The best books about life under Nazi occupation

This is a novel about an improbable relationship carried out under Hitler’s nose at Auschwitz, where over a million people were murdered.

Before writing The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris interviewed Lale Sokolov, who lived in Australia during the latter part of his life.

Lale told the story about how he was assigned by the Germans to place tatoos on the arms of people entering Auschwitz—a concentration camp built for mass extermination. This gave him certain privileges—including access to food—that enabled him to help Gita, another prisoner who he fell in love with.

Ms. Morris expertly weaves Lale’s story into a novel, which drags the reader into the horror and hope of Lale’s improbable narrative.    

This is a history about three young women in the Netherlands who resisted the occupiers by murdering enemy soldiers.

The story told in Three Ordinary Girls about young women who assassinated German soldiers had already been told partially in the memoirs of the survivors.

The story of Hannie Schaft, the ring leader and a student at Amsterdam University at the outset of the war, is now part of the history told to students in Dutch schools.

But author Tim Brady does an admirable job of bringing new perspectives to these heroes by weaving a story that reads like a novel even though the facts are documented in his footnotes.

This is the story of an American diplomat, Virginia Hall, who served in the French resistance.

Virginia Hall, the protagonist in A Woman of No Importance, worked for American and British intelligence. Much of her story was classified until recently.

But once she had access to those documents, author Sonia Purcell was able to weave together a masterly account of this most unusual woman’s brave contributions to the war effort.

This book is a biography about Mildred Harnack, an American woman who became a leader of the German resistance.

Rebecca Donner is the great-great-niece of the protagonist, Mildred Harnack, in All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days.

Ms. Harnack met her German husband while they were graduate students at University of Wisconsin. While serving as university professors in Berlin, the young married couple was appalled by the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist Party.

They circulated pamphlets that encouraged resistance to the Nazis and passed along secret information to the allies.

The author’s great grandmother, who joined her aunt Mildred in Berlin at the outset of the war, retained an archive of letters that formed the basis for the well-presented story about Ms. Harnack’s courage.

The author found an old man, who had been a boy at the time of the war and carried secret messages for Ms. Harnack, and his recollection filled in the details.

Without these links to the past, we might not have known about this unique aspect of the German resistance, about which little has been written.

This is a meticulously supported history of the women who were imprisoned at the notorious camp 54 miles north of Berlin.

Ravensbrück is a detailed history of the lives of the women imprisoned at the only concentration camp for women. Because the camp was located in East Germany, most of the documents needed to write the history were unavailable to western writers until the cold war ended.

As soon the Berlin wall fell, author Sarah Helm leaped into action, combing through the documents that remained, and from those she found survivors, who told her their stories.

Ms. Helm tells a gut-wrenching story about slave labor, starvation, medical experiments, infanticide, mass killing, betrayal, and heroism that made me feel like I was a witness to daily life at the camp.