I’m a long-time correspondent for American media across the world. I reported on Europe and Asia for the Wall Street Journal, and on Southeast Asia for Bloomberg News. I was always fascinated by deep historical layers to be found in ancient societies like those of Europe, and the sometimes accurate clichés about European tribes and their strange customs; no European tribe is weirder than the Germans, for a long time the wildest of the continent and then the most cultured and sophisticated until they came under the spell of a certain Austrian. The twelve years that followed still rank as the most insane historical period for any nation ever.
Kershaw’s double biography of the Nazi leader (the second part, almost entirely about World War II, is called Hubris) is a classic, and remains the best, most approachable look at the unusual upbringing of a young boy from provincial Austria who once wanted to be an artist, and felt in debt with the Jewish doctor who (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) treated his mother’s cancer. Hubris is most remarkable for the glimpses it provides of a different fate for that young boy Adolf: how he was scarred by family tragedy and by failure at multicultural Vienna, and how the Great War gave him an opening to become the worst possible version of himself.
From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in this century. Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried…
Voss volunteered to join the elite Nazi forces as a teenager in 1943, when (unbeknownst to him) the war was already lost for Germany. His memoir of barely two years in history’s most notorious military unit will surprise many who are used to seeing SS members in Holocaust movies and memoirs; Voss was an infantryman who fought in Finland and later in the Western front, fully devoted to Nazi ideology until Germany was defeated and he saw the flip side of the coin. A very unique book.
Originally written while the author was a prisoner of the US Army in 194546, Black Edelweiss is a boon to serious historians and WWII buffs alike. In a day in which most memoirs are written at half a centurys distance, the former will be gratified by the authors precise recall facilitated by the chronologically short-range (a matter of one to seven years) at which the events were captured in writing. Both will appreciate and enjoy the abundantly detailed, exceptionally accurate combat episodes.
Even more than the strictly military narrative, however, the author has crafted a searingly candid view into his…
Evans is the world’s foremost scholar on Nazism, a really difficult title to earn given the strong competition in a very crowded field. In this book, he reviews the 1920s and early 1930s in Germany, and how a toxic mix of revanchism, militarism, and German supremacism combined to create not just a Fascist state, but the most radical of several European Fascist states and one that was dead-set on revenge against the democratic powers and the Soviet Union that Nazis blamed for internal unrest that brought down the German Reich in 1914-18.
Richard J. Evans' The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany explores how the First World War, the Weimar Republic and the Great Depression paved the way for Nazi rule.
They started as little more than a gang of extremists and thugs, yet in a few years the Nazis had turned Germany into a one-party state and led one of Europe's most advanced nations into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair.
In this consummate and compelling history, the first book in his acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi…
Another great hit in Evans’ long series of books about Nazism, this is a very particular one: Evans was invited to take part as an expert in a trial for defamation brought by a British historian, David Irving, long suspected of being a tad too friendly towards the Nazi regime. This 2002 book recounts the trial and focuses on Evans decisive role: he went through Irving’s voluminous, and meticulous, books, finding misleading interpretations favoring the Nazi view of controversial events in World War II and, very particularly, views minimizing the scale of the Holocaust and Hitler’s role in it. This may be the ultimate book about detective work in the fight against misinformation.
In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving, whose libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was tried in April 2000, the High Court in London labeled Irving a falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge, would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did. Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief adviser for the defence, uses this famous trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise.
The coming of the Third Reich in 1933 left Klemperer, a cash-strapped Jewish scholar, without his teaching job in a German university, but somehow sheltered from the worst excesses of Nazism due to his marriage to an “Aryan” German woman. His diaries are a window to the daily life of a childless middle-aged couple that observes world-shaking events from close proximity, while worrying about debts and the high costs of keeping the family car, Klemperer's most cherished possession.
A publishing sensation, the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period.
'A classic ... Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank's' SUNDAY TIMES
'I can't remember when I read a more engrossing book' Antonia Fraser
'Not dissimilar in its cumulative power to Primo Levi's, is a devastating account of man's inhumanity to man' LITERARY REVIEW
The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages at Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many…
It’s a novel about the real-life, intriguing story of what may be Adolf Hitler’s first murder. In 1931, he’s a young, ever more popular politician in Munich, but his career seems shattered when his young niece Geli Raubal is found dead in the apartment they shared. Some evidence points to suicide, and massive pressure builds up on local police (full of Nazi sympathizers) not to investigate. A Great War veteran, married to a Jewish woman, is assigned the case and immediately starts to receive threats and find obstacles. The quest for the truth about Geli’s death ends up being more difficult and stranger than he could ever imagine.
Edge of the Known World is a near-future love and adventure story about a brilliant young refugee caught in era when genetic screening tests like 23AndMe make it impossible to hide a secret identity. The novel is distributed by Simon & Schuster. It is a USA Today Bestseller and 2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction: General.
Alexandra is a gifted student, adoring daughter, and exuberant prankster. She is also hiding in the open. After a blissful childhood, Alex learned she’s an illegal refugee from a brutal regime, smuggled into…
Fans of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake will be swept away by this riveting speculative fiction adventure and love story about family, genetic privacy, and the onrushing future of surveillance technology.
2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction
Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refusé, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of…
