Max in the House of Spies: A Tale of World War II

Hitler may be a madman,’ said Ewen as they passed a schoolhouse where all the windows had been blown out by a bomb that had fallen through the roof, “but what about everyone else? What about the lads in the sky who dropped the bombs? What about their commanders? What about their wives and children? What will the bomber pilots gel their wives when they come home tonight? …’ ‘… but how in God’s name does Hitler get them all to go along with it?

Max recognized instantly that Jean was strong, clever, and confident enough to be kind.

Adolf Hitler himself wrote that the most effective kind of lie is the Big Lie. He said that people won’t believe small lies, because they themselves tell small lies every day, and so they recognize them. But the average person can’t imagine someone would have the gall to tell an enormous lie, a huge fiction, a total falsehood, because it’s something they couldn’t get away with in their own lives. And so those are the lies that they believe.

for a moment, and then fell down again.

You cannot lose the truth. You must keep it buried, in a box under the stairs in the cellar of your brain. You might even struggle to find it some days. But if it's tossed out, if it's lost... then so are you." Ewen sighed and said, "Sometimes I think the whole of Germany is like that. Hitler invented a fiction for them, and they're all living it... and they've totally lost the truth." He got very quiet. "But why? How? How does a whole country bury the truth and forget where they buried it?