Downfall Quotes

Adolf Hitler: That was an order! Steiner's assault was an order! Who do you think you are to dare disobey an order I give? So this is what it has come to! The military has been lying to me. Everybody has been lying to me, even the SS! Our generals are just a bunch of contemptible, disloyal cowards.
General der Infanterie Wilhelm Burgdorf: I can't permit you

to insult the soldiers.
Adolf Hitler: They are cowards, traitors and failures!
General der Infanterie Wilhelm Burgdorf: My fuhrer, this is outrageous!
Adolf Hitler: Our generals are the scum of the German people! Not a shred of honour! They call themselves generals. Years at military academy just to learn how to hold a knife

and fork! For years, the military has hindered my plans! They've put every kind of obstacle in my way! What I should have done... was liquidate all the high-ranking officers, as Stalin did!

[last lines]
Traudl Junge: All these horrors I've heard of during the Nurnberg process, these six million Jews, other thinking people or people of another race, who perished. That shocked me deeply. But I hadn't made the connection with my past. I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty. And that I didn't know anything about the enormous scale of it.

But one day I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in the Franz-Joseph-Strasse. I saw that she was about my age and she was executed in the same year I came to Hitler. And at that moment I actually realised that a young age isn't an excuse. And that it might have been possible to get to know things.

[first lines]
Traudl Junge: I've got the feeling that I should be angry with this child, this young and oblivious girl. Or that I'm not allowed to forgive her for not seeing the nature of that monster. That she didn't realise what she was doing. And mostly because I've gone so obliviously. Because I wasn't a fanatic Nazi. I could have said in Berlin, "No, I'm not doing

that. I don't want to go the Führer's headquarters." But I didn't do that. I was too curious. I didn't realise that fate would lead me somewhere I didn't want to be. But still, I find it hard to forgive myself.

Oberleutnant: [after the telephone line is cut] Orders, sir?
General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling: I am to be shot.
Oberleutnant: What? Why?
General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling: They believe I moved my command post to the West, away from the enemy!
Oberleutnant: Not a bad idea,

General.

Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel: Even at the risk of repeating myself, the Ninth army must be withdrawn, otherwise it is surrounded and wiped out! We must now...
Adolf Hitler: The Ninth army will not retreat. Tell Busse to fight where he stands.
Generaloberst Alfred Jodl: My Führer, then the Ninth army will be lost.

Adolf Hitler: We will repel the Soviet troops advancing to the North and East, with a relentless and almighty assault.
Generaloberst Alfred Jodl: With what force, my Führer?
Adolf Hitler: Steiner's force will attack from the North and unite with the Ninth army.
General der Infanterie Hans Krebs: The Ninth

Army is unable to move North; the enemy army outnumbers us ten to one.
Adolf Hitler: Wenck: he will support them with the Twelfth Army.
Generaloberst Alfred Jodl: But my Führer, the Twelfth Army is heading west to the Elbe.
Adolf Hitler: Then tell the army to turn around!
Generaloberst Alfred Jodl: But

we would expose the Western Front!
Adolf Hitler: Are you questioning my orders? I believe I made myself clear!

Walter Hewel: Why do you want to live on?
Prof. Dr. Ernst-Günter Schenck: And you? Why do you absolutely want to die?
Walter Hewel: You see this?
[shows him a cyanide cap]
Walter Hewel: The Führer personally gave it to me!
Prof. Dr. Ernst-Günter Schenck: [bitter] As last

honor?
Walter Hewel: ...maybe.