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"I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality. A comparison of the German people with other peoples arouses a painful feeling, which I try to overcome in every possible way." Goethes Gespraeche, December 13, 1813

 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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In Erlangen, for instance, in January 1946 he spoke of meeting a German Jew who had lost everything--parents, brothers, and sisters too. 'I could not help myself', said Niemöller, 'I had to tell him, "Dear brother, fellow man, Jew, before you say anything, I say to you: I acknowledge my guilt and beg you to forgive me and my people for this sin."' Niemöller's stance was by no means entirely welcome to the 1,200 students to whom he was preaching. They shouted and jeered as he preached that Germany must accept responsibility for the five or six million murdered Jews. Students in Marburg and Göttingen similarly heckled him. But Niemöller insisted that "We must openly declare that we are not innocent of the Nazi murders, of the murder of German communists, Poles, Jews, and the people in German-occupied countries. No doubt others made mistakes too, but the wave of crime started here and here it reached its highest peak. The guilt exists, there is no doubt about that — even if there were no other guilt than that of the six million clay urns containing the ashes of incinerated Jews from all over Europe. And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done.

 

Martin Niemoller

 

In my eyes, the year 1942 already has behind it the most fateful trial of our people. That was the winter of '41 to '42. I may be permitted to say that in that winter the German people, and in particular its Wehrmacht, were weighed in the balance by Providence. Nothing worse can or will happen. That we conquered that winter, that "General Winter," that at last the German fronts stood, and that this spring, that is, early this summer, we were able to proceed again, that, I believe, is the proof that Providence was content with the German people... You do not realize what is hidden beneath these words in the way of human heroism, and also of human pain, and suffering, and we may say, often anxiety too, naturally, deathly anxiety on the part of all those who, especially for the first time, are placed before the trial of God in this highest court.

 

Adolf Hitler

 

Freedom and honour! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honour. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German—it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of "freedom and honour of the German nation" throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew.

 

Adolf Hitler

 

Wolf was in Israel, because that's where Wolf belongs, with Ariel Sharon about to croak. ... Wolf is an old friend of Ariel's. Wolf - remember - was the Washington Bureau Chief of the Jerusalem Post, before he signed on with CNN to work 80 hours a day. Ummm... I'm so sick of his face, I could just scream. You know, people e-mail me and say "What do you mean, he's a former German U-Boat commander?" Look - if you don't get it, you don't get it. But every movie made in the 40's about the German U-Boats had a guy who looked just like Wolf Blitzer. And his name is, um... German. (Beginning of the show)

 

Mike Malloy

 

Americans have it right. Europeans are not in an evangelical — or a bellicose — mood.
Indeed, sometimes I have to pinch myself to be sure I am not dreaming: that what many people in my own country now hold against Germany, which wreaked such horrors on the world for nearly a century — the new "German problem," as it were — is that Germans are repelled by war; that much of German public opinion is now virtually ... pacifist!

 

Susan Sontag