These are the quotations, along with citations, which are heard in the documentary.

Terror Bombing

 

Winston Churchill: German cities . . . will be subjected to an ordeal the like of which has never been experienced by a country in continuity, severity and magnitude . . . To achieve this end there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go. [Garrett, Stephen A. Ethics and Airpower in World War II—The British Bombing of German Cities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Page 31]

19-year-old Kate Hoffmeister: I struggled to run against the wind in the middle of the street . . . We . . . couldn’t go on across . . . because the asphalt had melted. There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck in the asphalt. . . . They were on their hands and knees screaming. [Middlebrook, Martin. The Battle of Hamburg—Allied Bomber Forces Against a German City in 1943. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. Pages 266–267]

Author Vera Brittain: The ruthless mass bombing of congested cities is as great a threat to the integrity of the human spirit as anything which has yet occurred on this planet . . . There is no military or political advantage which can justify this blasphemy. [Sorge, Martin K. The Other Price of Hitler’s War—German Military and Civilian Losses Resulting from World War II. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Page 108]

A RAF Crewman: There were people down there being fried to death in melted asphalt in the roads, they were being burnt up and we were shuffling incendiary bombs into this holocaust. I felt terribly sorry for the people in that fire I was helping to stoke up. [Garrett, Stephen A. Ethics and Airpower in World War II—The British Bombing of German Cities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Page 82]

A Rescue Worker: Never would I have thought that death could come to so many people in so many different ways . . . [S]ome times the victims looked like ordinary people apparently peacefully sleeping; the faces of others were racked with pain, the bodies stripped almost naked by the tornado; there were wretched refugees from the East clad only in rags, and people from the Opera in all their finery; here the victim was a shapeless slab, there a layer of ashes. . . . Across the city, along the streets wafted the unmistakable stench of decaying flesh. [Irving, David. The Destruction of Dresden. London: William Kimber & Co., LTD. Page 189]

A Rescue Worker: One shape I will never forget was the remains of what had apparently been a mother and child. They had shriveled and charred into one piece, and had been stuck rigidly to the asphalt. They had just been prised up. The child must have been underneath the mother, because you could still clearly see its shape, with its mother’s arms clasped around it. [Irving, David. The Destruction of Dresden. London: William Kimber & Co., LTD. Page 189]

A Red Cross Worker: I went down on my knees, trembled and cried . . . Several women lay there with their bellies burst open . . . and one could see the babies for they were hanging half outside. Many of the babies were mutilated. . . . Scenes like that one I saw everywhere and very slowly one became numbed. One acted like a zombie. [McKee, Alexander.Dresden 1945—The Devil’s Tinderbox.New York: E.P.Dutton, 1982. Pages 252-253]

A RAF Crewman: To just fly over it without opposition felt like murder. I felt it was a cowardly war. [McKee, Alexander.Dresden 1945—The Devil’s Tinderbox.New York: E.P.Dutton, 1982. Page 66]

 

The Rape of Germany

 

A Horrified Witness: In the farmyard further down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position. . . . Beyond . . . stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture. In the dwellings we found a total of seventy-two women, including children, and one old man, 74, all dead . . . all murdered in a bestial manner, except only a few who had bullet holes in their necks. Some babies had their heads bashed in. In one room we found a woman, 84 years old, sitting on a sofa . . . half of whose head had been sheared off with an ax or a spade. [De Zayas, Alfred M. Nemesis at Potsdam:The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsions of the Germans—Background, Execution, Consequences. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. Page 63]

Ilya Ehrenburg: Kill them all, men, old men, children and the women, after you have amused yourself with them! Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn. . . . Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army. [Lutz, Elizabeth. “Rape of Christian Europe—The Red Army’s Rampage in 1945.” The Barnes Review 3, no. 4 (Apr. 1997): 9–16.]

A Rape Victim: The Russians were coming and going the whole time and they kept eyeing us greedily. The nights were dreadful because we were never safe for a moment. The women were raped, not once or twice but ten, twenty, thirty and a hundred times, and it was all the same to the Russians whether they raped mere children or old women. The youngest victim in the row houses where we lived was ten years of age and the oldest one was over seventy. . . . [Kaps, Johannes, ed. The Tragedy of Silesia, 1945–46—A Documentary Account with a Special Survey of the Archdiocese of Breslau. Munich: Christ Unterwegs, 1952/53. Page 136]

A Witness from Neisse: These atrocities were not committed secretly or in hidden corners but in public, in churches, on the streets, and on the squares. . . . Mothers were raped in the presence of their children, girls were raped in front of their brothers. [Kaps, Johannes, ed. The Tragedy of Silesia, 1945–46—A Documentary Account with a Special Survey of the Archdiocese of Breslau. Munich: Christ Unterwegs, 1952/53. Page 228]

