Here are 100 books that The Mind of Adolf Hitler fans have personally recommended if you like
The Mind of Adolf Hitler.
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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 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…
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 1973 book got me started in this field over 50 years ago, and is still endlessly fascinating. Bleuel examines nearly every aspect of Nazi culture: male and female roles, the good wife and mother. There was even special medals (I have one) called Mutters Medal—a bronze for five children; a silver for 7; and a gold medal for 10 or more kids; divorce (actually quite common if the wife could not bear children); adultery (also quite common, as long as it produced babies); legal brothels; and of course “degeneracy” (perverted sex that did not produce Aryan blonds for the Fatherland (homosexuality, abortion, transvestism).
The movie and play Cabaret and the Roku series Berlin Babylon perfectly describe the forces of fascism trying to destroy “abnormal” sex.
Compare this book to Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture and Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin.
In writingThe Lost Son, which is loosely based on family history, I immersed myself in the history of World War II and in the world between the wars. It was important to me to understand this period from both sides—from the perspective of Germans who were either forced to flee their homeland or witness its destruction from within by a madman, and from the perspective of Americans with German ties who also fought fascism. The stories of ordinary people during this time are far more nuanced than the epic battles that World War II depicted, as the stories of ordinary people often are.
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.
Irmgard Hunt was born into Nazi Germany in 1934 and brought up in the Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, just outside the fence that surrounded Hitler's alpine retreat and headquarters. On Hitler's Mountain is her account of a childhood under the Third Reich as the daughter of low-level Party members. As a model Aryan toddler, she was photographed sitting on Hitler's knee, and attended school with the children of Albert Speer and Fritz Sauckel. Like many ordinary Germans her parents considered themselves to be moral and honourable: her father was a porcelain artist (at the workshop that provided Hitler with his…
Keith Lowe is the author of several works on postwar history. His international bestseller, Savage Continent, won the English PEN/Hessell Tiltman Prize and Italy’s Cherasco History Prize. His book on the long-term legacy of World War II, The Fear and the Freedom, was awarded China’s Beijing News Annual Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Crown. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages.
There are dozens of excellent books about Germany and Germans in the wake of defeat – I could mention Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich, or R.M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane – but Douglas Botting’s book is by far the most engaging history of the subject that I’ve ever read. It was written in the 1980s, so it is not quite as up-to-date as the more recent histories, but what it lacks in cutting-edge research it more than makes up for in narrative immediacy. It is impossible not to be moved by Botting’s descriptions of postwar chaos, of orphans hiding in the ruins, of lawlessness, starvation, desperation and retribution. An absolute classic.
First published in Britain in 1985, In the Ruins of the Reich is a classic account of Nazi Germany after her fall to the Allies in May 1945. Douglas Botting concentrates on the defining events that took place in the period between the collapse of the Third Reich and the foundation of the new Germanys to create the prevailing atmosphere of a most unusual and little-charted time in history. This was a period when four of the strongest industrial nations to emerge from the Second World War attempted to work together to govern the once strong Germany, now prostate, impoverished…
My parents both fought in the Second World War – my father as a bomber pilot, my mother as a Wren. Dad often entertained us at family mealtimes with tales of his wartime adventures – of how was shot down over Germany, captured, imprisoned, but finally escaped. My interest in the period grew from there, and my first ‘wartime’ novel The Secret Letter was in fact largely based on my parents experiences. Since then, I have become increasingly fascinated by the period, with now a total of four novels set in WW2, culminating in my present book The German Mother.
Joseph Goebbels was the Minister for Propaganda in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and is one of the central characters in my latest novel. I recommend Longerich’s biography of this complex man in its own right, and not just because I plundered it for information when writing my novel.
Scholarly but written in a lively style, the book will appeal to anyone interested in what made the ‘master of the dark arts of propaganda’ tick. Drawing heavily on Goebbels’ own diaries (which run to an astonishing twenty-nine volumes), Longerich has written the definitive history of this complex and fascinating man, who was so attracted to Nazi ideology that he ultimately lost his soul to evil.
Joseph Goebbels was one of Adolf Hitler's most loyal acolytes. But how did this club-footed son of a factory worker rise from obscurity to become Hitler's malevolent minister of propaganda, most trusted lieutenant and personally anointed successor?
