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Hitler's Soldiers.
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I have been drawn to the history of the German lands ever since I opened a historical atlas as a child and wondered why the middle of Europe was a colorful patchwork compared to the solid blocks depicting other countries. I then wondered how the people living under this multitude of authorities could manage their affairs, resolve differences, and defend themselves against each other and outsiders. Digging deeper into these questions has unearthed fascinating stories, not all of them pleasant, but which also shed light on the complexities of our shared existence.
This is one of the first ‘proper’ history books I read, having borrowed it from my local public library, and gave me a lasting interest in the wars and warriors of Central Europe.
First published in 1964, it recounts the life of an Irish exile who became a field marshal in the Austrian Habsburg army and died leading a bayonet charge against the Prussians. Browne’s career exemplifies how ‘German’ military history is far more diverse than it might first appear.
Christopher Duffy vividly brings the eighteenth century to life, and I warmly recommend his many other books on early modern warfare.
Maximilian von Browne is counted among the finest soldiers of the old Imperial Austrian Army. As the present biography sets out to show, he was outstanding in his time for his vigorous conduct of war, and his extremely advanced idea of leadership and responsibility. Few commanders have taken so literally the phrase ‘to share the hardships of his men’.
A son of that generation of Irishmen who fled from a penal regime to take service in Catholic Europe, Browne rose in the Army of the Empress Maria Theresa. In 1746, he could take the greater part of the credit for…
I have been drawn to the history of the German lands ever since I opened a historical atlas as a child and wondered why the middle of Europe was a colorful patchwork compared to the solid blocks depicting other countries. I then wondered how the people living under this multitude of authorities could manage their affairs, resolve differences, and defend themselves against each other and outsiders. Digging deeper into these questions has unearthed fascinating stories, not all of them pleasant, but which also shed light on the complexities of our shared existence.
Addressing his troops prior to their departure for China in 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm urged them to behave like the Huns and give no quarter to the Chinese accused of murdering the German ambassador during the Boxer Rebellion.
Four years later, German troops mercilessly drove the Herero and Nama people of what is now Namibia into the desert to die, while their comrades in what is now Tanzania fought a vicious war to suppress another colonial revolt. These events have recently returned to broader consciousness as the victims’ descendants demand reparations.
Without minimizing the violence, Kuss shows how it was rooted in specific situations and that there was no simple, inevitable line ‘from Windhoek to Auschwitz’.
Germany fought three major colonial wars from 1900 to 1908: the Boxer War in China, the Herero and Nama War in Southwest Africa, and the Maji Maji War in East Africa. Recently, historians have emphasized the role of German military culture in shaping the horrific violence of these conflicts, tracing a line from German atrocities in the colonial sphere to those committed by the Nazis during World War II. Susanne Kuss dismantles such claims in a close examination of Germany's early twentieth-century colonial experience. Despite acts of unquestionable brutality committed by the Kaiser's soldiers, she finds no direct path from…
I have been drawn to the history of the German lands ever since I opened a historical atlas as a child and wondered why the middle of Europe was a colorful patchwork compared to the solid blocks depicting other countries. I then wondered how the people living under this multitude of authorities could manage their affairs, resolve differences, and defend themselves against each other and outsiders. Digging deeper into these questions has unearthed fascinating stories, not all of them pleasant, but which also shed light on the complexities of our shared existence.
After 1918, many German and Austrian Habsburg officers blamed their defeat on being ‘stabbed in the back’ by civilian ‘shirkers’, leftists, and (in the Habsburg case) fractious nationalists.
Both states indeed failed to manage their home fronts but, as Alexander Watson shows in his compelling account of this titanic conflict, there were far more complex reasons for the war’s outcome, not least the willingness of the high command in both states to embark on a conflict they had no realistic chance of winning.
Winner of the 2014 Wolfson History Prize, the 2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Society for Military History's 2015 Distinguished Book Award and the 2015 British Army Military Book of the Year
For the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary the Great War - which had begun with such high hopes for a fast, dramatic outcome - rapidly degenerated as invasions of both France and Serbia ended in catastrophe. For four years the fighting now turned into a siege on a quite monstrous scale. Europe became the focus of fighting of a…
I have been drawn to the history of the German lands ever since I opened a historical atlas as a child and wondered why the middle of Europe was a colorful patchwork compared to the solid blocks depicting other countries. I then wondered how the people living under this multitude of authorities could manage their affairs, resolve differences, and defend themselves against each other and outsiders. Digging deeper into these questions has unearthed fascinating stories, not all of them pleasant, but which also shed light on the complexities of our shared existence.
