. 1932) Friedländer introduced the concept of “redemptive” anti-Semitism, a
radical form of Jew- hatred resulting from the convergence of racial
anti-Semitism and a pseudo-religious ideology of redemption (or perdition).
“Redemptive” anti-Semitism was based on a vision of an apocalyptic struggle to
the death between the Jews and “Aryan humanity” and served an integrating and
mobilising function in the Nazi system. While Friedländer differed with
“intentionalists,” who argued that extermination of the Jews had always been
Hitler’s goal, he did insist that the “redemptive” anti- Semitism of Hitler and
the core of the Nazi Party was the key to the origins of the Holocaust.
Friedländer recognised the role of technocratic rationality in the extermination
programme, but insisted on the centrality of Hitler and his ideological goals. 
GELLATELY, ROBERT
(b. 1943) Referred to regularly in HL classes, Canadian-American historian
whose most important contributions to the historiography of Nazism to date have
been his studies of popular cooperation in the totalitarian Nazi regime which
marked a shift in emphasis from public dissent and non- cooperation in earlier
literature on Nazi Germany to an emphasis on the participation, compliance, and
accommodation of ordinary German citizens. Gellately concluded that the
efficient functioning of the understaffed secret police was dependent on the
continuing cooperation of ordinary Germans in denouncing their fellow citizens.
Gellately argued, however, that loyalty to the regime, ideological fanaticism,
or fear of Gestapo reprisal were less important as motives for denunciation
than opportunism, conformism, professional rivalries, personal grudges, and
conflicts between neighbours. Not only was it far smaller than had previously
been assumed, but its personnel were drawn mainly from the professional police
force that pre-dated the Nazi regime. Gellately debunked what remained of the
popular conception of the Nazi regime as a police state imposed by force on an
unsuspecting population, which then found it too late to resist What makes
Gellately’s findings on Nazi Germany particularly relevant to contemporary
concerns is the implication that a totalitarian system can function effectively
even without the use of large- scale coercion. Totalitarianism thus constitutes
an insidious potential threat even in societies that perceive themselves as
democratic. 
GERLACH, CHRISTIAN
(b. 1963) Young German historian whose discovery of Heinrich Himmler’s
appointment calendar in a newly opened Soviet archive in 1997 led to a reappraisal
of the long-disputed question about whether and when Hitler made the decision
to launch the “final solution.” Based on several of Himmler’s entries, as well
as newly discovered pages of Goebbels’ diary, Gerlach concluded that
Hitler announced his decision to exterminate all European Jews to a meeting of
Reichsleiter and Gauleiter in Berlin on 12 December 1941, one day after the
German declaration of war on the United States. The Wannsee Conference, originally
intended to decide the fate of the German Jews, was now assigned the function
of coordinating the implementation of the Final Solution and deciding whether
German Mischlings and Jews married to Germans should be included in the
extermination program. Gerlach’s dating of Hitler’s decision to early December
ran counter to Christopher Browning’s contention that Hitler’s decision to
extend the killing program to include all European Jews had already been made
by October 1941. Gerlach also disputed Browning’s hypothesis that Hitler’s
decision was the result of the euphoria that accompanied German battlefield
successes in the east in late summer 1941, arguing instead that the US entry
into the war was the crucial catalyst of Hitler’s decision. 
GOLDHAGEN, DANIEL J. (b. 1959) His best-selling book,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (a couple of
copies in my classroom), became the subject of a fierce controversy among historians
about the causes of the Holocaust, the participation of ordinary people in
atrocities, and the motivation of the perpetrators. Goldhagen contended that
the Holocaust was a German “national project” perpetrated with the full
knowledge and approval of the German public. He identified an “eliminationist” anti-Semitism so
deeply rooted in German history and culture as to have become part of the
common sense of the average German. In collapsing the distinction between Nazis
and Germans, Goldhagen violated a taboo that had been useful in reintegrating
the post-war Federal Republic in the Western cold war alliance. Goldhagen was roundly criticised for
overstating German exceptionalism, offering an overly simplistic, monocausal
explanatory model for the origin of the Holocaust, neglecting the political
context in which Nazism arose, insisting that anti-Semitism was more pervasive
in Germany than in other countries without providing any comparative data, and
for exaggerating the novelty of his thesis that anti-Semitism was the root
cause of the Holocaust. As the deliberate use of the phrase “ordinary Germans” in his title made clear, Goldhagen directly challenged Christopher Browning who had concluded that ordinary men became brutal killers, not because they were ideological fanatics or bloodthirsty sadists but because of situational factors such as peer pressure, conformism, careerism, deference to higher authority, the brutalisation of war, and the routinisation of killing. Goldhagen argued instead that German killers were decisively motivated by passionate hatred of Jews, a hostility shared by virtually all Germans as a result of their socialisation in a specifically German culture of “eliminationist” anti- Semitism.
HILLGRUBER, ANDREAS
(1925–1989) Prominent West German
diplomatic and military historian of the generation just old enough to have
been drafted into the German army in the closing stages of the Second World
War. Argued a strongly
“intentionalist” view in which the course of the Third Reich and the Second
World War were almost exclusively attributed to Hitler’s personal and
ideological goals. Hillgruber retracted his earlier contention that the German
invasion of the Soviet Union had been a “preventive war” (a contention
successfully refuted by the American historian Gerhard Weinberg in 1954).
