100 books like The Berlin Candy Bomber

Milton does an exceptional job of tracing the origins of the Berlin crisis that culminated in a Soviet blockade of the 2.2 million German civilians living in the Western Sectors of Berlin.

The book starts with a look at Allied decisions and actions during the Second World War and describes how these influenced and shaped the post-war period. It does a particularly outstanding job of portraying life in occupied Berlin with rare granularity and neutrality. The result is a work that highlights Western hubris, failings, and mistakes as much as Soviet arrogance, deceit, and cruelty.

The book’s strength is explaining the build-up to the crisis (three-quarters of the book) rather than the confrontation itself. I recommend it as a good book to start with.

Although The Berlin Airlift devotes time and space to the political background of the crisis, the bulk of the book is devoted to explaining how the West and the Berliners effectively responded to the Soviet blockade.

It shows both the difficulties encountered, the risks involved, and how the West’s efforts ultimately forced the Soviets to abandon their aggression unconditionally. Importantly, this book does not neglect the role played by the Berliners themselves in fighting for their freedom from Soviet domination.

Parris’ book provides a “peek behind the curtains” to look at the decision-making process, particularly in Washington.

He uses eye-witness reports to highlight the differences between the various actors, and underlines disagreements within governments. Truman, for example, was not only often at odds with his generals and diplomats, he was also considered a “lame duck” president, destined for electoral defeat during the critical early months of the blockade and airlift.

Understanding his relationships with his cabinet officials is thus extremely illuminating and well handled by Parrish. The weakness of the book is that its focus on American politics and issues results in a comparative neglect of British, German, and Soviet perspectives.   

This is a rare book on the Berlin Airlift written by an airman for airmen and is about the massive logistical undertaking that the Airlift represented rather than the political crisis that led to it, the negotiations to end it, the impact on the people of Berlin or the balance of power in Europe that resulted.

It is organized around topics such as “organization and operations,” “bases,” “men and machines,” “air traffic control” and so on. It provides a wealth of statistics in 10 appendices that include the units employed, the casualties, the monthly tonnages, and individual aircraft performances. It is a treasure trove of useful details for an author (like me) who wants to depict the Airlift realistically. 

Nick Stargardt’s Witnesses of War is the kind of book I’d love to write – it’s really one of the most comprehensive and accessible studies of children’s experiences under Nazism out there. The author doesn’t shy away from describing the lives of the Third Reich’s youthful victims in harrowing detail, but he also explores the lives of children who were seduced by the Nazi dictatorship. "In war," he writes, "all children are victims." 

Set during WWII, this novel follows a Ukrainian girl who, with other children, is forced to make bombs for the German army. The story is captivating and fast-paced, and it’s hard not to admire the protagonist, Lida, who risks everything in her fight to do what she believes is right. I think books like this are so important because they ask readers to think hard about what they would do in similar situations. 

Requiem for a German Past: A Boyhood Among the Nazis offers a nuanced glimpse of what it was like to grow up in Germany from 1928 to 1948. Author Jurgen Herbst joined the Hitler Youth or Jungvolk and became a leader because he supported a mythic German past. But the more involved he became as the war wore on, the more he understood and was deeply troubled by the nefarious basis of the National Socialist regime. His descriptions of how fascism slowly overcame a democratic country are particularly chilling. Captured at the end of the war by American forces, Herbst would learn even more of the horrors that had taken place in Nazi Germany, horrors that forced him to leave his home country for the US, pledging never to return.

This is an extraordinary story of a brave German woman whose diplomat father and Italian aristocrat husband decide to resist the Nazis.

When German troops enter Italy, Fey von Hassell finds herself trapped with her young children in a 12th-century villa in northern Italy while her husband joins the anti-fascist underground in Rome and her father decides to join the group that plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Nazi stormtroopers take over the villa and later arrest Fey.

Using archival materials and family letters, Caroline Bailey reconstructs Fey’s harrowing journey—moved from prison to prison and concentration camp to concentration camp. Her two young boys are taken away from her, and sent to a Nazi orphanage. Fey’s single-minded mission to find her children reads like a good thriller.

Peter Gay was a child in Nazi Berlin in the 1930s. I read his book to see what life was like there while writing my third novel, much of which takes place in Nazi Berlin. Gay was an academic historian but this memoir is deeply personal, laced with self-deprecating humour. His assimilated life (he and his father were staunch atheists) was relatively unaffected by the regime until 1933 when he became a Jew overnight by law. The Nazis quickly stripped the Jews of all rights, culminating in the violent Kristallnacht in 1938. He and his parents managed to escape to the U.S. six months later. Many of his relatives were killed. The underlying question in the book: why didn’t his family—and by extension other Jewish families—leave right after 1933 when Nazi plans became clear?

If you are Jewish and have ambivalent feelings about visiting Berlin, then this could be the book for you.  Leonard Barkan is a professor at Princeton where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. A Jewish American, growing up in a secular New York family, his book is a personal reflection on traveling in the city. 

Berlin for Jews is part history and part travel guide.  Barkan shows how, in the early nineteenth century, Jews dominated the arts, sciences, and public life and the way in which, despite the horrors of the Nazi era, they left an indelible imprint on the Berlin of today.  The book, described as a “love letter” to the city, takes the reader through some of the most iconic locations of Jewish life and describes the long-lost elegant Jewish suburbs, salons, writers, artists, politicians, philanthropists, art collectors, and intellectuals. And throughout, Barkan muses on what… show more.