Book: Barbarossa

Keitel nodded approvingly, but Jodl has expressed doubts:
- War with Russia - a war waged when you always know how to start it, but you'll never know how it will end. Any war with any country can be brought to a victorious end. And only in war with Russia we can not advance to see its finale...

Paulus, remaining almost indifferent, replied the mother-in-law that Hitler fell from the ceiling, and came to power by democratic means - through popular election.
- Ah, this is democracy! - exclaimed the mother-in-law. - Covers all the crimes she care about the people. Look what happened to Russia when they killed the king... No, I was and remain convinced monarhistkoy.

Theodore field Marshal Fedor von Bock, Paulus congratulating on appointment to the tank ranges in Wunsdorf-Bergen, about the political "race" up there, spoke more frankly:
From softening of bones German people switched to the softening of the brain... In any case - was talking to von Bock, from this guy with bangs on the forehead is always necessary to hide matches away so he doesn't make a good fire...

The war ended with the Treaty of Versailles, which the officers called "shameful" ready even now "replay" the war again. Germany was in the confusion of feelings and opinions, all wanted something, all someone hated, and most of all the Germans wanted a... is! Once at the hotel Bristol, where instead of butter was served margarine instead of fresh meat canned, Paulus ordered natural steak, which cost four hundred marks, and one-eyed waiter, recognized him as a soldier, a friendly warning:
- Eat soon, because prices are rising, and while you are poking around with a knife and fork, steak will cost seven hundred brands...

Follow the river, starting with its origins. Truth for today - tomorrow is a lie.

The Americans drove the Germans to watch the excavated ditches in which rot the corpses of the tortured, and the Germans said that "they knew nothing". This infuriated Americans:
Shut up, if you don't know what's in front of you was going on! Why do we, living thousands of miles from Germany, we were notified about all the horrors in your country...

In the Nuremberg Palace of justice, seat of the international Tribunal, and as the indictment documents also showed films about the atrocities of Hitler's regime. Here, too, turned away from the screen, wore impenetrable sunglasses, and some war criminals even... crying. Judges and prosecutors could not help remembering the old Maxim: "be Afraid of defeated Germans! If they failed to flood the world in blood, they will flood it with my tears..."

Accidentally I thought, because we have very few people knows that many women were left in the dugouts and trenches, never considering themselves to be soldiers, they did what they could: washed, cooked, darned shirt, care for the wounded, moreover, many children are released, and our soldiers fed them... Death? But these women say: death to all one! Here it is, the brotherhood of the people and the army - and not flashy, but the heart, the most pure and sacred. Always will remain burning question: where the end sections of the military oath and where begins the civil conscience? Oh, how much we still do not know!..

Famous words Chuikov about this time:
- If the Americans say that "time is money", we, Russians, now say differently: "Time is blood."

In the fight against the enemy ideology of the Italian fascists, frankly, not very lucky: the don in one of the towns they destroyed the statues of mustachioed farmer with a farm girl in a wide dress, deciding that these statues represent the great Stalin and his beloved wife - Stalinize.

Halder in conversation with officers of the General staff said:
- Russia under the Stalinist regime - it's not even a country, and a great big soap bubble, lightly armored on the outside. Poke him with your finger - and he immediately burst, revealing its emptiness. Not without reason, to cover up their misery, Moscow likes to flaunt all sorts of records. Above all, beyond all... and often, perhaps, dumber than everyone else. I would not want to be a Russian in this era, so disastrous for Russia. Perhaps our Fuhrer rights, which monitors the production of toothbrushes...

Of course, this "success" was to celebrate the good stuff! At his dacha in Kuntsevo, Stalin threw a party. Tipsy, "leader of the people" expressive looked at Kalinin, and "national mayor", rocking a goatee, walked in front of him squatting; Stalin blinked then Mikoyan - and he vospryanuv from the snack table, willingly danced for him lezginka.
Oh, if I made it up! Alas... preserved the witnesses that testified about this disgusting picture, when the image which is remembered Ivan the terrible and his oprichnina.

In rare moments of rest Paulus with the subframe, as an artist, went to the Tiergarten, where prettily painted watercolor lyrical landscapes. Said he was in the shower lyric. Sentimental...
Maybe. But his plan "Barbarossa", strung on the peak of the war, carried us all the blood, famine, disasters, suffering.
I did this Paulus? Yes, he knew.
But I am a soldier and I must keep his hands at his sides...
Him - hands at the seams, and we - hands up!

Oh, how many enemies of the people! But I don't see them behind the barbed wire of the Kolyma or Vorkuta, and in the most serene and warm offices of the Kremlin, and in Stalin's entourage.