German Soldier: We had never seen anything like it—utterly, unbelievably monstrous! Naked, dead women lay in many of the rooms. Swastikas had been cut into their abdomens, in some the intestines bulged out, breasts were cut up, faces beaten to a pulp and swollen puffy. Others had been tied to the furniture by their hands and feet, and massacred. A broomstick protruded from the vagina of one, a besom from that of another. . . . The mothers had had to witness how their ten and twelve-year-old daughters were raped by some 20 men; the daughters in turn saw their mothers being raped, even their grandmothers. Women who tried to resist were brutally tortured to death. There was no mercy. . . . The women we liberated were in a state almost impossible to describe. . . . [T]heir faces had a confused, vacant look. Some were beyond speaking to, ran up and down and moaned the same sentences over and over again. Having seen the consequences of these bestial atrocities, we were terribly agitated and determined to fight. We knew the war was past winning; but it was our obligation and sacred duty to fight to the last bullet. [Testimony of “H. K.”, Bergisch-Gladbach, Germany (copy in possession of the author).]

 

The Baltic Massacre

 

A Young Mother: It was so terribly cold, and the wind was like ice… the snow was falling and nothing warm to eat, no milk and nothing. I tried to give Gabi the breast, behind a house, but she didn’t take it because everything was so cold. Many women tried that, and some froze their breasts. [Thorwald, Juergen. Flight in the Winter: Russia Conquers—January to May, 1945. New York: Pantheon, 1951. Pages 48-49]

Juergen Thorwald: Every alley, every street was packed with their vehicles. People were waiting in every harbor shed, in every wind-sheltered corner. Among them stood their beasts, bleating, snorting, lowing. . . . The pregnant women giving birth somewhere in a corner, on the ground, in a barracks. Some of them had been raped on their flight . . . [and] now they were trembling for fear they would give birth to a monster. The strangely pale faces of girls going up and down the streets asking for a doctor. The wounded and the sick, in constant fear they would be left behind, concealing weapons under their blankets to force someone to take them along, or to end their own lives if the Russians came. The orphans who had been saved from their asylum somewhere at the last moment and tossed onto carts with nothing around them but a blanket, and who were now lying on the floors with frozen limbs. The Russian prisoners of war, brought west under orders from above, walking on wooden soles, their tattered overcoats held together with paper strings. The old people who had lain down in some doorway at night, and had not awakened… And the wild-eyed insane ones who rushed from house to house, from wagon to wagon, crying for their mothers or their children. . . . Over it all the gray sky, snow, frost, and thaw . . . and thaw and frost and snow, and the chill, killing wet. [Thorwald, Juergen. Flight in the Winter: Russia Conquers—January to May, 1945. New York: Pantheon, 1951. Pages 127-128]

Defeat in The West

 

A US Soldier: [T]he men were deliberately wounding guards. A lot of guards were shot in the legs so they couldn’t move. They were then turned over to the inmates. One was beheaded with a bayonet. Others were ripped apart limb by limb. [Buechner,Howard A.Dachau—The Hour of the Avenger.Metairie, Louisiana: Thunderbird Press, 1986. Page 104]

Amy Schrott: They just opened up the camps and let them go. The Russians and Poles were looting the houses and killing the shopkeepers. Then they began raping the girls. [Amy Schrott Krubel interview, Jan. 9, 1997, Topeka, Kansas.]

A US Sergeant: Our own Army and the British Army . . . have done their share of looting and raping . . . [W]e too are considered an army of rapists. [Kelling, 61; Time Magazine, Nov. 12, 1945; Life Magazine, Jan. 7, 1946.]

A US Soldier: Hunger made German women more ‘available,’ but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her face smashed with a rifle butt and was then raped by two GIs. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. [Brech, Martin.“In ‘Eisenhower’s Death Camps’: Part I—A U.S. Prison Guard’s Story.” The Journal of Historical Review 10, no.2 (Summer 1990). Page 165.]

