The most recommended books on Nazi Germany

Other, newer books on the Battle of Berlin are available. And Ryan’s other books, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, are more famous. But The Last Battle is the book whose style and mood I most try to emulate in my own writings.

Ryan interviewed many of the participants, collected reams of documents from both sides—at a time when the Cold War was at its height—and the result is a wonderful book. You can smell the cigarette and gunsmoke, picture the military and political leaders talking, laugh or cry at some of the vignettes.

Beevor’s book on Berlin is better history—thanks to the sources he was able to access—but Ryan is my ‘go-to’ book if I want to feel and experience the fall of Berlin.

Maddie, a pilot, and Verity, an SOE agent, are two girls from very different pre-war lives who forge a deep friendship during World War II.

Verity has been captured and, while being interrogated in France, is forced to write a confession. Into this, she weaves the story of how she and Maddie came to know each other. Maddie’s version of events comes later in the book and provides a different reading of what happened. To say more would involve spoilers, so I won’t go any further.

I was gripped by the plotting – Verity is under a death sentence – and by the vivid writing: two young women pouring their all onto the pages. It’s a harrowing read at times, thrilling, beautiful, and heartbreaking. And it’s the first book that’s made me cry for a very long time.

Ms. Kollwitz is one of the most famous expressionistic German artists and was the first female to teach in a university setting. She was a pacifist, champion of the poor, a politically-active socialist. Under the Nazi regime, her work was labeled “Degenerate.”  After learning about Ms. Kollwitz, I wrote a play about her entitled Censored.

I really love this book and could write an entire short story collection inspired by it. It’s the first time I heard about the Amber Room, one of those things that once you know about it, you are obsessed. The authors lead us into caves, through basements, across borders, as they track down the pathways of stolen treasures. The book tells us about the provenance of missing artworks, and what it means to have that space on the wall. 

All of these books have an element of ‘the missing wall’ about them and perhaps that’s one of the things that fascinates me the most about the subject. Sometimes what isn’t there is more meaningful than what is. 

This author offers a well-crafted history of daily life inside the Reich, a fascinating exploration of the German capital as the Nazi movement brought its citizens to their knees. Extensively researched and documented, Moorhouse vividly portrays the daily oppression and challenges faced on all societal fronts. This well-crafted study enmeshes the reader in life under totalitarian rule.

I was enraptured by this book. It took me right into the middle of one of the defining events of the air war over Germany in a way that no other book did, not even Sinclair McKay’s superb Dresden.

Through Middlebrook’s book, I saw the bombing of Germany’s second city through the eyes of the British bomber crews, the helpless German fighter pilots, and the people of Hamburg itself. It made me realise how close bombing came at that point in the war to causing a German collapse–totally absorbing.     

I loved this book because of Johnathan’s fighting spirit. 

Many war stories are about the fighting – the soldiers’ stories. This story is about the thoughts and life of a boy who was a child at the start of World War ll. He tells of how his father goes off to war. He suffers through the blitz and losing his home. He is forced to live with other relatives, and eventually to go away from his family to another part of the country. 

It is interesting reading about a boy’s understanding and confusion about catastrophic events, and how these events shape his behavior, before eventually arriving at a more peaceful outlook on life.

This long-out-of-print book that came out in the 1960s introduced me to Witez II, the subject of my new book. While And Miles to Go is also historical fiction, it uses the real details of the life of Witez from his birth in Poland to his capture by the Nazis during WWII.

When I am writing a new novel about a little-known horse or horse-related event, I buy all the nonfiction books on the subject that I can find.  Once the print copy arrives, I can highlight, write notes in margins, dogear corners, and so forth, to help me with my research. This was the case with my latest book.

I purchased several nonfiction books about the army's "Operation Cowboy" during WWII during which they rescued the horses stolen by the Nazis. This book was written in the 1960s, so the closest to the time of the actual event of… show more.

Written during the Third Reich itself, this is the hard-hitting book that told the world just how heinous Nazi education policy was – although it was only heeded by a prescient few at the time. Anyone who is worried about how easily schooling can become subject to ideology should definitely read this book!

How did Nazi antisemitism affect German Jews? To answer this question Marion Kaplan delves into the social, domestic, and emotional lives of the persecuted one-percent minority. She reveals how Jews felt when hit with yet another restrictive or punitive measure, when neighbors and friends turned away, when deportation loomed. Crucially, the pioneering feminist historian distinguishes between male and female experiences. Having been less involved in professional and public life, women reacted more flexibly to an unprecedented situation than their menfolk. They were less tied to German culture and more capable of grasping the new realities. Even so, when couples and families finally decided to emigrate, it was often too late: potential host countries were reluctant to allow them in, and Nazi antisemitism soon turned into a policy of mass murder.