Fans pick 100 books like A World Without Jews

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.

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. 

This book is based on reports, reflections, and correspondence of prison chaplains who interacted with imprisoned Nazi perpetrators awaiting trial and, in some instances, execution.

What the prisoners confessed to the clergy and, even more, the criminal behavior they failed to acknowledge I find so revealing. The prisoners felt guilty for individual personal transgressions (like cheating on their wives). Here, they had chosen to sin. But they felt no guilt about their participation in genocide since they saw themselves as having acted perforce on behalf of the community of the “Volk.”

Kellenbach brings this astonishing fact home in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and empathic. After reading her book, I finally came to understand what Adolf Eichmann meant when he claimed that he was “the victim of a fallacy” at his trial in Jerusalem.

With a narrative of just over 650 pages, this is the book for the reader out there who wants it all: the names, the dates, the facts, the figures, the individual experience, and the analysis, all wrapped up in an engrossing, readable narrative. Friedländer’s impeccable scholarship speaks to the historian in me, but, more importantly, it speaks to the humanity in me.  When I sat down to read this second volume, I wasn’t struck by how thick it was. I was struck by the magnitude of tragedy that the book represented. For the reader who has read widely on the Holocaust, in particular, this book will answer many of your questions. What appeals to me most, though, is the historical data never obscures the victims or their experiences.      

When the Nazis came to power, they were viciously antisemitic, but they had not planned a genocide of the Jews. By 1942, that genocide was their driving purpose. What changed? Schleunes argues that pressures within the Nazi Party and the circumstances of World War II induced an increasing radicalization of the Nazis’ plan for the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust.

There are several major histories of the Holocaust. Each has strengths and weaknesses, but they offer the reader an in-depth view of the events described in this work. The most influential of these histories is Raul Hilberg's The Destruction the European Jews: Revised and Definitive Edition, a three-volume study has also been condensed into a one-volume college edition. It provides an unequaled insight into how the Holocaust was perpetrated. The work is considered magisterial by many scholars of the  Holocaust. Hilberg used German documentation as his major source. He has been criticized by scholars for what they consider an overreliance on German material as well as his depiction of Jewish leadership as inept in responding to the events of the Holocaust. No one, including those who criticize, has written a better or more enduring work. First published more than a half-century ago, it has stood the test of time.

The Reich Security Main Office, founded in September 1939, under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich (until his death in 1942), and which included the Security Service and the Gestapo, was the organizational center of the Nazis’ murderous racial policy.

The historian Wildt's book shows how extermination plans were prepared and worked out in this office—in part by young, career-minded academics. Some of them were not just "desk perpetrators" but were directly involved in the mass murder as leaders of the notorious Einsatzgruppen operating in the occupied Soviet territories. One famous case is Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppe D, who openly confessed to killing 90,000 Jews in his trial.

Wildt discusses the post-war trials of these men by the American authorities, as well as the German publics’ growing ambivalence towards the trials.

No one can understand the German Resistance to Hitler without first understanding Nazi Germany — its ideology, its institutions, and its psychology. Grunberger’s concise but comprehensive study of Nazi Germany organized topically provides essential insight into the society in which those who opposed Hitler lived. This book is more valuable than any chronological history of Nazi Germany and exposes just how pervasive and insidious the National Socialist corruption was.

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.