Sebastian Kurz Quotes

Germany's historical responsibility will not expire. We want to live up to it - and you should judge us on it.

I am not a German bitter-ender. I am, though, a German never-forgetter.

After the war, the Austrians just denied their role in it all. They didn't teach it in school. But since 1990 they have openly acknowledged their role in the Holocaust and I feel more comfortable in Austria. I feel a sort of reconciliation.

The German debt to the Jewish people can never end, not in this generation and not in any other.

Norway as a nation should take collective responsibility for what happened in our country during World War II. I see it as our duty to seek a broad, moral reconciliation and to let this be expressed economically.

Many Germans dream of revenge today.

Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

We Germans have a special responsibility to be alert, sensitive, and aware of what we did during the Nazi era and about lasting damage caused in other countries. I've got tremendous sympathy for that.

In my several visits to Germany, I have written in admiration of that country's strenuous efforts to face its past and make amends.

One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.

I am not saying that during the Second World War Germany did not, under the leadership of the National Socialist government, commit crimes.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

I worked as a lawyer; as a member of the teaching staff of a technical college; and then I worked principally as legal adviser to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party.

Is it appropriate still for a German to have a gun? I only use that as an example of a country that's still deeply involved and engaged in the conversations about how to come to terms with the past. Certainly for that country, it's not forgotten.

Germany was the cause of Hitler as much as Chicago is responsible for the Chicago Tribune.

Murder has been done in Buchenwald.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.

For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State [Germany], as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims [the Jews] of the government that preceded it [Nazi Germany].

As a German, in view of the history of World War II and the terrible deeds of the Nazi period, I feel a special obligation to help as much as I can to develop European-Israeli relations and thus contribute to ensuring Israel's future and existence.

We abide by our responsibility as Germany for the Shoah.

As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.

Germany's crimes were recent and of such a scale and depravity that, unless constantly faced, they will come to seem fictitious.