In this definitive one-volume biography, renowned German Holocaust historian Peter Longerich sifts through the historical record - and thirty thousand pages of Goebbels's own diary entries - to answer that question. Longerich paints a chilling picture of a man driven by a narcissistic desire for recognition who found the personal affirmation he craved within the virulently racist National Socialist movement - and whose…
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.
As the title suggests, this is a compendium of American visitors’ impressions of Nazism in the 1930s. Their reactions varied from confusion to rage to applause, but Nagorski notes that, sooner or later, most came to the realization that Germany was “a society undergoing a horrific transformation in the name of a demented ideology,” and feared the implications for humanity. Another useful reminder of the essential role of solid, independent journalism, and of the methods by which seemingly decent people and entire societies can be devoured by hatred and tribalism. It seems, sadly, that we need a lot of reminding about such things…
World War II historian Andrew Nagorski recounts Adolf Hitler’s rise to and consolidation of power, drawing on countless firsthand reports, letters, and diaries that narrate the creation of the Third Reich.
“Hitlerland is a bit of a guilty pleasure. Reading about the Nazis is not supposed to be fun, but Nagorski manages to make it so. Readers new to this story will find it fascinating” (The Washington Post).
Hitler’s rise to power, Germany’s march to the abyss, as seen through the eyes of Americans—diplomats, military officers, journalists, expats, visiting authors, Olympic athletes—who watched horrified and up close. “Engaging if chilling…a…
I’m endlessly fascinated by the stories of young women from the WW2 era, who came of age at the moment the world was torn apart. As an author of wartime historical fiction with strong female characters, it’s vital for me to understand the experience of ordinary women who grew up in such extraordinary times, so I’m always on the hunt for real voices from the era. I’d love to think that in similar circumstances I’d face my challenges with the same humour, resourcefulness, bravery, and humanity as my favourite five female memoirists selected for you here.
I love taking elements from memoirs and spinning them into historical fiction. But some memoirs are better than novels, and this is one of them. Trudi recounts her life as a chic young hat designer in Vienna in 1938 who falls in love with Walter, a charming businessman. But Trudi and Walter are Jewish, and their love story rapidly becomes a desperate bid for survival, as the Nazis annexe Austria. Trudi is a wonderful writer, and her story is a gripping read of love, escape, and hope.
An “instantly mesmerizing” (Oprah.com) and “valuable piece of social history” (Chicago Jewish Star)—the astonishing memoir of a “vivid, tenacious, and absolutely unforgettable” (Bookreporter.com) woman whose courage and resourcefulness kept her and her beloved safe after the Nazis invaded Austria.
Vienna, 1938: Trudi Kanter, stunning and charismatic, is a renowned hat designer for Europe’s most fashionable women when she falls in love with a handsome businessman. “We were young and the world was ours,” she writes. Then, in the blink of an eye, Hitler comes to power and Kanter’s world collapses. She and her family embark on an incredible journey across…
I am a writer and television producer who researches and writes in an attic surrounded by tumbling bookshelves. When I was young I watched a BBC series called Secret Army which got me hooked on the people who stood up to the Nazis when their country was occupied. Over the years I’ve travelled around Europe to interview many of WW2’s resisters and veterans, and I became interested in the people inside Germany who defied the Nazis. Trying to tell the stories of the people who dared to oppose Hitler became something of an obsession.
For me, Hans Oster is one of the most noble and courageous of the military resisters to the Nazis.
Unlike many in uniform, Oster’s opposition did not waver during Hitler’s military successes or begin with Germany’s defeats: he always hated them. Terry Parssinen’s book centres on Oster’s pre-war plot to kill Hitler, which failed after Britain signed the Munich peace treaty with Germany.
It inspired me to research Oster’s continuing resistance throughout the war and even his efforts to help Jews. As Oster said later, after being captured by the Nazis, it is “my duty to free Germany and the world of this plague”.
September 1938. In power more than five years, Hitler unilaterally dismantled the Treaty of Versailles, provision by provision, daring Britain and France to stand up to him. Earlier that year, he forced Austria into his Third Reich without firing a single shot. Now his sights were set on Czechoslovakia.
It was in this dangerous climate that the first anti-Nazi coup was born. The plot was spearheaded by Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster, and its members included top German military leaders, the Berlin police, local troop commanders, civil authorities, religious leaders, and a group of resisters whose names have been wiped from the…
