You cannot speak on behalf of a nation when you have no mandate to do so.

O my dear parishioners, let us endeavor to get to heaven! There we shall see God. How happy we shall feel! If the parish is converted we shall go there in procession with the parish priest at the head. . . We must get to heaven! What a pity it would be if some of you were to find yourselves on the other side!

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives.

There was no reason to label us as anti-Semitic.

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks. The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims. For some the most terrible aspect of it was the deportations, while for others it was the leveling bombings or the mass deaths by starvation and cold.

France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.