Fans pick 100 books like Hitler and Geli

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… show more.

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),… show more.

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… show more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you only have time to read one book on the Nazi leadership, it should be this one. It is not the lightest of books (and it has two volumes), but it is well worth your time. Adolf Hitler was obviously central to the Nazi dictatorship and the number of books written about him reflects that. There are lots of biographies on Hitler – even a lot of good ones – but Ian Kershaw’s two-volume life of Hitler remains unsurpassed in my view. Kershaw skillfully combines his biography of the dictator with a wider social and political history of the Nazi dictatorship, so readers learn a great deal about both the man at the top of the regime and the ways in which the Third Reich functioned.