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We needed 40 years to overcome East Germany. Sometimes in history, one has to be prepared for the long haul and not ask after four months if it still makes sense to keep up our demands.

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939.

I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another.

I was in the underground until I left Germany.

The German physicists knew at least so much about the manufacture and construction of atomic bombs that it was clear to them that the manufacture of bombs in Germany could not succeed during the war. For this reason, they were spared the moral decision whether they should make an atomic bomb, and they had only worked on the uranium engine.

After World War I, while France and other Allies were building military defenses modeled on trench warfare, German commanders were shaping a nimble fighting force.

There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.

The Germans have done wonderful work. Not long ago, a German battle group battalion conducted a very impressive counterinsurgency operation in a portion of Baghlan province. I think these are the first counterinsurgency operations conducted by any German element after World War II. And they did a very impressive job.