10 books like Behind Enemy Lines

Stasiland is a gripping non-fiction account of personal histories from the former East Germany told retrospectively. We live alongside Australian writer Anna Funder amidst fast-changing 1990s Berlin as she meets Stasi men and those who resisted them. We learn of their struggles in East German times and beyond through her outsider’s eye. Some may balk at the book’s personal tone, but for me, Funder pulls it off. I found this first-person blend of memoir and journalistic investigation to be utterly irresistible. 

Published in 1976, this book has aged well. We are still spying on Russia, and Russia is still spying on us. Spy stories are often travelogues. This book starts in New York and Washington but then goes to France, not far from Monaco and Nice. That interested me since I've been to all of those places. The plot involves the theft of sensitive documents engineered by a Russian spy who is the agent in place of the title. People get killed, but most of the violence is off-screen. One of the interesting facets of the book is descriptions of tradecraft--showing how spies preserve their covers and prevent their enemies from unmasking them. There is also a detailed description of planning and executing a caper designed to fool the enemy.  

Dusko Popov may or may not have been a model for James Bond, but he did know Ian Fleming. He was also one of the most effective double agents in World War II. His greatest accomplishment was helping to fool the Germans about the location of the D-Day landing. Popov had conclusive evidence that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor months before it happened. He told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, because the US didn't have an effective spy system yet, but Hoover wasn’t interested. After the war ended, Popov searched for his best friend who had been captured by the Germans, with surprising results. Good for history junkies like me, it contains facts not present in other histories of the War.

This is a good book to read if you want to know what it felt like to be in France or other European countries in 1938 before the start of World War II when my father was saying how bad Hitler was but people didn’t believe it. Bad things were already happening and much worse things were to come. In some places you couldn't trust anybody because everybody could be a spy. People who lived in France and didn't want to leave had to face the fact that if they didn't they might lose their freedom and their lives. Franco was leading a revolution to take over Spain, and he had help from the Axis powers. This is an excellent spy novel with an accurate historical setting.

Studying the history of the German occupation of France must include a knowledge of Gestapo history and its crimes against humanity. This book is an introductory overview of the German security forces (RSHA) and in particular, Amt IV, or the Gestapo. The book focuses on the Gestapo forces in Paris and how they interacted with other security units including the Sicherheitdienst (SD), or Nazi political intelligence agency (Amt VI).

The author was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1944 after he was caught as a saboteur in the Combat resistance movement. During his post-war career, Delarue was called as a prosecution witness at Klaus Barbie’s trial, and he was assigned to investigate the French war criminal, Paul Touvier. I recommend this book to anyone who needs an overview of the Gestapo from Berlin to Paris.

The story of an unusual boy who stops growing for fear of becoming an adult in Nazi Germany. The novel was made into a much-heralded film, too, though the book explores the zeitgeist to greater effect. Gunter Grass is a master of irony and wit, and his boy creation becomes the story’s conscience as Germany descends into a moral hell. Ironically, Gunter Grass was outed later in his life as a former S.S. recruit.

My personal library holds dozens of histories and first-person accounts dealing with the French Resistance. Some are scholarly, others more popular in treatment, but many so boring that I barely reached the final page. Cobb’s work however is a great exception, depicting in smooth prose and outstanding research the dramatic development of the Résistance. You'll meet heroes and heroines, and see the extraordinary lengths taken by simple French citizens to undermine fascist tyranny and aid Allied efforts. Here is the insight needed to truly appreciate accurate fictional portrayals of this time.

Christabel Bielenberg’s autobiography I find madly inspiring for her courage and clear, perceptive writing. A well-connected Anglo-Irish Englishwoman, she marries a German lawyer in 1934 only to find herself living through the war and the horrors of Nazi rule in Germany. Staggeringly, near the war’s end, she manages to talk her husband Peter out of a concentration camp with the camp commandant after Peter was implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler. It’s that rare book that I would have loved to last much longer, especially for showing how ordinary Germans changed and got corrupted by Nazism—but others managed to retain their humanity. She shows us the triumph of the human spirit, even in the face of a downward slide into evil and corruption.

Heck’s plain-spoken memoir of his indoctrination into Nazism as a young boy and his time in the Hitler Youth and the German military is powerful and honest. Long after he’d left Germany as an adult, Heck continued to grapple with his own complicity in the regime and his fervent beliefs in its goals. The Hitler Youth was particularly adept at tapping into young boys’ yearning to be heroes. Heck explains the lingering effects of his indoctrination, noting that, “Despite our monstrous sacrifice and the appalling misuse of our idealism, there will always be the memory of unsurpassed power, the intoxication of fanfares and flags proclaiming our new age.” This was a fascinating read for me personally, given the similarities between Heck’s experiences and those of my father, and it was an invaluable resource as I wrote my own novel. 

How do people react when a dictatorship forces them to make choices? To learn more, read this brilliant memoir by a journalist looking back on his life in 1930s Berlin. Happily focused on his legal training and circle of friends, Sebastian Haffner at first showed little interest in politics and rejected the Nazis out of instinct rather than principle. Disgusted but powerless, he was content to keep a low profile under the new regime. To his own lasting shame, however, he one day answered “yes” when an SA stormtrooper demanded to know if he was “Aryan.” But Haffner’s friendships and liaisons with Jews, and his belief in the rule of law, ultimately made him realize that he couldn’t live in Nazi Germany. His final choice? Exile in Britain.