# 1939

## Metadata
- Author: [[Robert Kee]]
- Full Title: 1939
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- Academic history can sometimes lose sight of one important element in both the experience and the shaping of great events, namely, the straightforward but exciting fact that no one at the time could ever say exactly what was going to happen next. ([Location 120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07WFHQ1H1&location=120))
- It was true, the editor of The Times went on, that certain ideological repercussions of the dictatorships’ notions of race and state, such as the treatment of the Jews ‘not only affect the interests of other countries but challenge the general conscience of humanity. … Yet the instinct is sound that there is in these differences of political creed alone no sane case for armed conflict.’ ([Location 234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07WFHQ1H1&location=234))
- No Jew could henceforth own or drive a car, or engage in the retail trade or any craft. (Jews were already forbidden to attend cinemas, theatres and concerts.) ‘There is a fear’, the report concluded, ‘of even sterner measures in the next few days.’ ([Location 238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07WFHQ1H1&location=238))
- And a Philadelphia Quaker group working in Germany ‘with every co-operation and courtesy of the German Government’ said that the message from the 600,000 Jews still there was, ‘Above all, get us out before something more awful happens.’ ([Location 244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07WFHQ1H1&location=244))