The Death of Boris,' by Mussorgsky?

Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932.

Thomas Wolfe wrote, Here was an entire nation … infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.

Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people-men, women, and children-simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps.

In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.

If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently

found the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to be a trove of relevant materials that conveyed a sense of the woof and weave of life in Hitler's Berlin. There, in one locale, I found the papers of...

Contrary to the predictions of many students of international problems, I feel fairly certain that we shall not have war in the near future.

had become friends and met often

I didn't believe all her stories, Martha wrote later. I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical. When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no...

Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.

These were complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature

TO DODD, PAPEN'S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the...

Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because American...

Klemperer detected a certain hysteria of language in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation-This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!-and in strange, inexplicable episodes of...

Later, Dodd wrote a description of Hitler in his diary. He is romantic-minded and half-informed about great historical events and men in Germany. He had a semi-criminal record. He has definitely said...

In part, he knew, this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison, and here Dodd found deepest irony. At a time when hundreds of men have...

My darling atheist, she recalled telling him, why do you help me decorate a Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of Christ? He laughed. This isn't for Christians or for Christ, liebes Kind, he said,...

He sensed a rising hysteria among midlevel leaders of the Nazi Party, expressed as a belief that the only safety lies in getting everybody in jail.

Tolerance means weakness," Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. "In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant...

Hitler's cabinet enacted a new law, to take effect January 1, 1934, called the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which authorized the sterilization of individuals suffering...

to remain silent is out of the question for a strong and honest man.

She saw Hitler as "a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin." Like many others in America at this time and elsewhere in the world, she could not imagine him lasting very long or being taken seriously.

With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come

Americans coming to Germany will find themselves surrounded by influences of the Government and

it is less important where one lives than how one lives.

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost. -DANTE ALIGHIERI, The Divine Comedy: Canto I

But Hitler's government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another.

We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic.

But Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because...