Hillgruber now attributed the attack on Russia to Hitler’s fanatical racist
beliefs and desire for Lebensraum. Whilst
Hillgruber agreed with Fischer that the German leadership brought about the
First World War by its high- risk diplomatic strategy, he discounted the role
of domestic factors in the German government’s decisions. Hillgruber’s pronounced
Hitler-centrism also left him open to the charge of indirectly exculpating the
German elites by making Hitler solely responsible for the Holocaust and other
Nazi atrocities. 
IRVING, DAVID His controversial 1977 book Hitler’s War suggests that Hitler was
very much a creature of his time, rather than a power-crazed madman.
Irving’s Hitler is a brilliant politician who seized government not to
exploit the situation, but because the situation – and the people of
Germany – demanded a dictator. 
JÄCKEL, EBERHARD
(b. 1929) Jäckel is a leading representative of the “intentionalist” school of
thought- Jäckel believed that Hitler’s world-view was formed in the
aftermath of the First World War and aimed for the physical destruction of the
Jews as early as 1924. According to Jäckel, extermination of the Jews was an
essential German war aim from the start of the Second World War. The essential
political decisions were taken by Hitler alone as the logical consequence of
his ideological obsessions, justifying in Jäckel’s judgement his labelling of
the Nazi regime as Alleinherrschaft. Jäckel believed that
Hitler’s ultimate aim was continental, not global domination. 
KERSHAW, IAN Sir (b. 1943) Leading British historian of Nazi
Germany, whose two- volume biography of Hitler, Hitler: Hubris (1998) and
Hitler: Nemesis (2002), both in the school library, has been widely recognised
as the most reliable account of Hitler’s life and rule to date. It is not so
much a personal biography as it is a study of how Hitler interacted with German
society and exploited and mirrored the fears and resentments of the German
population after the First World War. Kershaw introduced the innovative concept
of “working towards the Führer” to explain why so many Nazi policies originated
on the local or regional levels and how an apparently dysfunctional Nazi
administrative system of competing authorities, personal rivalries, and
overlapping competencies was nonetheless able to carry out the murder of the
Jews efficiently and obsessively. Hitler, who showed little interest in the
day-to-day business of government or in administrative detail, needed only to
establish the broad parameters of policy. Subordinate leaders and their
underlings were encouraged to exercise their own initiative in fulfilling
Hitler’s perceived objectives.“The repeated claim before the ‘seizure of power’ – that the NSDAP, as a national social-revolutionary movement, and not simply another political party… would create new bonds of unity through its elimination and transcending of the party system, was highly attractive and conveyed much of Nazism’s dynamic appeal.”
KOONZ, CLAUDIA
(b. 1940) Leading American feminist historian of Nazism, Koonz described women
as active participants in the Nazi system despite their restriction to the
private sphere. Whilst men were responsible for public policy, women provided
the emotional support in domestic life that helped to stabilise the regime. Koonz emphasised the role of German women as willing accomplices
and contributors to Nazi power.
LONGERICH, PETER
(b. 1955) A leading member of a younger generation of German historians who
have used the opening of East European archives after the collapse of the
Soviet Union to make important contributions to the historiography of the
Holocaust. Longerich concluded that Hitler played a central, hands-on role in
the origins and implementation of the Holocaust, even though there probably was
no written order or even a single basic decision (Grundsatzentscheidung). Longerich traced the extermination policy through several
stages, beginning with the resettlement of Jews into ghettos after the defeat
of Poland in October 1939. Although the ethnic cleansing of Soviet Jews began
with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Longerich
believed that it was not until May 1942 that the “final solution” was extended
to all European Jews under German control. Unlike Christopher Browning,
Longerich did not consider the construction of killing centres, the deportation
of Jews from the Reich, or the prohibition of Jewish emigration in October 1941
as compelling evidence that a basic decision to include all European Jews in
the extermination program had already been made in 1941. “The history of the
Holocaust,” Longerich argued, “is not the history of an extermination program
that progressed without deviation as a result of a single order, but is rather
the history of a process, in the course of which various interests were
weighed, priorities established, and decisions made – a process that was, in
short, the result of a policy, but shaped by politics.” In “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Longerich addressed the paradox that Nazi leaders spoke openly
about the destruction of the Jews in public speeches but treated the details of
the death camps as a state secret. By announcing the extermination program
without revealing its full scale and barbarity, the Nazis ensured the
complicity of the German public while avoiding the potentially demoralising
effects of that knowledge. The purpose of this double strategy of treating the
Holocaust as an “open secret” was to convince the German people that there was
no alternative to fighting the war to the bitter end.
MARRUS, MICHAEL R.
(b. 1941) Marrus argues that anti-Semitism was not forced on the Vichy regime by the Nazis but
originated from domestic sources and was marked by unusual brutality. Marrus was
critical of Pius XII’s reluctance to assist non-Catholic Jews and his failure
to publicise reports of the Holocaust or of the plight of the Polish Church. 
MOMMSEN, HANS (b.
