War is romantic, with a mystic and poetic element in it. … To save our nation from falling into disrepute, we must learn to understand that a warlike and brawling spirit is not essential to us. … War is a lie. … My aim is to win you to the side of the republic; to the side of what is called democracy ... the republic is our fate. ... The republic — still and always Germany! Democracy!

One of the inmates in our large holding cell was an elderly peasant from a collective farm (kolkhoz). We gathered that his son was being held in another holding cell and they were trying to make the son testify against his father. The old man kept saving crumbs from his daily bread ration to give to his son when they saw each other. The son must have eventually succumbed to the beatings and signed a document saying that the father was trying to convince him to kill the kolkhoz director. The old man denied the accusation, and no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't convince him to admit his 'guilt.' He was summoned to a joint interrogation with the son and went in determined to defend himself and tell the truth. But when he saw his tortured son, with the bruises from the beatings clearly visible, something inside him broke and he told the investigator: 'It's true, all of it, I confess, whatever my Ilyushka told you, don't doubt it, everything is true,' and he immediately signed the confession they had prepared for him. A few days later, when he next saw his son on the way to the court chambers, the old man somehow managed to get away momentarily from his guards and gave his Ilyushka the fistful of crumbs he had collected for him. And then the son broke down, fell on his knees, and started crying, 'Forgive me, papa, forgive me, I betrayed you, forgive me.' The old man started mumbling something, patted his son on the head, told him it was OK. The guards didn't know what to do; their emotions overwhelmed them. Even the judges of the tribunal, who had seen it all, were shaken to their core.

It was the French people who, through their representatives, entrusted power to me in 1940. I asked for nothing and wanted nothing. I was begged to come; I came. I became the heir to a catastrophe for which I was not responsible. The Armistice saved France and contributed to the Allied victory by ensuring that part of France and the empire remained free and intact. Power was entrusted to me lawfully and recognized by every country in the world from the Vatican to the Soviet Union. I used that power as a shield to protect the French people. I remained at the head of an occupied country. While General de Gaulle, outside our frontiers, carried on the struggle, I prepared the way for the liberation, by preserving an unhappy, but living, France.

World and colonial" power "is pursued for . . . capitalist exploitation and for displaying military force . . . [I]t corresponds to the greedy desire of the bourgeoisie . . . to invest its ever-increasing capital . . . and to the desire for new markets which each country tries to usurp to itself.

The scene has changed fundamentally. The six weeks' march to Paris [promised by the German high command in 1914] has grown into a world drama. Mass slaughter has become the tiresome and monotonous business of the day and the end is no closer. Gone is the euphoria. Gone the patriotic noise in the streets. Gone the swaying crowds in the coffee shops with ear-deafening patriotic songs surging ever higher. Gone the transformation of whole city neighborhoods into mobs ready to denounce [suspected foreign spies], to shout hurrah and to induce delirium in themselves by means of wild rumors. The spectacle is over. The trains full of troops are no longer accompanied by women fainting from pure happiness. The soldiers no longer greet the people from the windows of the trains with joyous smiles. Carrying their packs, they quietly trot along the streets where the public goes about its daily business with unhappy faces.

We are entering the Reichstag in order that we may arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its arsenal. We shall become members of the Reichstag in order that the Weimar ideology should itself help us to destroy it … to revolutionize the present state of affairs. We come as enemies! Like the wolf falling upon a herd of sheep, that is how we come

Overnight we have become the most radical democracy in Europe, yet we must consider it the relatively moderate solution to the problem of our political life. Democracy did not happen overnight. It is the natural consequence of modern population density, combined with education, industrialization, war mobilization, and politicization. It fell solely to the terrible world war to deliver democracy to victory. But this introduced the danger that the development will not stop at democracy, and a "dictatorship of the proletariat" will assume the form of terrorist domination by a minority. We can only secure this new situation externally through a League of Nations and internally through a new order renovated along democratic and social lines. Otherwise Germany may become a volcano of misery, always likely to erupt into civil wars.