Gestapo Quotes

• Freedom is when one hears the bell at seven o'clock in the morning and knows it is the milkman and not the Gestapo.

  Georges Bidault

  Morning, Freedom, Bells

  82 Copy quote

• Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews....If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed.

  Anne Frank

  Taken, Car, Holocaust

  87 Copy quote

• I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.

  Harry S. Truman

  Freedom, Agency, Historical

  106 Copy quote

• The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as from 1933 onward, "political criminality" was given a much broader definition than ever before and more forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more "laws" or law-like measures were put on the books than ever.

  Sheila Fitzpatrick

  Book, Law, Political

  37 Copy quote

• We've come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended.

  Harry Belafonte

  Dark, Rights, Citizens

  41 Copy quote

• It is natural that people do not want to be involved with us too much. There is no problem down to the smallest egotistical longing which the Gestapo cannot solve. Regarded in this way we are, if a joke is permitted, looked upon as a cross between a general maid and the dustbin of the Reich.

  Reinhard Heydrich

  People, Maids, Want

  "Gestapo : Instrument of Tyranny" by Edward Crankshaw, (p. 103), 1956.

  66 Copy quote

  Show source

• Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.

  J. Edgar Hoover

  Done, Information, Should

  Look magazine, June 14, 1956.

  96 Copy quote

  Show source

• To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.

  Albert Maltz

  Victim, Torture, Informers

  84 Copy quote

• No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanly directed in the first instance.

  Winston Churchill

  Country, Fall, Socialist Government

  Winston Churchill (2012). “Churchill: The Power of Words”, p.478, Da Capo Press

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night.

  Bruno Schulz

  Father, Night, Play

  31 Copy quote

• And I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.

  Benjamin Carson

  Crazy, Believe, Government

  "Ben Carson: U.S. Like Nazi Germany ‘Because Of The PC Police’". talkingpointsmemo.com. March 12, 2014.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• By the end of the war, I could pick out Jewish people almost as if I had a sixth sense about it, even if they had blue eyes and blond hair. I would have been a very valuable Gestapo person.

  Diet Eman

  War, Eye, Hair

  20 Copy quote

• I would say that not many German people are still alive, who experienced what happened during the third reich. We don't have to go to the Stasi, we can go to the Gestapo, and see what happens, when your human rights, your ability to a freedom of expression and a freedom of thought is infringed upon. This is terribly, terribly dangerous territory.

  Ray McGovern

  Rights, Expression, People

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those 'good Germans' who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.

  Frank Rich

  War, Ignorance, Humanity

  14 Copy quote

• The EPA, the Gestapo of government, pure and simply has been one of the major claw-hooks that the government maintains on the backs of our constituents.

  Tom DeLay

  Government, Epa, Hook

  Associated Press, July 29, 1995.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.

  George Orwell

  War, Struggle, Heart

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944”

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• In this prison camp, the Gestapo state brain-police planet Earth, what is normal is insane and what is insane is normal. But it doesn't pay to tell that to the local politicians or other organizational structures that run the place that. They didn't crucify Christ because they liked what he said.

  Frederick Lenz

  Running, Buddhism, Police

  11 Copy quote

• They didn't crucify Christ because they liked what he said.

  Frederick Lenz

  Christianity, Christ, Said

  8 Copy quote

• A large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same. All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned. What distinguished each of us was only our inner attitude.

  Etty Hillesum

  Peace, Attitude, Men

  Etty Hillesum, K. A. D. Smelik, Arnold Pomerans (2002). “Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943”, p.258, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

  65 Copy quote

  Show source

• Before the advent of Hitler or Stalin, who took their power from the German and the Russian people, measures were thrust upon the free legislatures of those countries to deprive the people of the possession and use of firearms, so that they could not resist the encroachments of such diabolical and vitriolic state police organizations as the Gestapo, the Ogpu, and the Cheka.

  Edwin Arthur Hall

  Country, Organization, People

  45 Copy quote

• The anger I felt when the ACLU tried to disenfranchise me because my religious stayed with me. These are dangerous people who make dangerous arguments. Some powerful members of the cultural elites in our country are so paralyzed by the fear that theistic notions might reassert themselves in the official activities of government that they will go to Gestapo lengths to inhibit such expression.

  Henry Hyde

  Christian, Country, Religious

  10 Copy quote

• The IRS has become morally corrupted by the enormous power which we in Congress have unwisely entrusted to it. Too often it acts like a Gestapo preying upon defenseless citizens.

  Edward V. Long

  Liberty, Citizens, Irs

  45 Copy quote

• Well, the role of our "allies," in my view, is a scandal. 53 other countries cooperated in the kidnapping, "extraordinary rendition," of suspected terrorists to black sites where they were administered enhanced interrogation techniques, which by the way is a direct, literal translation of "verschärfte Vernehmung" right out of the Gestapo manual.

  Ray McGovern

  Country, Views, Interrogation Techniques

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar.

  Rose Wilder Lane

  Government, Law, Political

  22 Copy quote

• Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.

  Arthur Koestler

  Cutting, Reality, Imagination

  "A Challenge to 'Knights in Rusty Armor". The New York Times, February 14, 1943.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source