1930) Member of a famous family of historians, Mommsen is the leading representative of the
left-liberal “functionalist” interpretation of Nazism that emerged to
prominence in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Mommsen stressed the culpability
of Germany’s conservative economic and military elites both in Hitler’s rise to
power and in his system of rule. He has been critical of potentially apologetic
interpretations that overemphasise Hitler’s personal role in the Nazi system,
thus neglecting the complicity of collaborating elites as well as the
conditions and structures that allowed Hitler to gain such indisputable overall
control. According to Mommsen, anti-Semitic ideology and Hitler’s intentions
are not enough to account for the “final solution,” which was conceived as a
sequence of emergency measures to solve the self-created “Jewish problem”
rather than as the realization of a master plan for extermination. Mommsen
certainly did not slight ideological factors in his interpretation of Nazism,
however. Ideology provided the indispensable motor of “cumulative
radicalisation.” Mommsen attributed Germany’s fanatical resistance at the end
of the war to the Nazis’ ideological mobilisation and their belief that a
resolute will could make up for lack of material resources. In his account of
Nazi policies in the Second World War, Mommsen gave great weight to Nazi
leaders’ determination to avoid the perceived mistakes of German leaders in the
First World War, who had failed to secure the unity of the home front. Mommsen
was critical of totalitarianism theory, which located Nazism closer to
revolutionary movements of the left than to counter-revolutionary movements of
the right. Mommsen also rejected interpretations that depicted Nazism as a
modernising movement. Mommsen played a leading role in the Historikerstreit.
NOLTE, ERNST (b.
1923) The leading representative of right-wing historical revisionism in Germany
seeking to “normalise” the history of Nazism, Nolte achieved public notoriety
in the Historikerstreit with his assertion
that Nazism must be understood as an at least partially justified response to
the greater evil and destructiveness of Soviet Communism. He denied the
unique criminality of the Holocaust, portraying it instead as a radical
defensive reaction to the perceived genocidal threat posed by “Asiatic
Bolshevism” and the Russian Revolution. According to him, Nazi plans to
destroy an entire race, the Jews, were modelled on the precedent established by
the Bolsheviks in their efforts to destroy an entire class, the bourgeoisie.
Nolte attributed ultimate responsibility for the atrocities of the twentieth
century to the communist revolutionaries, without whose provocation there would
have been no Nazi counter-revolution. Nolte’s right-wing bias and apologetic
purposes became increasingly apparent, linking Hitler’s cause with the Western
cause in the cold war. Nolte thus provided an interpretation that allows Nazism
to be at least partially rehabilitated without denying its radical nature or
genocidal crimes. 
OVERY, RICHARD
(b. 1947) British military and economic historian and one of the foremost
authorities on the Second World War. He disputed Mason’s claim that Hitler had
been forced to go to war in 1939 to prevent an economic crisis. Overy contended
that Hitler had only miscalculated the likelihood of Britain and France
intervening in the war against Poland. Overy rejected the notion that the
German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a preventive war. In The
Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (2004) Overy concluded that the
similarities between the two regimes outweighed the differences. Both systems
were based on utopian visions that were similar in form though divergent in
purpose, and both regimes understood that their true enemy was the liberal
West. Critics of Overy’s revived totalitarianism model, however, questioned his
failure to differentiate between the very different popular bases on which
these two regimes rested. 
PEUKERT, DETLEV J. K. (1950–1990) Short-lived but highly influential German historian and part
of the movement of Alltagsgeschichte in the 1980s to
which he contributed a history of the experiences of ordinary Germans during
the Third Reich. Peukert stressed the ambivalence of popular interactions with
the regime, ranging from active collaboration to passive resistance, and revealed
the ambiguous but unavoidable complicity even of Germans who did not share the
Nazi ideology. Peukert’s most significant contribution to the historiography of
Nazism, however, was his critique of modernisation theory (the notion that
Nazism can best be understood as a product of inadequate modernisation). Peukert
took issue with the conventional notion that Nazism resulted from Germany’s
failure to modernise and argued instead that Nazism represented the dark side
of Germany’s extraordinary modernity. In Peukert’s view Nazi racial policy,
including compulsory sterilization, eugenic abortion, euthanasia (the killing
of the mentally and physically disabled), and the “final solution of the Jewish
question,” exemplified a central feature of modernity, Machbarkeitswahn (the
illusion that anything is doable), the belief that society could be renovated
and social problems resolved through the application of biological principles
and practices. In Peukert’s interpretation Nazism typified the murderous
potential of modern social engineering projects. Peukert rejected the
comforting notion that Nazi barbarism marked a relapse into the primitive past,
warning that it might instead offer a preview of a potentially genocidal
future. 
RAUSCHNING, HERMANN
(1887–1982) A prominent German conservative, veteran of the First World War,
and member of the Nazi party in 1931, Rauschning argued Hitler’s movement was
solely opportunistic, without consistent ideology, program, or principle. By
describing the Nazis as only interested in exercising power, Rauschning in
effect extricated his own anti-democratic and anti-communist values and goals
from complicity in the Nazi project without denying them. In some respects
Rauschning anticipated totalitarianism theory by situating the Nazi movement on
the left rather than the right of the political spectrum. Many of the direct quotations
in his 1939 book, Hitler Speaks, purportedly based on conversations with
Hitler, were fabricated, and this book is no longer considered a reliable
historical source. 
RITTER, GERHARD
(1888–1967) Like most German nationalists he rejected the Versailles Treaty and
the Weimar parliamentary system, embraced the “stab-in-the-back” legend, and
denied German guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. While rejecting
the Nazis’ extremism in the 1930s, particularly their violent persecution of
the Jews, Ritter admired and celebrated Hitler’s foreign policy successes and
supported German expansionism. These nationalist attitudes coloured his
historical works as well. According to Ritter, Nazism was the product of mass
politics and the revolutionary movements emanating from the French Revolution.
