Here are 100 books that Sex and Society in Nazi Germany fans have personally recommended if you like
Sex and Society in Nazi Germany.
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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.
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.…
Few people know of the affair Adolf Hitler had with his niece, Geli Raubal. The couple shared a strangely intense, passionate relationship, but it was always dogged by Hitler's intolerance, his chauvinistic attitude to women, and his possessive jealousy.
In 1931, aged twenty-three, Geli Raubal was found dead in the Munich flat she shared with Hitler, his revolver on the floor, and an unfinished letter on the table. Hitler was shattered by his niece's death, and for the rest of his life couldn't speak of her without becoming emotional.
Hitler & Geli is the remarkable and little-known story of the…
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…
While a graduate student and then an army interpreter in Germany, I listened to reminiscences from both Third Reich military veterans and former French resistance fighters. Their tales picked up where my father's stories of pre-war European life always ended, and my fascination with this history knew no bounds. On occasion I would conceal my American identity and mentally play the spy as I traversed Europe solo.A dozen years later upon the death of my father, I learned from my mother his great secret: he had concealed his wartime life as an American spy inside the Reich. His private journals telling of bravery and intrigue inspire each of my novels.
This author offers a well-crafted history of daily life inside the Reich, a fascinating exploration of the German capital as the Nazi movement brought its citizens to their knees. Extensively researched and documented, Moorhouse vividly portrays the daily oppression and challenges faced on all societal fronts. This well-crafted study enmeshes the reader in life under totalitarian rule.
In Berlin at War , acclaimed historian Roger Moorhouse provides a magnificent and detailed portrait of everyday life at the epicentre of the Third Reich. Berlin was the stage upon which the rise and fall of the Third Reich was most visibly played out. It was the backdrop for the most lavish Nazi ceremonies, the site of Albert Speer's grandiose plans for a new world metropolis," and the scene of the final climactic battle to defeat Nazism. Berlin was the place where Hitler's empire ultimately meet its end, but it suffered mightily through the war as well not only was…
The American-born son of Jewish refugees, I would have every reason to revile the erstwhile capital of The Third Reich. But ever since my first visit, as a Fulbright Fellow in 1973, Berlin, a city painfully honest about its past, captured my imagination. A bilingual, English-German author of fiction, nonfiction, plays, poetry, travel memoir, and translations from the German, Ghost Dance in Berlin charts my take as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in a villa on Wannsee, Berlin’s biggest lake, an experience marked by memorable encounters with derelicts, lawyers, a taxi driver, a hooker, et al, and with cameo appearances by Henry Kissinger and the ghost of Marlene Dietrich.
In Berlin Stories, the book that inspired the movie Cabaret, comprising two linked novellas by Christopher Isherwood loosely based on his first-hand experience as an expat in Berlin in the Twenties, the British novelist evokes the anything-goes atmosphere that reigned in the capital of the Weimar Republic immediately prior to the Nazi take-over. That free-wheeling, raucous spirit survived the Third Reich and still thrives in Berlin today.
First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafes; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires-this is the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and…
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
Unlike most children of immigrants who were told nothing about the past, I grew up surrounded by family history—my grandfather’s village in Russia, my father’s memories of 1930s Europe, and my mother’s childhood on a migrant worker farm during the Great Depression. I realized that history isn’t just names and dates but a unique opportunity to study human behavior. I wrote Hammer of the Gods about the Thule Society because Thule was often mentioned in passing by historians of Nazi Germany, as if they were uncomfortable delving into an occult group recognized as influential on the Nazis. I decided I wanted to learn who they were and what they wanted.
I found this book by the German scholar Joachim Fest many years ago at a flea market. Fest’s portrait of Hitler and a dozen high-ranking officials of the Third Reich became models for my own writing. Fest maps out the range of personalities—their cruelty, greed, and misplaced ideals—and the way in which Hitler encouraged rivalry among them to preserve absolute power for himself.
When I find a big story that has not come out, which has massive relevance for history and for the entire world, I go all out to bring it to light, as I have done with this book. Most of the books I have written have been devoted to telling big, unknown stories that concern the world. (Examples: alien intelligence, the origins of ancient civilisations, the Chinese contribution to the history of inventions, the existence of optical technology in antiquity, who were the people who tried and executed King Charles I and why did they do it.) I simply had to expose this information to the public.
This book was originally published by Doubleday, New York, in 1944. This book also contains material obtained from Heinrich Pfeifer, not only from Pfeifer’s own experience but from Pfeifer’s secret network of sympathisers and informants deep within the Nazi Establishment.
It is alarming in the extreme, detailing as it does how the Nazis of the SS and SD had since 1943 started planning to metastasize their doctrines all round the world, and found a Nazi International organisation, with the eventual hope of creating a Fourth Reich which was not dependent upon the territory of Germany, but was spread across the world invisibly, so that no armies could ever conquer it.
They planned the ratlines and escape routes to all the friendly countries such as Argentina and Chile. Their ratline HQ was in Madrid, with the full cooperation of the Franco Government. One of the two chief organisers was SS Lieutenant…
'Its existence is known only by the effects of its action.' Author Curt Riess on what happens when an organisation goes underground. Written in 1944, thus contemporary to the events of the Second World War and Nazi Germany, The Nazis Go Underground describes how the Nazis planned and organised their descent into the underground as early as 1943. At this stage of the war, the situation for the Third Reich looked grim. With Bormann and Himmler as its architects, the Nazi party would go underground and prepare for World War III from the shattered ruins of Berlin. German generals were…
Spending my childhood in Nazi Germany, the nature and the horrific consequences of Nazi ideology have occupied me as a student of German history and later as a teacher of intellectual and literary history. In 1933 Car Schmitt opted to support the Nazis. While he was banned from the public sohere in post-war Germany, his ideas remained influential on the far right and the far left, fortunately without significantly impacting the democratic reconstruction of West Germany. It was the growing international visibility of Schmitt’s writings that became my personal concern after 2000. In particular, Schmitt’s increasing influence in the United States energized me to reread and respond to his writings.
Are you tired of Hollywood clichés about Nazi culture? The Princeton historian Anson Rabinbach is your man. His brilliant essays on aspects of Nazi culture as diverse as the popular novel under Nazism, the Nazi-organized leisure industry, and the fate of the humanities at German universities between 1933 and 1945, provide the sharp, well-informed analysis you never got at school. Get started with the interview the author gave to two younger colleagues (pp. 450-480); here things become personal. Of course, Rabinbach is a pro, he knows the critical literature on the topic and cites it to differentiate his argument. But more importantly, his insights and arguments force you to rethink your response to German fascism, and to question the facile opposition of democracy and Nazism portrayed in American pop culture.
A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar German and European culture. Historically detailed and theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler's rise, the most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s…
