Цитаты из книг — Флориан Хубер

It was the same story with all the people from the party—Otto’s Deutsches Jungvolk leader, for example, and the district group leader—they had all spread hope and refused to hear of escape, and now they’d gone and escaped themselves.

The Wehrmacht made no secret of their intention to surrender the town and blow up the bridges behind them as they moved west. It was the last chance of escape for any doubters and ditherers.

A few days in March had been enough to transform an ordinary factory into a model Nazi business run by party loyalists.

The visit made a lasting impression on Jacob Kronika; in subsequent diary entries from a foundering Berlin, he would often return to that late-winter sermon and its prophecy of the rising wave of suicide across the German Reich. He saw it as a troubling echo of his own sense of foreboding a few days before, when he had…

Irene Bröker spent the nights in constantly changing hiding places to avoid assault. She slept in hedges of brambles and behind rabbit hutches, in a concrete trough in the attic, and in the shelter beneath the compost heap.

Like millions of other Germans, he’d had to make a choice: either he could toe the line and silence his inner voice, or he could stay true to his convictions and be ostracised.

When the concentration camps were discovered, the Allies hung pictures of the atrocities outside town halls and showed films. Julius Posener recalled that all the Germans he spoke to guilelessly told him they’d known nothing about it. But they’d all had a friend or cousin at the front or in the hinterland who’d passed on…

Violence was so ubiquitous as to have become normal. Johann Radein, still a member of the Hitler Youth, felt sucked in by it; the violent acts condoned and even glorified by the grown-ups seemed to him inevitable, intrinsic to human nature. But this didn’t make them any less frightening. The cold tyranny of the law of the…

Not everyone was rallying behind the new government. Roussel saw people avert their eyes as the brown-shirted troops passed. People in a hurry to get back inside their flats. People having trouble concealing their anger, helplessness, distress or fear. A young girl with tears pouring down her face.

Roussel had come up against a phenomenon that increasingly troubled neutral observers and deeply embittered the regime’s victims and former opponents. Not long after the end of the war, most Germans considered themselves victims of the Nazis.

Although Germany’s new leaders had made no secret of how they intended to deal with opponents or what radical methods they would favour, most people played down the risks. The desire for security and stability was so great that the Germans preferred to turn a blind eye to certain aspects of this new reality, as long as…

Dozens of unidentified bodies were also buried in the mass graves dug in Demmin’s cemetery in early May—people whose names and backgrounds remain unknown. Those who went to their deaths were of all ages, classes and professions. The suicides of Demmin represented a cross-section of small-town German society. It was as if…

From the air, the blackish-green ribbon of the Peene could be seen cutting off the escape routes to the west. From the air, it was obvious: they were all trapped.

Until then, the people of Demmin had known the war only from the newspapers, radio and weekly newsreels. Sometimes, it is true, they were driven into their cellars by the air-raid sirens, but the bombers always flew on, to Stettin or Berlin.

The suicide epidemic that had rolled in waves across the dwindling Reich—from east to west, Königsberg to Berlin, Demmin to Siefersheim—was a radical response to this emotional collapse. Untold numbers of Germans turned on themselves the violence that had become part of their everyday life. The epidemic, which claimed…

When the Germans’ world came to an end in 1945, they had spent twelve years being driven from one extreme emotion to the next: the hope of upturn, the joy of belonging, the pride of being special, the euphoria of success, the arrogance of power, the rage of destruction. They had been in a state of permanent intoxication…

She thought of her own service in the east, of the peasant woman and the Polish boy in the cow pasture. Immediately the shadow descended. She knew not to ask any more questions if she didn’t want to compromise her faith and loyalty. Soon afterwards, her brother-in-law Werner came home on leave from the Eastern front. He…

He [Hitler] spoke of victory over the past, of the present and the future, work and happiness—and every member of the audience seemed to feel as if he were addressing them personally. Roussel noticed the way he transformed their vague but urgent feelings into something more tangible. People’s longings and resentments were…