Here are 100 books that Hitler and Geli fans have personally recommended if you like
Hitler and Geli.
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Because I have devoted my life to the study of two major topics: sexuality and radical politics like Nazism, and trying to understand the connection to both, it is both a fascinating and a taboo subject. In the past, the saying went: gentlemen simply did not discuss such subjects. As a historian and sociology for the past fifty-plus years, but also as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I have had a lifelong interest in Nazism and the mind of Nazis—both men and women. Usually most histories of the Holocaust or Shoah avoid the sex lives of Nazis and their victims.
This is arguably the greatest book on the mind of Hitler. Written by a psychoanalyst, it was a secret psychological report that came out during World War II in 1943 expressly for “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA.
Though quite common today in understanding people like Putin, Kim Jung Un, and other pathological world leaders, this was the first book to apply psychoanalytic insight to warfare. It described not only Hitler’s sexual deviance and obsessions but also correctly predicted his eventual suicide. There are many other books in this genre that followed Langer’s book: Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God-- Adolf Hitler; Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, introduction to Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944; and Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler.
Rosenbaum is an excellent and readable introduction to this field—the sexological explanation of the mind of Adolf Hitler and his…
Because I have devoted my life to the study of two major topics: sexuality and radical politics like Nazism, and trying to understand the connection to both, it is both a fascinating and a taboo subject. In the past, the saying went: gentlemen simply did not discuss such subjects. As a historian and sociology for the past fifty-plus years, but also as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I have had a lifelong interest in Nazism and the mind of Nazis—both men and women. Usually most histories of the Holocaust or Shoah avoid the sex lives of Nazis and their victims.
This is the best book dealing with Hitler’s relationship with women in general—as well as several women in particular who were obsessed with him and vice-versa. One thing I noticed sociologically was the number of women who committed suicide after having an affair or a relationship with Hitler; even his own suicide included the suicide of Eva Braun as well as Magda Goebbels and her six children.
In fact, in my essay Holocaust Suicides, in my book, I discuss the idea that Nazism was a culture based on self-destruction and suicide. There was no other alternative except Armageddon and Gotterdammerung, the "twilight of the Gods" marked by world-altering destruction, extreme chaos, and out-and-out violence.
Hitler would die bringing down all of Germany (and the world if he could) at the same time. The Nazi women who committed suicide included Geli Raubal (more on her in the next book),…
In part, this is the story of how ordinary women were wooed by the Nazis and married into the Third Reich, stabilizing and supporting the Fascist revolution and guaranteeing it survival into the next generation. But it is also the story of the women close to Hitler, such as Magda Goebbels, the high-profile wife of Hitler's minister of propaganda. What happened to this devoted mother os six, the poster-child of family values during the Third Reich, that led her to poison her children? Finally, "Nazi Women" looks at the background to Hitler's won relationships and attitudes to the opposite sex,…
Because I have devoted my life to the study of two major topics: sexuality and radical politics like Nazism, and trying to understand the connection to both, it is both a fascinating and a taboo subject. In the past, the saying went: gentlemen simply did not discuss such subjects. As a historian and sociology for the past fifty-plus years, but also as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I have had a lifelong interest in Nazism and the mind of Nazis—both men and women. Usually most histories of the Holocaust or Shoah avoid the sex lives of Nazis and their victims.
While the title and even the prose are a bit off-putting, suggesting a dry academic account, it is actually quite readable. Mosse, the late Bascom professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was one of the great historians of Europe and of Nazism. See his classic book Nazi Culture: A Documentary History. Mosse presents a nuanced and complex analysis of nationalism and respectability.
He shows how concepts like sexuality “haunted” bourgeois society and European nationalism and led to society’s control over sexuality. The sexual excesses of the Weimar Republic between World War I and the rise of Nazism in 1933 were a threat to bourgeois society and thus had to be controlled or destroyed, especially “abnormal” behavior (Homosexuality, transvestism, sexual orgies, wild music).
We see the same thing happening in America and the West: a return to “respectable” authoritarianism (read: fascism) suppressing sexuality, birth control, and…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
Because I have devoted my life to the study of two major topics: sexuality and radical politics like Nazism, and trying to understand the connection to both, it is both a fascinating and a taboo subject. In the past, the saying went: gentlemen simply did not discuss such subjects. As a historian and sociology for the past fifty-plus years, but also as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I have had a lifelong interest in Nazism and the mind of Nazis—both men and women. Usually most histories of the Holocaust or Shoah avoid the sex lives of Nazis and their victims.