The Thirty Years War remains seared into the popular consciousness across Germany and Austria as a momentous catastrophe against which other conflicts are still measured.
The conflict was indeed terrible, yet its impact was uneven across time, place, social status, and gender.
Sigrun Haude writes sympathetically about how ordinary people coped with calamity whilst skillfully weaving individual stories with the wider dynamic of military and political events.
At its core, Coping with Life during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) explores how people tried to survive the Thirty Years' War, on what resources they drew, and how they attempted to make sense of it. A rich tapestry of stories brings to light contemporaries' trauma as well as women and men's unrelenting initiatives to stem the war's negative consequences. Through these close-ups, Sigrun Haude shows that experiences during the Thirty Years' War were much more diverse and often more perplexing than a straightforward story line of violence and destruction can capture. Life during the Thirty Years' War was not…
I started writing a series about menopausal werewolves eleven years ago, right before my fiftieth birthday. I wanted to see more women like me in science fiction and fantasy: middle-aged and older women who had led full lives but were still up for more adventure, new worlds, eager to see what came next. I also started a bibliography project on older women protagonists in speculative fiction and began proposing and speaking on convention programming about older women in the genre. We’ve had a lot of great discussions and agree that the needle is slowly moving toward more and better representation. I’m thrilled to be a part of that.
General Turyin Mulaghesh is on the brink of retiring to her long dreamt of remote island post where she can lay around on a beach, getting happily drunk with a beautiful young man or two and do as little as possible.
But she’s a legendary hero of the Saypuri Republic, or perhaps a war criminal, depending on which side of the many battles that she’s fought you were on. So instead, she gets pushed into one last mission, one that has her confronting the deeds of her past and, possibly, getting a shot at redemption.
She is cynical and sweary and has done terrible things, as well as good ones and, at least for me, is one of the most relatable older women in fantasy.
A triumphant return to the world of City of Stairs.
A generation ago, the city of Voortyashtan was the stronghold of the god of war and death, the birthplace of fearsome supernatural sentinels who killed and subjugated millions.
Now, the city’s god is dead. The city itself lies in ruins. And to its new military occupiers, the once-powerful capital is a wasteland of sectarian violence and bloody uprisings.
So it makes perfect sense that General Turyin Mulaghesh— foul-mouthed hero of the battle of Bulikov, rumored war criminal, ally of an embattled Prime Minister—has been exiled there to count down the…
I have been a teacher, writer, scholar, and, above all, a critic of social injustice for my entire professional life. My experience living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank informed my critical voice around issues of language, knowledge, history, and policy in and about the Middle East, leading to the publication of my two scholarly monographs: Palestine in the American Mind: The Discourse on Palestine in the Contemporary United States and Palestine-Israel in the Print News Media: Contending Discourses. The titles I introduce here have been vital to my ongoing education on these issues and in my continuing advocacy for peace and justice in Palestine, the Middle East, and around the world.
I came across the work of Nick Turse while working on the fifth chapter of my new book. I had been struggling to find a critical voice in the assessment of the American war in Vietnam that was sustained by a keen historical eye and the pure, intellectual critique of a scholar. When I found Turse, I found my answers.
Turse’s assessment of the unmitigated brutality of the American war in Vietnam chilled me; his powerful critique brought a new voice and vigor to my own burgeoning criticism of that U.S. slaughter in Southeast Asia.
Anyone looking for a strong voice condemning wholesale the U.S. anti-communist paranoia of the era and/or the indiscriminate killing capacity of the U.S. military machine need look no further than Turse and Kill Anything that Moves.
Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by just a few "bad apples." But as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese non-combatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to "kill anything that moves." Drawing on more than a decade of research into secret Pentagon archives and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time the workings…
I am a tired activist and recovering attorney. My professional focus on violence and humanity’s response to it began when, as a seven-year-old, the nuns at my Catholic school showed us newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. This led me to adopt as my life’s guiding principle Julian Beck’s admonition “to redeem our share of the universal cruelty.” After 20 years in the U.S. Violence Against Women Movement, I absconded to the former Yugoslavia and found myself in the middle of a war during which I ran a war crimes documentation project (memoir in progress). I later reported on the international war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
I’m drawn to inconvenient truths and Canadian Erna Paris reveals them in exceptionally readable prose. Paris discusses why it took more than fifty years to establish a permanent International Criminal Court to try war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. She examines the reasons for U.S. opposition to the permanent International Criminal Court established in 2002, identifies U.S. officials who worked to undermine efforts to develop the ICC, exposes the real reasons they did so, and debunks the official position of protecting US soldiers.
