98 books like The Secret Journals of Adolf Hitler

Surely the rise of Hitler and the impact of global depression gave an air of inevitability about the holocaust to follow? In this successor volume, Steiner makes clear many other factors were in play that might have altered Europe’s fate. She details the West’s overriding fear of Soviet communism, the crucial role Mussolini played as termite to the tentative international order built in the 1920s, and the deep internal divisions that French leaders ultimately were unable to overcome, divisions that played their own role in strengthening British Prime Minister Chamberlain’s decision to deal with Hitler at the Munich conference. 

This book is so deliciously over-the-top. Forced into a marriage she doesn't want, Sophie gets desperate and makes a crazy post online, begging someone to kidnap her. Phoenix actually does it, and it's just an insane level of possessive hotness from then on out. Phoenix is dark and gruff and growly and everything an obsessive alpha male should be.

This is not a full biography – the biography Steinert wrote later in her career is not available in English – but many of the ideas in Steinert’s biography can also be found in this earlier work, which has faded into posterity slightly but can be read with great profit. Here, Steinert is concerned to give texture to a hitherto often two-dimensional image of German society and its attitudes to Hitler’s War. The result is an interesting, differentiated account of public opinion in Nazi Germany. In many respects, it was pioneering and opened up questions surrounding the relationship between state and society that other historians went on to explore further in the 1980s. Steinert’s Francophone background, and perhaps the fact that she was a female writer working in a profession that was then very male-dominated, probably account for the fact that her work is less well-known in the English-speaking world… show more.

First recommended to me by a renowned authority on European history, this big book is far and away the most comprehensive study of the origins of World War II that I read while preparing to write my own book. Watt not only traces the rise of Hitler and the absolutely ruthless steps he took to make himself master of Germany throughout the 1930s; Watt also shows exactly how Roosevelt maneuvered his way around American isolationists who were dead set against any American involvement in the new war. On top of that, Watt shows how Britain and every other European country outside Germany were responding to the prospect that within twenty years of a war that had taken 20 million lives and wounded 21 million more, Europe was facing the unthinkable: a second World War. 

This book reminded me how important it is to constantly check my attitude, in both my personal and professional experiences. 

In fact, the only thing in life we truly have control over is our attitude—our response to people and situations. Learning how to possess and practice a winning attitude has helped me overcome many challenges in my life and resulted in my learning to frame what I used to look at as obstacles to be overcome as opportunities for growth and redirection.  

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.

Kershaw’s double biography of the Nazi leader (the second part, almost entirely about World War II, is called Hubris) is a classic, and remains the best, most approachable look at the unusual upbringing of a young boy from provincial Austria who once wanted to be an artist, and felt in debt with the Jewish doctor who (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) treated his mother’s cancer. Hubris is most remarkable for the glimpses it provides of a different fate for that young boy Adolf: how he was scarred by family tragedy and by failure at multicultural Vienna, and how the Great War gave him an opening to become the worst possible version of himself.

It’s been a while since I have read this one but it has always been one of my favorites. An American pilot is stranded in post World War 2 Britain. In this reality, moments before defeat, Adolf Hitler released a biological weapon that decimated the population. A hemorrhagic virus that attacks certain blood types, those not killed initially are slowly dying and desperate for a cure that they think is in the main character's blood since he is unaffected. The action in this book is some of the best I have ever read as the ‘Black Shirts’ chase our hero through the war-torn city.

On 21 March 1943 Gersdorff, a German colonel, showed Hitler around a display of captured weapons in Berlin. He set off the timer for a bomb secreted in his capacious army pocket, but Hitler suddenly left the building: Gersdorff was unable to follow, and had to race to a toilet cubicle to tear the fuse from his bomb. Gersdorff was a committed opponent of the Nazis, and his account traces the highs and lows of the German opposition.

I wanted to dive into Hitler’s mind as I wrote words pouring from his mouth, and this book did not disappoint. From the opening pages I felt immersed in his pathetically creepy world where he was always the hero, or the wronged one, the victim. His rise to power was foreseeable, predictable, and avoidable, urged forward by people of wealth who consistently chose personal profit over integrity. Reading this book helped me understand how divisiveness can be propagated using deft propaganda. This book is terrifying, revealing, and really important to understand.