This 1973 book got me started in this field over 50 years ago, and is still endlessly fascinating. Bleuel examines nearly every aspect of Nazi culture: male and female roles, the good wife and mother. There was even special medals (I have one) called Mutters Medal—a bronze for five children; a silver for 7; and a gold medal for 10 or more kids; divorce (actually quite common if the wife could not bear children); adultery (also quite common, as long as it produced babies); legal brothels; and of course “degeneracy” (perverted sex that did not produce Aryan blonds for the Fatherland (homosexuality, abortion, transvestism).
The movie and play Cabaret and the Roku series Berlin Babylon perfectly describe the forces of fascism trying to destroy “abnormal” sex.
Compare this book to Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture and Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin.
I am Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton, UK, and publish widely on diverse aspects of Nazi Germany. The first history book that I ever read was Alan Bullock’s Hitler. A Study in Tyranny - the first scholarly biography of Hitler to appear. I still recall the fascination of reading this as a teenager: it sparked a curiosity that formed the basis of a scholarly career that has spanned nearly three decades. The desire to make sense of the phenomenon of Nazism was never purely academic, however – my own family origins in Germany, and the stories elderly relatives told of their wartime experiences, gave the history texture, immediacy, and urgency.
This was not the first biography of Hitler, but it was the first to try to explain Hitler’s power in terms of his relationship with the German people. For Fest, Hitler’s power rested on his ability to channel ordinary Germans’ hopes, fears, aspirations, and resentments. Fest came from a solidly anti-Nazi bourgeois background and in his insistence on reading Hitler as an expression of populist resentments ‘from below’ we may detect an inability to countenance the idea that Nazism came just as much from the centre of educated German middle-class society. In that sense, the book is a fascinating insight into what was at stake in the postwar period when Germans argued over who or what had been to blame for the catastrophe of Nazism. It remains, however, a classic among earlier accounts of Hitler’s career.
Since 2011 I have taught a summer course at Freie Universität Berlin, and have grown fond of the city, including its admirable efforts to acknowledge and atone for its former status as the capital of the Nazi empire. I’ve seen pictures of Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King touring the city and interacting (cheerfully) with Reich officials, and a couple of years ago I made a point of retracing his steps to observe the vestiges (very little) of prewar Berlin. This compelled me to dig deeply into what motivated King to break bread with Nazis, and how the prime minister’s trip was viewed by Canadians and the world – at the time, and since.
Fromm, too, was a journalist alarmed by the rise of Nazism and Germans’ increasing embrace of hatred and falsehood. She differs from Halton and Shirer in that she was 1) born in Germany, and thus had a deeper perspective on Nazism’s place in German history and culture, 2) a woman, and thus expected to report on “society” and fashion stories, although her interests and abilities soon drew her to politics, and 3) Jewish, and therefore subjected to the daily indignities, threats, and violence that in 1938 led her to flee a land her family had inhabited for five centuries. Fromm seemed to know everybody, including Nazi bigwigs, and was continually astounded by the degrees to which foreign visitors fell for blatant Nazi propaganda. Mackenzie King should have been listening.
The diary, smuggled out of Nazi Germany, of a Jewish woman who wrote the social column for a major Berlin newspaper, and was able to observe the rise of the Nazis
NORVEL: An American Hero chronicles the remarkable life of Norvel Lee, a civil rights pioneer and Olympic athlete who challenged segregation in 1948 Virginia. Born in the Blue Ridge Mountains to working-class parents who valued education, Lee overcame Jim Crow laws and a speech impediment to achieve extraordinary success.
As a writer of seven historically themed books, fiction and nonfiction, I’ve loved the intense, deep dive into World War I, World War II, the Civil War, and the Paris Commune that researching my books entailed. It’s been particularly fascinating to explore how women, whether on or near the front lines, or on the home front, negotiate life during war and how their behavior illuminates character. My protagonists are all women, and I’ve found that writing their lives offers a sharp opportunity to see the moral ambiguities of war. What’s more, their stories often transcend the personal to symbolize the spirit of a particular time and place at war.
I greatly admire how this book subverts the traditional form of biography in a way that perfectly suits the subject.
Mildred Harnack, the author’s great-great-aunt, was an astoundingly brave young woman from Wisconsin who, starting in the early 1930s, had a central role in Berlin’s homegrown opposition to the Nazis and was eventually beheaded on orders from Hitler.
Drawing on diaries, letters, photographs, interviews, and declassified intelligence documents, Donner tells an extraordinarily intimate story that reads like a literary novel and has the pace of a thriller.