A powerful investigation of the story and individuals behind America’s refusal to acknowledge international law and an inquiry into the urgent role of international criminal justice from the award-winning, bestselling author of Long Shadows.
In this groundbreaking investigation, Erna Paris explores the history of global justice, the politics behind America’s opposition to the creation of a permanent international criminal court, and the implications for the world at large.
At the end of the twentieth century, two extraordinary events took place. The first was the end of the Cold War, which left the world with a single empire that dominated global…
As a book lover and as a nonfiction writer and researcher, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that a book is truly a portal that can connect people across time and space. I’m a Catholic (stray) by education and tradition, and for me this interconnectivity resonates with the familiar theology of the communion of saints. Whether you are religious or not, if you love words, there is something rather miraculous about how language, past and present, from authors living and dead, can connect and surprise us and spark new conversations even with those yet to be born. You never know who may need to hear what you are putting on the page.
I have admired Wideman for many years. As a writer, he is a virtuoso in multiple forms, making room to confront violence and racism without offering readers trite or false resolutions.
I appreciate how he keeps calling back to the themes and subjects of earlier work. His essay, “Looking at Emmett Till” (originally published in Issue 19 of Creative Nonfiction), grappled with his recollections of 1955 as a 14-year-old teenager, the same age as Emmett Till when he was lynched and murdered.
Writing to Save a Life builds upon this work, tracing a parallel history of Till’s father, Louis, and Wideman’s journey to confront official documents of Louis’s prosecution and hanging during his service in World War II. Here as in so much of his writing, Wideman chooses a unique structure for the book, braiding his own reflections on injustice into the documentary material.
A professor of Chinese and Japanese, Asian Studies, and Women’s Studies at Vassar College, my research has focused on the cross-cultural fertilization between Chinese and Japanese literary traditions. I’ve published widely on the subject, including a book, Bashô and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai. I began research on the “comfort women”—victimsof Imperial Japan’s military sexual slavery during the Asia Pacific War (1931-1945)—in 2002when working with a Vassar student on her thesis about the “comfort women” redressmovement. Since then, I’ve worked closely with Chinese researchers and local volunteers, interviewing the eyewitnesses and survivors of the Japanese military “comfort stations” in China,and visiting the now-defunct sites.
The novel One Left begins when the elderly protagonist hears a TV report on the lastsurviving Korean “comfort woman.” She is in fact also a comfort station survivor, one who has remained silent and hence unknown to the public. At the age of thirteen, she was kidnappedinto a Japanese military comfort station in northeast China. The protagonist's thoughts flash back andforth between her present-day life and the wartime horrors, the details of which are drawn from real survivors’ testimonies. “Fifteen men a day was normal,” she recalls, “but on Sundayfifty men or more might come and go from a girl.” “If a girl got pregnant, her uterus wasremoved fetus and all as a preventive measure.” It is a difficult read, but necessary, moving, and profound.
During the Pacific War, more than 200,000 Korean girls were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers. They lived in horrific conditions in "comfort stations" across Japanese-occupied territories. Barely 10 percent survived to return to Korea, where they lived as social outcasts. Since then, self-declared comfort women have come forward only to have their testimonies and calls for compensation largely denied by the Japanese government.
Kim Soom tells the story of a woman who was kidnapped at the age of thirteen while gathering snails for her starving family. The horrors of her life as a sex slave follow her back…
I’m a soldier, an author, and an army wife – the last fifteen years of my life have revolved around dealing with the fallout of the Iraq war, not only for my family but also as a soldier and a veteran. I write books because I wanted to read about people who stayed in the military after the war started. The best writing advice I ever got came from Robyn Carr who said, write the book that only you can tell. Wrestling with the legacy of a war that we as soldiers did not choose as we return home was something I deeply wanted to understand, both as an army officer and a novelist.
This is a book about failure – leadership failure from every echelon.
I hesitated to ever read this book about horrific war crimes committed by American soldiers because I absolutely did not want to see “them” as “us”. What I found instead was a systematic failure of the Army from every echelon that enabled these men to slip free of the bonds of civilization and become the embodiment of humanity’s worst impulses.
The soldier who reported them was nearly murdered as a traitor. This book speaks to the burden that those who come forward carry – and how men become monsters.
I don’t know if the men who committed that horrible atrocity were ever good men who the war made evil nor do I care – but what Frederick has shown in this book is the systematic unraveling of a platoon’s ties back to what made them human and the…
This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit known as “the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’s so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the country’s most dangerous location at its most dangerous time.
Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks, suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring a chronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heart platoon—1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion—descended, over their year-long tour of…