100 books like The Mark of Cain

Since its publication, I have assigned this book every time I taught my course on Nazi Germany at Williams College.

Through his use of diaries, letters, and anecdotes, in combination with his profound knowledge of the history of the Third Reich, Fritzsche shows how, after January 1933, when Hitler became Reich Chancellor, the German people came rapidly to support and even to create National Socialism in Germany. The German people here were not simply duped or terrorized by the Nazis. Fritzsche shows how, in various different ways and to various different degrees, Germans became Nazis.

And, through empathy with those Germans, he helps the reader to understand why they did so. If you want to read only one book on the history of the Third Reich, this is the book I would recommend.

How can a human being organize an extermination camp and oversee the industrial murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people?

This book is based on journalist Gitta Sereny's conversations with Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, during his trial in Germany in 1971. It sheds light on how a perpetrator tried to deny his complicity by retreating into a purely functional professional role—a denial that ultimately failed.

At his last meeting with Sereny, Stangl still maintained that he never intended to hurt anyone, though for the first time, he admitted that there was guilt on his part, an acknowledgment with which he could not live. Nineteen hours after his confession, Stangl died of heart failure.

Although Kristallnacht has been the subject of intense scholarly interest, Confino noticed something about the pogrom of 9 November 1938 that previous historians had missed. He noticed that, in addition to plundering and destroying Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues, beating, arresting, and killing Jews, the Nazi mobs took particular delight in publicly burning the Hebrew Bible, the foundation of the Judeo-Christian religious and cultural tradition.

By thinking his way inside the Nazi imagination, Confino opened my eyes to the fact that the Nazis sought to create a world without Jews not only by physically exterminating them but also by committing cultural genocide, by seeking to eradicate the Jewish basis of Western civilization. 

This is a book of collected essays, most of which focus on the people who carried out the Holocaust. The essays are excellent, and many of them empathize to one degree or another with Nazi perpetrators.

I think that one of the articles, Harald Welzer’s “On Killing and Morality: How Normal People Become Mass Murderers,” is perhaps the single best thing I’ve read about Nazi Germany. Welzer compellingly and convincingly explains, on both a collective and individual level, how German people got, step by step, to perpetrating genocide.  

After reading Welzer’s article, I now understand how an SS man with a gun standing before a trench filled with naked Jewish men, women, and children could, when given the order to shoot those people, think that order made sense. 

I think Zachary Shore is one of our most underappreciated, insightful interpreters of American and global history.

Shore impressed me with his unique method of examining micro-events that give us a much wider view of American culture. He shows how America, at its best, can be a strong and moral guiding force for good in the world, but he doesn't shy from divulging the darker sides of the American psyche, such as the blunders that lead American leaders to make terrible and consequential military decisions.

Shore is not only a great historian but also a gifted writer. This book showed me how the collective memory of our nation has been portrayed too often in flawed stereotypes, either a villainous, youthful colossus or a city on a hill, a shining example for the rest of humanity. Shore convinced me that at its root, America can be a force for good as… show more.

There are lots of stories about spies, and there are great histories about American missionaries.

But Sutton brings them together in a refreshing way, revealing the moral and political conundrums that arose once the United States turned to (mostly) men of faith to do undercover wartime work, from showering North Africa with propaganda and rescuing Doolittle’s downed raiders from China to stealing secrets and plotting assassinations.

The author, a daughter of an uncommon ‘mixed marriage’ between a Lithuanian-Jewish Holocaust survivor and a Lithuanian-Christian immigrant family. Both sides of her families were kept separate, except for rare special occasions. As a child, she was told wonderful stories about how her Lithuanian grandfather helped save Jews. As an adult and as an historian, she began to investigate the true activities of her grandfather, during those dark days in Lithuania. Like, Silvia Foti, she was emotionally fractured when she learned the truth. 

There were very few Jewish survivors from Lithuania, and Gabis’ book helps me understand why.

Wendy Lower’s powerful examination of the role of German women as witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators in the Holocaust exposed the participation of women in the genocide of the European Jews during World War II.

Focusing on individual histories, Lower reveals the backgrounds, actions, and motivations of a cohort of mostly young women who became complicit in mass murder.

Full of haunting descriptions, the image of the wife of a German SS officer leading a group of naked Jewish boys to a woods near her home and shooting them as they wept because she wanted to prove her toughness to the men is only one unforgettable example of women’s participation in the Holocaust.

Jähner’s Aftermath is one of the best books about post-1945 Germany. Defeated and confronted with the horrors their country had unleashed during the preceding six years of genocidal war in Europe, most ordinary Germans were keen to move on, rebuild and forget. A myth was born that saw 1945 as Germany’s ‘Zero Hour,’ a kind of tabula rasa, from which the nation could start anew. Jähner’s social history of the first ten years after the Second World War shatters this illusion powerfully and definitively. His book is a great foundation for anyone who wants to understand Germany today.

Even those of us who are familiar with historical details of the Holocaust have a mostly generalized understanding of the fraught relationships between US-based Jews and Jews in Europe.

Bonelli uses primary source materials, mainly letters, to inform a very well-crafted narrative in service of educating American Jews about the travails of European Jewry and helps explain the older generation of Jews to an often-befuddled younger generation.