He rejected attempts to trace the origins of Nazism to German history,
attributing it instead to such European- wide aspects of modernity as
industrialisation, materialism, rationalism, Marxism, secularisation, Darwinian
science, and technology. However, the consensus today is
that Ritter was simply wrong in identifying Nazism as a direct consequence of
the rise of socialism rather than as a reaction to it. 
SHIRER, WILLIAM L.
(1904–1993) Journalist turned historian, William Shirer is today primarily
known for his massive best-seller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960),
a well-documented, richly detailed, non-academic narrative account written from
a strongly anti-Nazi perspective. Shirer was thoroughly familiar with Germany
and with the Nazi hierarchy, having served as a CBS radio reporter in Berlin at
the start of the war before being forced to leave in December 1940. His Berlin
Diary, published in early 1941, accurately predicted the German invasion of
Russia and the outbreak of war with the United States. It also contained eyewitness
accounts of the Nuremberg party rallies, the French capitulation on June 22,
1940, and numerous other events. TAYLOR, A. J. P.
(1906–1990) Popular but controversial British historian, whose major work was
The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (1954). His importance for the
historiography of Nazism is based on two works, The Course of German History: A
Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815 (1946) and The Origins of the
Second World War (1961). The former, written during the war and inevitably
reflecting the hostile passions of that conflict, was a classic indictment of
Germany’s anti-democratic and militarist tradition. In his later book on the
events leading up to the Second World War Taylor seemed to reverse course,
blaming the out- break of the war on Britain’s disastrous policy of
appeasement, thus seemingly taking some of the onus of guilt from Germany’s
leadership. By characterizing Hitler’s foreign policy as not significantly
different from earlier German policies, Taylor did not intend to absolve Hitler
of culpability, however. Instead, his assertion that Hitler’s policies were
consistent with those of mainstream German nationalists was intended as a
rebuke to British leaders, whose miscalculations and policy of appeasement made
war in September 1939 unavoidable. Taylor was particularly critical of the failure
of the British government to follow up Soviet overtures for an anti- fascist
military alliance in the 1930s. Only by resurrecting the grand alliance of the
First World War, which in fact came about after the German invasion of the USSR
and the Japanese attack on the US in 1941, might war have been prevented in
1939. Main quote: "The Depression put the wind in Hitler’s sails"
TOLAND, JOHN Strove for dispassionate objectivity about Hitler. Ignoring the presumption that Hitler was ‘evil’, Toland sought to identify his positive attributes and qualities, to understand why so many supported and even worshipped him. 
TOOZE, ADAM Young
British economic historian whose impressive tome, The Wages of Destruction, interprets the Second World War as
Hitler’s desperate response (in the context of his conviction that Germany was
locked in a mortal racial struggle with the Jews) to the challenge posed by the
allegedly Jewish-dominated United States, both as a rival to Germany for global
power and as a seductive model of a way of life that threatened traditional
European institutions by its affluence and gratification of material and
sensual desires. The book describes in unprecedented detail the extraordinary
mobilisation of German resources during the war to overcome the material
advantages of Germany’s foes. Tooze places the genocide of the Jews within a
framework that gives weight both to overarching ideological tenets and mundane
pragmatic considerations. Whilst in no way denying the Nazis’ predatory
practices, Tooze showed that the Nazis would not have been able to finance the
war solely by conquest and spoliation. Moreover, the sacrifices imposed on the
German population were borne unequally by Germany’s subordinate classes. 
WAITE, ROBERT G. L.
(1919–1999) Canadian-American historian whose book, Vanguard of Nazism
(1952), pioneered the study of the Free Corps as the forerunners of Nazism in
the period following the First World War. Waite also authored a biography of
Hitler, The Psychopathic God (1977), perhaps the most notable example of the
genre of “psycho-history,” which utilised psychoanalytical categories to
explain Hitler’s policies and practices and which left a deep impression on me
growing up. 
WEHLER, HANS-ULRICH
(b. 1931) Wehler set forth the so-called Sonderweg theory to help explain the
rise and triumph of Nazism in Germany. According to this interpretation, a key
factor in Germany’s susceptibility to fascism was the lack of a liberal
bourgeois revolution in Germany (due to the failure of the revolution of 1848).
The consequence of the weakness of liberalism was that the landed aristocracy
continued to wield disproportionate power in German politics. According to
Wehler, pre-democratic values and institutions predominated in Bismarckian and Wilhelminian
Germany. Whilst the German economy was rapidly modernized, Germany’s political
system failed to keep pace with democratic reforms enacted in Western Europe.
The resulting social tensions in Germany and differences from the Western
European model of liberal democracy helped to account for the aggressive nature
of German foreign policy in the twentieth century. 
WEINBERG, GERHARD L.
(b. 1928) Leading American historian of Nazi foreign policy and the Second
World War. His massive A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II is
available for download on the right. In contrast to A.J.P. Taylor’s portrait of
Hitler pursuing a traditional foreign policy of continental dominance, Weinberg
argued that Hitler was driven by global ambitions. Weinberg also effectively
refuted David Hoggan’s contention in 1961 that war had been forced on Hitler by
the hostile actions of the West. It was Weinberg who first discovered Hitler’s
Second Book in the archives, a translation of which he published in 2003. 
WELCH, DAVID (b. 1950) Author of The Third Reich: Politics
and Propaganda (also available for download on the right), Welch has
concentrated his research on Nazi propaganda both in practice and in theory.