Two German Soldiers (combined into 1 voice over): (1) [I]t’s incomprehensible to me how we could stand for many, many days without sitting, without lying down, just standing there, totally soaked. During the day we marched around, huddled together to try to warm each other a bit.  (2) The latrines were just logs flung over ditches next to the barbed wire fences. To sleep, all we could do was to dig out a hole in the ground with our hands, then cling together in the hole. . . . Because of illness, the men had to defecate on the ground. Soon, many of us were too weak to take off our trousers first. So our clothing was infected, and so was the mud where we had to walk and sit and lie down. There was no water at all at first, except the rain. . . . More than half the days we had no food at all. On the rest, we got a little K ration. I could see from the package that they were giving us one tenth of the rations that they issued to their own men. . . . I complained to the American camp commander that he was breaking the Geneva Convention, but he just said, “Forget the Convention. You haven’t any rights.” Within a few days, some of the men who had gone healthy into the camps were dead. I saw our men dragging many dead bodies to the gate of the camp, where they were thrown loose on top of each other onto trucks, which took them away. [Pechel, Peter, Dennis Showalter and Johannes Steinhoff.Voices From the Third Reich—
An Oral History. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989. Page 491] [Bacque, James. Other Losses—An Investigation into the Mass deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co., 1989. Page 38]

 

The Purge

 

Leni Riefenstahl: Neither my husband nor my mother nor any of my three assistants had ever joined the Nazi Party, nor had any of us been politically active. No `charges had ever been filed against us, yet we were at the mercy of the [Allies] and had no legal protection of any kind. [Horstmann, Lali.We Chose to Stay. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Page 327]

A German Prisoner: The purpose of these interrogations is not to worm out of the people what they knew—which would be uninteresting anyway—but to extort from them special statements. The methods resorted to are extremely primitive; people are beaten up until they confess to having been members of the Nazi Party. . . . The authorities simply assume that, basically, everybody has belonged to the Party. Many people die during and after these interrogations, while others, who admit at once their party membership, are treated more leniently. [Von Lehndorff, Hans Graf. Token of a Covenant—Diary of an East Prussian Surgeon, 1945–47. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1964. Page 127]

Both officers who took our testimony were former German Jews. [One] kicked me in the back and the other hit me. . . . [T]he terrible thing was, the German men had to watch. That was a horrible, horrible experience. . . . That must have been terrible for them. When I went outside, several of them stood there with tears running down their cheeks. What could they have done? They could do nothing. [Owings, Alison. Frauen—German Women recall the Third Reich.New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Pages 335-336]

George Patton: Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working . . . I can’t see how Americans can sink so low. [Martin Blumenson, The Patton Papers—1940–1945 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972)]

A British Witness: [S]ome of them, one-eyed or one-legged veterans of seven or so, many so deranged by the bombing and the Russian attack that they screamed at the sight of any uniform, even a Salvation Army one. [Garrett, Stephen A. Ethics and Airpower in World War II—The British Bombing of German Cities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Page 141]

American Historian Ralph Franklin Keeling: While the Germans around them starve, wear rags, and live in hovels, the American aristocrats live in often unaccustomed ease and luxury. . . . [T]hey live in the finest homes from which they drove the Germans; they swagger about in fine liveries and gorge themselves on diets three times as great as they allow the Germans. . . .When we tell the Germans their low rations are necessary because food is so short, they naturally either think we are lying to them or regard us as inhuman for taking the lion’s share of the short supplies while they and their children starve. [Keeling, Ralph Franklin.Gruesome Harvest—The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German
People. 1947. Reprint. Torrance, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review, 1992. Page 101]

 

Ethnic Cleansing

 

Winston Churchill: Don’t mind the five or more million Germans. Stalin will see to them. You will not have trouble with them: they will cease to exist. [Keeling, Ralph Franklin.Gruesome Harvest—The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People. 1947. Reprint. Torrance, Calif.: Institute for Historical Review, 1992. Page 13]

A Viewer from Gruenberg: As they left town in an endless procession, Polish soldiers fell upon them, beating and flogging them in a blind rage. . . . Robbed of all they possessed and literally stripped of the last of their belongings, . . . these poor creatures trudged along in the wind and the rain, with no roof or shelter over their heads, not knowing where they would find a new abode. [Kaps, Johannes, ed. The Tragedy of Silesia, 1945–46—A Documentary Account with a Special Survey of the Archdiocese of Breslau. Munich: Christ Unterwegs, 1952/53. Page 428]

Austin J. App: To slice three or four ancient provinces from a country, then loot and plunder nine million people of their houses, farms, cattle, furniture, and even clothes, and then . . . expel them “from the land they have inhabited for 700 years” with no distinction “between the innocent and the guilty” . . . to drive them like unwanted beasts on foot to far-off provinces, unprotected, shelterless, and starving is an atrocity so vast that history records none vaster. [App,Austin J.“Mass Expulsions: ‘Tragedy on a Prodigious Scale.” The Barnes Review 2, no. 10 (Oct. 1996). Page 24]