Born and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD programme in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment - a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin.
She recruited Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. When the first shots of the Second World…
Robert Gerwarth is a professor of modern history at University College. After completing his DPhil at Oxford, he has held visiting fellowships at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author and editor of more than ten books on modern German history, most recently November 1918: The German Revolution.
Albert Speer is one of the most enigmatic figures within the Nazi leadership. I have always been intrigued by the fact that most biographies of him – including Gitta Sereny’s famous Speer: His Battle with Truth – have been fairly benign in their judgment of Speer’s character and deeds. Although directly responsible for the slave labour programme in the later stages of the war and a member of Hitler’s inner circle until the end in 1945, Hitler’s favourite architect managed to get away with a comparatively light sentence at the Nuremberg Trials, where he admitted partial responsibility. Handsome and well-spoken, Speer was often publicly perceived as one of the “less bad” Nazis. Martin Kitchen’s biography revises that image and convincingly shows the reader how intimately involved Speer was in many of the crimes of the Nazis.
A new biography of Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and trusted confidant, reveals the subject's deeper involvement in Nazi atrocities
"Kitchen, the author of a dozen works on twentieth-century Germany, comprehensively disassembles Speer's alibis and excuses. . . . His mastery of the revisionist evidence against Speer is complete."-John Fund, National Review Online
"Brilliant and devastating. . . . Kitchen lays out a case so airtight that one marvels anew how Speer survived the Nuremberg trials with his neck intact."-Martin Filler, New York Review of Books
In his best-selling autobiography, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and chief architect of Nazi…
I'm a retired diplomat and award-winning novelist with a PhD in history. I was drawn to the German Resistance because, unlike the other resistance movements across Europe, the German Resistance fought not a foreign invader but rather confronted the corruption and hijacking of their own state. Germans opposed to Hitler needed the moral fortitude to commit treason, and ultimately tyrannicide, not for the sake of the nation, but for humanity itself. I devoted ten years of my life to studying the German Resistance, first for my doctoral dissertation and then to write my novel. During that time, I was asked a thousand times why I was so fascinated and committed to the topic. The answer, tragically proven true over the last five years, is that the United States is not immune to fascism. The need to resist a racist and immoral demagogue has never been more relevant.
This work on the German military resistance to Hitler by Professor Hoffman remains the most comprehensive, scholarly work on the topic available in English. Hoffman provides a detailed account of the opposition to Hitler and his policies within the German military and explains the motives for it. He then shows how this opposition was gradually transformed into resistance which culminated in an assassination and coup attempt. While meticulously researched and documented, this book is not for the novice or the faint-hearted, as it is over 800 pages long.
Fascination with the evil of the Nazi regime has not diminished in the decades since Hitler assumed power in Germany, but the story of internal resistance to Nazism has not been as fully realized as have the innumerable tales of horror. In this compact book Peter Hoffmann examines the growing recognition by some Germans in the 1930s of the malign nature of the Nazi regime, the ways in which these people became involved in the resistance, and the views of those who staked their lives in the struggle against tyranny and murder.
The earliest postwar accounts of the resistance by…
In writingThe Lost Son, which is loosely based on family history, I immersed myself in the history of World War II and in the world between the wars. It was important to me to understand this period from both sides—from the perspective of Germans who were either forced to flee their homeland or witness its destruction from within by a madman, and from the perspective of Americans with German ties who also fought fascism. The stories of ordinary people during this time are far more nuanced than the epic battles that World War II depicted, as the stories of ordinary people often are.
Born in 1934 in Berchtesgaden, in the shadow of Hitler’s Eagles Nest, Irmgard Hunt witnessed the growth of fascist ideology among the people she loved during an otherwise idyllic childhood. As the shadow of World War II fell over the mountain, however, Hunt began to question and then disavow the Nazi doctrines she had accepted as a young child. As time went on and the regime crumbled literally before her eyes, she was vocal in confronting her country’s criminal past and in championing the democratic principles her elders had so easily dismissed.
Irmgard Hunt was born into Nazi Germany in 1934 and brought up in the Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, just outside the fence that surrounded Hitler's alpine retreat and headquarters. On Hitler's Mountain is her account of a childhood under the Third Reich as the daughter of low-level Party members. As a model Aryan toddler, she was photographed sitting on Hitler's knee, and attended school with the children of Albert Speer and Fritz Sauckel. Like many ordinary Germans her parents considered themselves to be moral and honourable: her father was a porcelain artist (at the workshop that provided Hitler with his…