Welch has investigated not only the specific rhetorical or psychological
techniques of persuasion that Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazis used to achieve
their desired effects (particularly in the new medium of film), but also the
social and political context that enhanced or limited the power of propaganda.
One key to the Nazis’ propagandistic success was their skill in merging Nazi
ideology with traditional themes of patriotism and religion. Rather than
changing people’s minds, they reinforced existing prejudices. 
WINKLER, HEINRICH
AUGUST Winkler’s main field
of expertise is the Weimar Republic, arguing that the SPD’s failure to enact thoroughgoing social reform
in the aftermath of the First World War impaired the long-term viability of the
Weimar Republic by strengthening the right and alienating the left, but he
defended the SPD for pursuing the only course that could possibly have led to
the establishment of a functioning parliamentary democracy under extremely
adverse conditions. 
ZITELMANN, RAINER Conservative publicist whose major claim
to inclusion in a survey of the historiography of Nazism was his startling
revival of the thesis that Hitler was a man of the left, not the right.
Zitelmann set forth this dubious interpretation in his book Hitler as Social
Revolutionary in which he claimed that Nazi social programs like Strength
through Joy were not intended merely to maintain social peace but rather
genuinely to improve the conditions of the working class. For Zitelmann Hitler
and the Nazis were modernisers who constructively sought to enhance social
equality and mobility in Germany. His critics pointed out that wages remained
disproportionately low in Germany and that the social benefits that Zitelmann
touted were only available to racially pure “Aryans.”
Bullock and Nicholls- Hitler was important in failure of the Weimar Republic
Gordon Craig- Weimar Republic's "normal state was crisis."
Gordon Craig- Weimar Republic's "normal state was crisis."
John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Nazis used government money to put people in jobs- later used in USA
Walther Frank- Nazi historian, anti-Semite
David Hoggan- Der Erzwungene Krieg- about Anglo-Polish conspiracy to wage aggression against Germany, The Myth of the Six Million- denying Holocaust
Hugh Trevor-Roper: A. J. P. Taylor, Hitler and the War.
QUOTES
Goebbels: “If we are attacked we can only defend ourselves with guns not with butter.”
One German woman told the American reporter Nora Wall: “He is my mother and my father. He keeps me safe from all harm.”
HISTORIANS
E.H.Carr- pro-Soviet, revolution was perfectly planned ‘coup d’etat’
The suffering and deaths in the Soviet Union during the First Five Year Plan period were justified by the growth in Soviet heavy industry in the early 1930s, which in turn allowed the Soviet Union to defeat Germany
-Economical & political forces shaped Stalin, but Stalin still a strong figure.
-Stalin as an ‘agent of history’: produced by the circumstances after the Bolshevik Revolution
- If Stalin had not industrialised Russia, then someone else would have done so.
- Stalin combined immense achievements with utter brutality: “an emancipator and a tyrant.”
- Stalin was “the great executor of revolutionary policy.”
-Economical & political forces shaped Stalin, but Stalin still a strong figure.
-Stalin as an ‘agent of history’: produced by the circumstances after the Bolshevik Revolution
- If Stalin had not industrialised Russia, then someone else would have done so.
- Stalin combined immense achievements with utter brutality: “an emancipator and a tyrant.”
- Stalin was “the great executor of revolutionary policy.”
Robert Daniels- Revolution was an ‘historical accident’
Marc Ferro- WWI was the main factor leading to revolution
Robert Conquest-Orthodox, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties
William Taubman- Nikita Khrushchev
Zbigniew Brzezinski- The Grand failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th century
Eric Hobsbawm- MarxistGeorge F. Kennan- orthodox, diplomacy, 
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- soviet social, Gulag Archipelago
Orlando Figes- People's Tragedy: Russian Revolution 1891-1924
Plakhanov wrote Society and the Political Struggle in 1897- first Russian Marxist book
Christopher Reed- Bolshevik historian
John Reed: Ten Days That Shook the World
Ilyin- Zhenevsky, A.F. From the February Revolution to the October Revolution 1917
Rodzianko, M.V.: The Reign of Rasputin
Michael Lynch-a revisionist historian
Allan Wildman-Russian Army in War and Revolution
Sheila Fitzpatrick- Social historian, revisionist, Russia’s Twentieth Century in History and Historiography
Steve Philips- Stalin and Stalinism
Leon Trotsky- War and the International- Attacked Russian involvement in WWI, History of the Russian Revolution- attacking Stalin
Richard Pipes- orthodox, Three Whys of Russian revolution- describes evilness of Lenin, The Unknown Lenin
Robert Service- Comrades: A World History of Communism
Edvard Radzinsky- more pro-Stalinist, Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives
Dimitri Volkoganov- Stalinist, Stalin: Triumph and tragedy
Applebaum- GulagAdam Ulam -Stalin: The Man and his Era: Stalin impeded Soviet victory in WWII, as the purges had liquidated Russian manpower and expertise
Martin McCauley- Stalin & Stalinism: Stalin used brutal, appalling methods but achievement considerable
- Industrialisation in particular meant victory over the Nazis & that USSR became one of the two superpowers after 1945.
- “The Stalin revolution revitalised the country.”
- “[Stalin] launched a violent, phenomenally ambitious modernisation of the country.”
- “[Stalinism] was phenomenally successful and eventually a crashing failure."
