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“... As a graduate student in the 1970s, looking around for new approaches to history that would enable me to do something different from my teachers’ generation, I spent a lot of time with my fellow students discussing the relative attractions of British Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, German neo-Weberians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, American students of social inequality like Stephan Thernstrom, advocates of a social-anthropological approach such as Keith Thomas, partisans of a politically committed history of everyday life like Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop, and more besides ...”

“... We still​ do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for,’ Nicholas Stargardt announces at the outset of his ambitious and absorbing new book, ‘or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end.’ This is not for want of trying: numerous historians have analysed German opinion and behaviour at every stage of the Second World War, using above all the Meldungen aus dem Reich, the regular confidential reports on civilian morale made by SS Security Service and local and regional government officials, together with diaries and correspondence, especially field-post letters to and from soldiers at the front, to chart the diverse and changing attitudes to victory and defeat ...”

“... A couple​ of years ago, a Russian television channel asked if they could interview me for a programme they were making about Hitler. I get these requests every so often, and agreed in the usual hope that I would be able to pour some cold water on whatever outlandish theories they came up with. On previous occasions I have been confronted with claims that the entire German population was drugged up to the eyeballs for the duration of the Third Reich, thus making life bearable; that Hitler escaped the bunker and went to live in Argentina with Eva Braun (and in some versions, Blondi the dog); that Unity Mitford gave birth to Hitler’s child early in the war; that 2014 was going to be, like 1914, a year in which world war broke out; and so on ...”

“... Just​ over forty years ago, in 1980, I found myself by chance teaching for a semester at Columbia University, armed with the grandiose title of Visiting Associate Professor of European History, provided with a free apartment and paid a salary not far short of what I earned in a whole year as a lowly lecturer in the UK. I’d never been to the US and knew nothing about Columbia or indeed any other American university ...”

“... On​ 24 September 1943, following Italy’s surrender to the Allies and the subsequent occupation of Rome by German forces, Heinrich Himmler sent an order to Herbert Kappler, head of the SS in the capital city: ‘All Jews,’ it said, ‘without regard to nationality, age, sex or condition, must be transferred to Germany and liquidated there.’ On 16 October, SS officers, armed with addresses for Rome’s long-established Jewish community, fanned out across the city, knocking at doors and breaking them down if there was no answer ...”

“... A few decades ago, historians searching for the longer-term roots of Nazism’s theory and practice looked to the ruptures and discontinuities in German history: the failed revolution of 1848; the blockage of democratic politics after unification in 1871; the continued dominance of aristocratic elites over a socially and politically supine middle class; the entrenched power of the traditionally authoritarian and belligerent Prussian military tradition – in short, everything, they argued, that had come by the outbreak of the First World War to distinguish Germany from other major European powers and set it on a ‘special path’ to modernity that ended not in the creation of a democratic political system and open society to go with an industrial economy, but in the rise and triumph of the Third Reich ...”

“... When I first went to Germany, in the early 1970s, the roads were swarming with squat, misshapen little beasts, bustling about the city streets or rattling along the autobahns with noisy, air-cooled engines, curved roofs tapering down to the rear bumper and, in older models, tiny oval back windows, so small that I wondered how the driver could see anything at all in his rear-view mirror ...”

“... was crucial: ‘Franco,’ Hitler crowed, ‘ought to erect a monument to the glory of the Junkers Ju-52. It is this aircraft that the Spanish revolution has to thank for its victory.’ Over the course of the war the Condor Legion claimed to have shot down 320 Republican aircraft and sunk 60 ships. German anti-aircraft batteries destroyed another 52 ...”

“... The 20th century​ was the age of genocide. Many periods in history have seen acts of murderous violence committed on racial grounds, but none has witnessed so many, on such a large scale, or so concentrated in time, as the era framed by the German massacre of the Herero tribe in Namibia in 1904-07 and the Hutu genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 ...”

“... On the morning of 24 June 1922, Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister, set off for work from his villa in the Berlin suburb of Grunewald. The weather was fine, so he instructed his chauffeur to use the open-top limousine. The minister sat alone in the back. He took no security precautions, used the same route every day, and had dismissed the police protection he had been offered ...”

“... Why did the Germans keep on fighting to the bitter end in 1945, long after it was clear to almost everybody that the war was lost? From the catastrophic defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad early in 1943, through the devastating Allied bombing raids on Hamburg in the summer of 1943, reports on popular opinion filed by secret agents of the Nazi regime record a growing belief that Germany was going to lose ...”

“... Dotted around the world, there are still a few reminders of the fact that, between the 1880s and the First World War, Germany, like other major European powers, possessed an overseas colonial empire. If you go to Windhoek in Namibia, you can still pick up a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper which caters for the remaining German-speaking residents of the town ...”

“... On 18 June​ 1940 Charles de Gaulle, speaking from London, where he had arrived the previous day, denounced the new government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, which had called for an armistice after the comprehensive defeat of France’s armed forces at the hands of the Wehrmacht. ‘Nothing is lost for France,’ he declared. ‘The war is not over as a result of the Battle of France ...”

“... When​ the International Military Tribunal convened at Nuremberg shortly after the end of the Second World War, one of the many objects of its attention were the Storm Divisions (Sturm-Abteilungen, SA) of the Nazi movement. The SA, the prosecution alleged, had been a criminal organisation involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ‘National Bolshevist’ Ernst Niekisch, imprisoned during the war, described the SA in 1953 asa counter-elite; it attracted all those characters who were rotten and frail from within ...”

“... Shortly after he was forced out of office in November 2011, Italy’s longest serving postwar prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told the press he was spending his time reading the last letters written by Mussolini to his mistress Clara Petacci. ‘I have to say,’ he confessed, ‘that I see myself in many aspects of those letters.’ In the Duce’s view, according to Berlusconi, Italy was ungovernable ...”