Fans pick 100 books like The Face of the Third Reich

I’m a long-time correspondent for American media across the world. I reported on Europe and Asia for the Wall Street Journal, and on Southeast Asia for Bloomberg News. I was always fascinated by deep historical layers to be found in ancient societies like those of Europe, and the sometimes accurate clichés about European tribes and their strange customs; no European tribe is weirder than the Germans, for a long time the wildest of the continent and then the most cultured and sophisticated until they came under the spell of a certain Austrian. The twelve years that followed still rank as the most insane historical period for any nation ever.

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.

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.

The Second World War has always fascinated me, starting when I first entered school. The war had just started and it became even more real with each successive class when we were encouraged to buy war-saving stamps. On the home front, we experienced blackouts and mock air raids. Sugar, meat, butter, alcohol, and even gasoline were rationed. My cousins were overseas and in the thick of it. They always made sure I had an airplane model at Christmas. And as the war wound to a close, they sent me a cap from one from one of the German soldiers. It still intrigues me and still lives in my head.

I’m originally from New York but have lived in Portugal for the last 33 years. I write my novels in English and my children’s books in Portuguese. As anyone who reads my latest novel will discover, I have been greatly influenced the mythology and mystical traditions of various religions, especially Judaism (kabbalah). Happily, I discovered early on that I adore writing about people who have been systematically persecuted and silenced. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment to explore taboo subjects and topics that others would prefer to forget or conceal. When I’m not working on a book, I like to garden and travel. 

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.

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.

The ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes noted that botanists should write history because so much history involves plants. Coincidentally, I am a botanist with a deep interest in history. I began as a child botanizing abandoned farmers’ fields, and now I am always on the lookout for topics at the intersection of plants and human affairs. The books on my list are among many I read while researching for my book. In exploring the role of plants in warfare, I have synthesized vast information about human and military needs, from rationed foods to camouflage and battlefront medicine. Germany provided many unexpected findings.  

I am a professor of English and Visual Culture at St. John’s University in New York. My research in recent years has focused on reexamining the fate of modernist art in Hitler’s Germany. I have chosen five books that have shaped our understanding of Nazi art and have new resonance with the present resurgence of fascism and authoritarian governments around the world.

Why did I end up spending almost a third of my life researching Nazi boarding schools, and childhood under the Third Reich more generally? I sometimes wonder if it was because I myself was sent to boarding school at the age of nine – somehow, I can sympathise with what these children had to endure, as well as knowing full well from a historian’s perspective which hardships were truly unique to a National Socialist elite education, and which were simply the kind of heart-ache that’s common to any institution which takes children away from their parents at a young age…