100 books like Hitler. Eine Biographie.

This is not a full biography – the biography Steinert wrote later in her career is not available in English – but many of the ideas in Steinert’s biography can also be found in this earlier work, which has faded into posterity slightly but can be read with great profit. Here, Steinert is concerned to give texture to a hitherto often two-dimensional image of German society and its attitudes to Hitler’s War. The result is an interesting, differentiated account of public opinion in Nazi Germany. In many respects, it was pioneering and opened up questions surrounding the relationship between state and society that other historians went on to explore further in the 1980s. Steinert’s Francophone background, and perhaps the fact that she was a female writer working in a profession that was then very male-dominated, probably account for the fact that her work is less well-known in the English-speaking world… show more.

As in the case of Joachim Fest, it is impossible to read this book without having some sense of the author’s own autobiography. Haffner was an emigré who had left Germany for Britain in 1939, was briefly interned in the war, and became a correspondent for The Observer. The essayistic reflections offered in this short book are not so much biographical as a set of attempts to place Hitler within the wider context of German history and to understand Hitler as a historical phenomenon. Readable, astute, and thoughtful, they are an engaging introduction to his life-long attempts to make sense of the regime from which he had fled.

In my view, this is the most readable and persuasive of a number of new biographical treatments that have appeared recently. In terms of interpretation, largely Ullrich confirms the line offered in an older two-volume biography, the equally magisterial account by Ian Kershaw published at the turn of the century. Like Kershaw, Ullrich is concerned to explain Hitler’s power in terms of charismatic authority, and not just dictatorial terror. But whereas Kershaw was of the view that Hitler had comparatively little personal hinterland, foregrounding instead his career as a public figure, Ullrich pulls out a remarkable range of often tiny, seemingly insignificant personal details or anecdotes to generate a compelling view of Hitler’s own interior landscape – it is all the more impressive for the fact that he uses this to explain better Hitler’s political outlook and actions.  

This fascinating book takes the seemingly banal topic of Hitler’s domestic interiors as a way into exploring both how Hitler chose to project himself and how others – from foreign diplomats to ordinary Germans – learned to see him. From his initial humble quarters in Munich to his conservatively furnished apartments in Berlin and his mountain retreat in the Alps, the evolution of Hitler’s interior design ethos reflected his move from ordinary front soldier to European statesman. The reproduction of his furnishing choices in glossy consumer magazines, meanwhile, offered aspirational Germans a chance to remake their own homes in emulation of their idol. If this sounds familiar, well, that may be the point.

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.

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.

Hayman is not a scholar or trained historian but a stage director and biographer; therefore, he writes wonderfully. In 1931, aged twenty-three, Geli Raubal was found dead in the Munich flat she shared with Adolf Hitler, his revolver on the floor and an unfinished letter on the table. Hitler was shattered by his niece’s death and never spoke of it for the rest of his life.

To this day, we are not sure if this was a suicide or a homicide. Was she killed by Hitler’s henchmen because she knew too much about his deviant sex life (He reached orgasm by women urinating, defecating, and humiliating him) or because she hated his micro-management control over her life? In any case, aside from Eva Braun, who he married before they both committed suicide, Geli was the love of his life, even if it was never consummated sexually in a normal way.… show more.

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.

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.

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.