Ian Grey - Stalin: Man of History: Most staunch Western defender of Stalin
- Believed historians have been overly influenced by Trotsky
- “Soviet Russia became stronger as a result of Stalin’s campaigns of industrialization, collectivization and social transformation.”
Service: “…the
Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s
subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the
uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between rich and poor; between
privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old
custom”.
Smith: “The
collapse of the autocracy was rooted in a crisis of modernisation. The
government hoped that it could carry out modernisation whilst maintaining tight
control over society. Yet the effect of industrialization, urbanization,
internal migration, and the emergence of new social classes was to set in train
forces that served to erode the foundations of the autocratic state”.
Pavel Milyukov (Kadet Party): "What is it, stupidity or treason?"
Orlando Figes: “The Romanov dynasty presented to the world a brilliant image of monarchical power and opulence during its tercentenary.”
- “Nicholas had not been blessed with either his father’s strength of character or his intelligence.”
- “It was not a weakness of will that was the undoing of the last Czar but… a wilful determination to rule from the throne, despite the fact that he clearly lacked the necessary qualities to do so.”
Rasputin: "The Czar can change his mind from one minute to the next; he’s a sad man; he lacks guts.”
Norman Stone: "Russia was not advanced enough to stand the strain of war, and the effort to do so plunged her economy into chaos."
Sergei Witte: “His [Nicholas II] character is the source of all our misfortunes. His outstanding weakness is a lack of willpower.”
Dimitri Volkognov: “The Russian government’s failings in the war and its weakness at home led to the self-destruction of the autocracy on a wave of discontent"
Orlando Figes: “The Romanov dynasty presented to the world a brilliant image of monarchical power and opulence during its tercentenary.”
- “Nicholas had not been blessed with either his father’s strength of character or his intelligence.”
- “It was not a weakness of will that was the undoing of the last Czar but… a wilful determination to rule from the throne, despite the fact that he clearly lacked the necessary qualities to do so.”
Rasputin: "The Czar can change his mind from one minute to the next; he’s a sad man; he lacks guts.”
Norman Stone: "Russia was not advanced enough to stand the strain of war, and the effort to do so plunged her economy into chaos."
Sergei Witte: “His [Nicholas II] character is the source of all our misfortunes. His outstanding weakness is a lack of willpower.”
Dimitri Volkognov: “The Russian government’s failings in the war and its weakness at home led to the self-destruction of the autocracy on a wave of discontent"
Simpson: "With revolutionary parties in confusion and revolutionary leaders absent, the March revolution was a spontaneous, unplanned event. The timing and the cause of its outbreak were unexpected, though quickly exploited by the masses in the city"
Prince Georgy Evgenyevich Lvov: "The Soviet has power without authority, the Provisional Government has authority without power"
Bolsheviks: “suppress all attempts of the bourgeoisie to return to power: and this is what is meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat”
Trotsky: “We have not organised the revolution to kill.”
“War is the instrument of policy.”
E. H. Carr: “Trotsky was the great intellectual”
Anna Louise Strong: “Leon Trotsky remains the most popular man in the Soviet Republic. . . Russia's best organiser . . . Trotsky is more popular throughout Russia not only than any other man but than the whole of the Central Committee” Leon Trotsky “built an army out of worse than nothing; out of demoralised deserters who had determined never to fight again”
Historians Chris Ward and Chris Corin "Rykov and Tomsky were too naïve and blinded by love of NEP”
Alec Nove- An Economic History of the USSR: "It remains true beyond question that the second Five-Year Plan period was one of impressive achievement."Robert Conquest: "Joseph Stalin gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled." He was nonetheless "a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century."
Ukraine, "the breadbasket of the Soviet Union,"
Richard Pipes- Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime: "Stalin was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron's political philosophy and practices. Murdering fellow Communists - he had learned from Lenin, and that includes the two actions for which he is most severely condemned: collectivization and mass terror. A man of meagre education, he had no other source of ideas."
Stalin’s foreign policy was called “cold blooded realism”
With Nazi-Soviet pact “Stalin gave the green light to aggression.” Stalin’s action lay in “believing that such a war would be a long drawn out affair rather than a ‘blitzkrieg’ victory for Germany.”-war with Western Allies.
In War: Resolution.In Defeat: Defiance.In Victory: Magnanimity.In Peace: Goodwill.
May 13 1940 in his first address as Prime Minister:'I
would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined the
government: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
'We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy?
'I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
'That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.'
June 4 1940 following the evacuation of forces from Dunkirk:
'We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
'We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.We shall never surrender!'
June 18 1940 following the collapse of France to Nazi forces:
'Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.
'The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
'But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
'Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their Finest Hour."'
August 20 1940 in tribute to the RAF:
'The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion.
'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.'
September 9 1941 on Britain's increasing strength in battle:
'The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation.
'This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this—a year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate, to all eyes but our own. Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world, "We are still masters of our fate. We still are captain of our souls."'
November 10 1942 following the victory at El Alamein, North Africa:
'The Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others. Now this is not the end.
'It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.'
'We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy?
'I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.
'That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.'
June 4 1940 following the evacuation of forces from Dunkirk:
'We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.
'We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.We shall never surrender!'
June 18 1940 following the collapse of France to Nazi forces:
'Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.
'The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
'But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
'Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their Finest Hour."'
August 20 1940 in tribute to the RAF:
'The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion.
'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.'
September 9 1941 on Britain's increasing strength in battle:
'The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation.
