(no subject)
Excerpt from Fail-Safe, co-written by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, published 1962, republished 1999, Ecco Publishers, pp. 107-108:
"Emil Groteschele was not an embittered man. He had understood clearly what his prospects were when he left Berlin. He was saving his life and the lives of his family. Nothing more. One of the few times that his son had seen him angry was when the subject of the Diary of Anne Frank came up. Emil Groteschele had offended the Jews of Cincinnati by arguing that Anne Frank and her family had acted like imbeciles. Rather than hiding in an attic and clutching their Jewishness to them they should have made plans to escape. Failing that, they should have been prepared to fight the Nazis when the final day came. 'The steps leading up to that miserable attic should have been red with Nazi blood--and that of the Frank family,' Dr. Groteschele argued bitterly.
'If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested,' Emil Groteschele argued. 'At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped. Face it. If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up? At around a few hundred they would have started to think twice. At a few thousand they would have started to shake a bit. If it got to twenty thousand, they would have called it off. But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest.'"
"Emil Groteschele was not an embittered man. He had understood clearly what his prospects were when he left Berlin. He was saving his life and the lives of his family. Nothing more. One of the few times that his son had seen him angry was when the subject of the Diary of Anne Frank came up. Emil Groteschele had offended the Jews of Cincinnati by arguing that Anne Frank and her family had acted like imbeciles. Rather than hiding in an attic and clutching their Jewishness to them they should have made plans to escape. Failing that, they should have been prepared to fight the Nazis when the final day came. 'The steps leading up to that miserable attic should have been red with Nazi blood--and that of the Frank family,' Dr. Groteschele argued bitterly.
'If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested,' Emil Groteschele argued. 'At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped. Face it. If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up? At around a few hundred they would have started to think twice. At a few thousand they would have started to shake a bit. If it got to twenty thousand, they would have called it off. But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest.'"