“The likelihood that Jews would be sent to their deaths depended upon the durability of institutions of state sovereignty and the continuity… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The word "Auschwitz" has become a metonym for the Holocaust as a whole. Yet the vast majority of Jews had already been… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die.… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian)… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origin, turned his philological training against Nazi propaganda. He noticed how Hitler’s language rejected legitimate… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“no stereotype can explain why and how, in the six months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a technique to… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“That November, German authorities held parliamentary elections (without opposition) and a referendum (on an issue where the “correct” answer was known) to… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The Jewish barbers, who cut the hair of thousands of women, remembered the beautiful ones.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“In the euphoria of victory, Nazis tried to organize a boycott of Jewish shops. This was not very successful at first. But… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway,… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“On February 2, 1933, for example, a leading newspaper for German Jews published an editorial expressing this mislaid trust: We do not… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“WE TEND TO assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks. This was the very mistake that… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“If the Holocaust is reduced to Auschwitz, then it can easily be forgotten that the German mass killing of Jews began in… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“If we believe that the Holocaust was a result of the inherent characteristics of Jews, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or anyone else,… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Citizenship is the name of a reciprocal relationship between an individual and a sheltering polity. When there was no state, no one… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Citizenship in modern states means access to bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has the reputation of killing Jews; it would be closer to the truth… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“changes. It was the deliberate policy of Nazi Germany to artificially create conditions of state destruction and then steer the consequences towards… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” Thus Hamlet. Yet he concludes: “Nay, come,… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“the democracies that arose after the First World War (and the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in some combination of… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy...We imbibed the… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The key to this translation of ideology to politics in both cases was an effective appeal to human experience at the crucial time.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us to see… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up.… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“As she observed, “the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Once we subliminally accept that we are watching a reality show rather than thinking about real life, no image can actually hurt the president… — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
“Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy.” — Timothy Snyder Copy Share Image