'This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this—a year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate, to all eyes but our own. Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world, "We are still masters of our fate. We still are captain of our souls."'
November 10 1942 following the victory at El Alamein, North Africa:
'The Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others. Now this is not the end.
'It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.'
I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.
- George Bernard Shaw sent him two complimentary tickets to his play with a note, “You are invited to my première. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.” Winston Churchill replied: “Impossible to be present for first performance. Will attend second—if there is one.”
- We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
- A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
- A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril.
- All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope.
- To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
- Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
- Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
- A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
- Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.
- The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
- An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.
- The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.
- A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
- Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk.”
Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”
- Nancy Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.”
Churchill: “If I were your husband I would take it.”
- Once in a while you will stumble upon the truth but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened.
- If you are going to go through hell, keep going.
- Much of his imaginative energy was spent in trying to get the sick Roosevelt to do the sensible thing. “No lover,” he said, ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.”
- After being dismissed by the British electorate after WWII Mrs. Churchill commented, “Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise.” Churchill replied: “It appears to be very effectively disguised.”
- It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
- Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
- You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
- He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
- If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.
- You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.
- History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
- Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
- The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
- Mussolini’s foreign minister, Count Ciano, who had married Mussolini’s daughter, had been accused of treason and shot. Churchill’s reaction: “Well, at least he had the pleasure of murdering his son-in-law.”
- I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
- A sheep in sheep’s clothing. (On Clement Atlee)
- A modest man, who has much to be modest about. (On Clement Atlee)
- Once an empty taxi drove up to the House of Commons and Clement Attlee got out.
- I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
- The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.
- Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
- Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
- A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
- When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticise or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
- Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
- Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.
- One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.
- When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
- Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
- Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
- The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
- It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
- Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
- Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
- There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.
- The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
- From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.-“The Sinews of Peace” speech, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946
- If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
- "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."
- Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
- The price of greatness is responsibility.
- Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.
- The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
- "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."
- Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
- The price of greatness is responsibility.
- Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.
- The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
- If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
Churchill about Munich 1938: “It is a total defeat. Czechoslovakia will be swallowed up by the Nazis. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning.”
“Second world war was the easiest war to be prevented.”
“An Iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind”
Churchill about Korea: “Korea does not really matter. I’d never heard of the bloody place until I was seventy-four. Its importance lies in the fact that it has led to the re-arming of America.”
Churchill after Yalta to Roosevelt: “The Soviet Union has become a danger to the free world.”
HISTORIANS
Kenneth Waltz: What is a good state? Marxists say it is in fair distribution of wealth. USA and allies say multi-party democracy and sovereignty of people
John Marsden- different social structures, and each of them proving that their system was better
George Mitchell- The Iron Curtain: The Cold War in Europe
“Stalin was sure that Russia could only gain from a long war in which Britain, France and Germany exhausted themselves.”
“Stalin was sure that Russia could only gain from a long war in which Britain, France and Germany exhausted themselves.”
John-Lewis Gaddis-post-revisionist The Cold War: A New history. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History Believed that both America and Russia wanted to keep the peace after the war but that conflict was caused by mutual misunderstanding, reactivity, and above all the American inability to understand Stalin's fears and need to defend himself after the war. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- soviet social, Gulag ArchipelagoGeorge F. Kennan- orthodox, diplomacyRichard Pipes- American orthodoxE.H. Carr- The twenty years crisis pro-soviet historianEric Hobsbawm- Marxist
Robert Divine- The Cuban Missile Crisis. Eisenhower and the Cold War
David Holloway- Stalin and the Bomb orthodox
William Taubman- Nikita Khrushchev
John Halliday and Bruce Cumings- Korea: The Unknown War
Chen Jian- Chinese Historian Mao’s China and the Cold War
William Appleman Williams- Tragedy of American Diplomacy- US was blamed for the Cold WarGar Alperovitz -Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965) Blame for Cold War on the Americans for their use of the atomic bomb
Gabriel Kolko- The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy Truman should have given Stalin the atomic bomb in 1945, claimed that Russia treated Poland well in 1945, and blamed South Korea for the Korean War of 1950-3. One of the most extreme revisionists.
Timothy Garton Ash- the last part of the Cold War, Europe 1975-present
Howard Zinn- social historian- A People’s History of the United States
Harry Elmer Barnes- history is based on official historians like Churchill, Cold War was artificial (no ideology, just giving labour jobs etc.), Soviets did not start Cold War, origins of Cold War- Truman and Churchill
Peter G. Boyle: American-Soviet Relations: From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism.
Norman Friedman: The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War.
Terry Anderson: The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944-1947- orthodox view
Diane Shaver Clemens: Yalta- orthodox
Bruce Cumings: The Origins of the Korean War- pro-NK, against US intervention
Sergei Gorcharov, John Lewis, Xue Litai: Uncertain partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War.
Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia.
Michael Beschloss: Kennedy v. Khrushchev
Lawrence Freedman: Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam.
Alexandr Fursenko, Timothy Naftali: One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964.
Jarolim Navratil: The Prague Spring 68
David Reynolds: The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives.
Frank E. Vandiver: Shadows of Vietnam: Lyndon Johnson’s Wars.
Robin Edmonds: The Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years.
Martin P. Leffler - A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (1992) Cold War was a clash of two military establishments both seeking world domination
Marc Trachtenberg- A Contested Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (1999) Cold War was really about settling the German question in the aftermath of World War II.
