100 books like The Last Nazi

I read this book quickly. Its historically informative and inspirational quality caught my interest immediately. From the first chapters, the author brings us into World War II France, which will become a tangled web of occupation by the Nazis.

I discovered in this powerful story a relationship between two sisters that weaves secrets of the heart and key decisions. The characters are caught in a difficult situation: a predicament that reflects the struggle experienced by many people in France during the war years. The story stimulates a sense of empathy and curiosity about what will come next.

The historical setting is drawn colorfully. This novel is valuable both for gaining a broader historical sense and for the sheer you-are-there experience. The narrative skill with which the author weaves this tale and its inherent drama should sustain the reader’s interest, as it did mine. This story touches the core of human… show more.

This is one of my all-time thrillers. It’s a cautionary tale that reminds us that not all of the Nazis were caught after the war and their need for power would never disappear.

The story follows Dr. Paul Osborne, who has been haunted from the day he was ten years old and watched a stranger kill his father. Now, years later, in Paris, he sees the same man. This starts the frantic race through Europe to find out why his father was killed and who ordered it done, while killers and the police dodge his every move, Osborne doesn’t know who can be trusted. The action doesn’t stop until the horrifying last page.

Another cautionary story. This story shows that the Nazi movement is growing worldwide and that governments need to keep these organizations under wraps before allowing them to carry out their own agendas. 

When a mistake causes an international incident during a US Presidential visit to Norway, Detective Harry Hole is placed out of sight in the Federal Police Department, until matters settle. Unable to sit still, Harry investigates a neo-Nazi group and comes across someone practicing with an exotic rifle that would only be used to assassinate someone. Now he must identify both the target and the killer.

This story hit home because it is set within my own community, so it could have really happened. We never know who our neighbors are and what they do behind closed doors.

Dead Air portrays radio morning host, Lee Garrett, who comes to work one morning to find a death threat taped to his radio console. At first, he thinks it’s a joke, but one accident after another convinces him that someone is really out to kill him. Can it be a member of the local neo-Nazi group, the Skins, a jealous radio personality for his or another station, or has he inadvertently insulted someone online? He must figure it out before they strike again.

The story of the nondescript German diplomat who became one of the United States' greatest spies in Nazi Germany reads like a thriller.

It was important to me because it showed how a single person, working alone, could do incredible damage to the Nazi war effort.

Kolbe’s story did not come out until well after the war, when declassified CIA documents revealed 1,600 diplomatic cables copied by Fritz Kolbe, a career-functionary in the German Foreign Office. Koble had smuggled the documents into Switzerland – mainly tucked down into his pants – to be passed to the OSS bureau head, Allen Dulles.

Only a tight circle of people knew who Kolbe was; even the president, Franklin D Roosevelt, who read his reports with astonishment, only knew of Kolbe by the codename, George Wood.

Kolbe disappeared into obscurity after the war, but the CIA left a wreath on his grave.

I chose this memoir because it tells the compelling story of Germans and Austrians who joined the British forces to strike back against Nazi Germany—a story that is missing from most histories. First, they had to undergo many metamorphoses—a main theme of this memoir. Peter Masters—originally a member of a respectable Jewish family in Vienna—escapes to Britain and is a refugee from Nazi oppression, but in 1940 the British government identify him as an enemy alien and intern him. For his fourth metamorphosis he becomes a soldier in the British army, but the British government bans Austrians and Germans from bearing arms. After this ban is lifted there is a final metamorphosis when he joins a British commando unit. He writes, "The antithesis of 'lambs to the slaughter,' we fought and many of us died... Those who died preferred their fate to being gassed and cremated by the Nazi brute."

The story holds almost more sorrow than seems possible. Krystia Fediuk, her mother Kataryna, sister Maria and their longtime friends, many of them Jewish, live in a Ukrainian town that celebrated as their Soviet occupiers left in 1941. But the even more cruel Nazis arrived, joined by many more Germans and Balkans friendly to them. And they were determined to single out Jewish townspeople, eventually forcing them into a ghetto.

It was then that Krystia and her mother decided to hide three Jewish friends in a hole dug under their stove. The price for what the Nazis saw as their treachery was steep. Krystia fled to the Ukrainian insurgents in the forest, taking only her dwindling hope. Though fiction, the author based the book on several real Ukrainians and the stories of others who survived. 

Born in 1934 in Berchtesgaden, in the shadow of Hitler’s Eagles Nest, Irmgard Hunt witnessed the growth of fascist ideology among the people she loved during an otherwise idyllic childhood. As the shadow of World War II fell over the mountain, however, Hunt began to question and then disavow the Nazi doctrines she had accepted as a young child. As time went on and the regime crumbled literally before her eyes, she was vocal in confronting her country’s criminal past and in championing the democratic principles her elders had so easily dismissed.

This story has won many awards including the Geoffrey Bilson Award for historical fiction but I love it for looking at the German side of World War II, not the battle but the prejudices a 12-year-old Canadian German and a 17-year-old German prisoner of war face in rural Alberta. Karen creates compelling fiction that humanizes instead of demonizes “the enemy.”

Set in Holland during WWII, this autobiography gives an up close and personal look at life in a German concentration camp.

The vivid descriptions of the horrid living conditions and prevailing illnesses made me feel like I was there. Most memorable was the discussion of the flea-infested straw bedding and the notion of being thankful for the fleas. The author and her sister were devout Christians, but why be thankful for fleas? However, the guards left the women alone because of the fleas.

I will also always remember how the author was given a small bottle of liquid vitamin D and how she never hesitated to share it with the sick, yet it never ran dry. She makes it clear this was God’s work.