Martin P. Leffler - A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (1992) Cold War was a clash of two military establishments both seeking world domination
Marc Trachtenberg- A Contested Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (1999) Cold War was really about settling the German question in the aftermath of World War II.
QUOTES
Robert J. Oppenheimer, citing from the Bhagavadgita, after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion: "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.
Defence Secretary Henry Stimson 1945: “US could never again be an island to itself”
George Marshall June 1947: “Europe is a breeding ground of hate.”
Malenkov after Marshall Plan: “The ruling gang of American imperialists has taken the path of open expansion, of enslaving weakened capitalists countries.”
James Byrnes, 1946 Secretary of State: “Soviets understand only language How many divisions have you? I am tired of babying the Soviets.”
Molotov: “We have troops only where provided by treaties.”
Russian historians after introducing new currency in Bizonia: “The Soviet side was ready to supply food to all Berlin. Yet every day 380 American planes flew into Berlin. It was simply a propaganda move intended to make the Cold War worse.”
US State Department June 1947: “US must develop a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world…”
Brzezinsky stated that “world was now divided into two fronts, one imperialistic, the other socialist and democratic…”
Truman after invasion of South Korea: “I recall some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remember how each time the democracies failed to act it had encouraged the aggressor to go ahead… If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war.”
Bradley Omar- Korea: “The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy”
John Halliday and Bruce Cumings- Korea: The Unknown War: “Each side proclaims that it won, yet each actually seems to feel that it lost.”
Kim Il-Sung: “In the Korean War, the US imperialists suffered an ignominious military defeat for the first time in the history of the US; this meant the beginning of a downward path for US imperialism.”
Khrushchev 1955 in Yugoslavia: “There are different roads to communism.”
1956 in London: “You do not like Communism. We do not like capitalism. There is only one way out- peaceful co-existence.”
Khrushchev in 1971: “…The Cold War set in. Churchill had given his famous speech in Fulton urging the imperialistic forces of the world to fight the Soviet Union. Our relations with England, France and the USA were ruined.”
JF Kennedy “There are many people in the world who really don't understand-or say they don't-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!” 
Robert McNamara in movie Fog of War (2003) -“Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies.”
Curtis Lemay- Cuban Missile Crisis: “That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.”
Richard Grayson: “Britain was the Coldest Cold War Warrior”
Irwin Setzler, The Times: "When President de Gaulle demanded that American troops be removed from French soil, Lyndon Johnson asked whether that included those who were buried beneath it."
How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
Ronald Reagan (American 40th US President (1981- 89), 1911-2004)
“Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914. . .”
A. J. P. Taylor
Ronald Reagan (American 40th US President (1981- 89), 1911-2004)
“Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914. . .”
A. J. P. Taylor
“If anyone believes that our smiles involve abandonment of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin he deceives himself. Those who wait for that must wait until a shrimp learns to whistle.”
Nikita Khrushchev
“Seventy years ago this November, created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.”
Michael Johns
“No chronology of Soviet atrocities can convey the crushing of the human spirit under Lenin and his successors. But the retelling of 70 years of grisly facts leaves little doubt that what we face today in Soviet communism is, indeed, an 'evil empire'.”
Michael Johns-
“The Cold War was over. The global standoff between superpowers was at an end. The world saw America and the West triumphant, freedom preserved, and the promises of Marx and Lenin and Stalin discredited.”
Spencer Abraham
“On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.”
Ellen Willis
Andrew Roberts:
Cold War Historiography
Orthodox View: It was clearly Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe and then other parts of the world that had caused the Cold War. The United States had no choice but to meet the challenges posed by Soviet actions – whether those actions were seen as the result of traditional Russian imperialism or of an ideologically- driven expansionism that arose, ultimately, from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.
Examples: Herbert Feis, Churchill-Roosevelt- Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (New York, 1957); Feis, From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War (New York, 1970); Arthur Schlesinger Jr, “Origins of the Cold War” Foreign Affairs, 46, October, 1967, pp. 22-52.
Revisionists or New Left Historians: Revisionists place the blame on the United States rather than the Soviet Union for the start 67 of the Cold War as the end of the wartime alliance need not in itself have led to cold war. They argued that the Soviets did nothing more in Eastern Europe than any great power would have done in terms of looking after their national interests, especially after two German invasions in less than thirty years. In any event, the Russians were often merely reacting to what the revisionists portrayed as aggressive American demands for business markets and political access into this region.
Examples: William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1959); Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York, 1969); Gabriel Kolko and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy 1945-1954 (New York, 1972); Thomas G. Paterson, Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1973).
Post-Revisionists: Tried to show that both sides had their faults and that over time both superpowers pushed their own interests and misunderstood the other side even to the point, on occasions, of leading to the possibility of nuclear war. (In fact the views that are often regarded as post-revisionist have a long pedigree. Realists like Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan and William H. McNeill’s were interpreting the origins of the cold war in a ‘post- revisionist’ way even before the revisionists came along). The post-revisionists have tended to accept the revisionists’ view that Stalin was more concerned with Soviet security, and to that end the creation of a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern and Central Europe, than with world domination or aggressive ambitions towards Western Europe; but at the same time they have argued that that Western leaders at the time could not be certain of what Stalin was up to, that even a Soviet Union preoccupied with what Stalin perceived to be ‘security’ could still threaten Western interests, and that the Western powers therefore had legitimate and understandable concerns about Russia.
Examples: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York, 1997).
Check out Old IB History Exam Test Questions
Andrew Roberts Quotes from A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES`
