The most recommended books about the Gestapo

I love to travel, and when I’m at home, I love to read about places I’ve been or hope to visit. This book transports me to a beautiful village in France, where Bruno, Chief of Police, chases bad guys, fights bureaucracy, keeps the townspeople calm, falls in love, and cooks food that I wish he’d cook for me. 

Christabel Bielenberg was Anglo-Irish, her husband was a German lawyer, and they were close friends of Adam von Trott and other German oppositionists. Christabel was in Germany throughout the war, and her book gives an absorbing account of daily life in the Third Reich.

It was a dangerous world. How do you stop your child from telling the Nazi gardener that his mother listens to the radio with her ear pressed against the set? What do you do when a friend says something imprudent? How do you react when a homeless Jewish couple asks for shelter? When your husband is in prison, what do you say to the Gestapo officer in charge of his case?

I was thoroughly drawn in.  Christabel felt like someone I could have been friends with. 

Despite the title, this is not so much a story of one woman, but a portrait of several individual Jews and Poles caught in the Nazi web during WWII. 

Each chapter is a finely drawn sketch of a single individual tested by fate and circumstance. The author captures how each of these characters responds to his or her plight in ways that are rarely predictable. I was particularly impressed by how the author displays a broad knowledge of national and political movements which he incorporates into the stories.

This provides a nuanced backdrop to the personal struggles experienced by each of his meticulously crafted characters.

I was sitting in a cafe in Paris with a friend from Texas. I had just finished my time in the Army and was studying on the GI Bill. My friend was reading a book. I asked what it was about. He looked at the cover. I would like it, he said and gave it to me. I couldn't put the book down.

He dedicated the book to Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, I learned that John Kennedy toasted him at a White House dinner in his honor as "the man we all wanted to be," For years I too wanted to be like him. As a young man, he went to French Indochina and lived in China, struggling then.

He wrote Man's Fate, his first novel, which made him famous. He was a pilot in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. He made a documentary about the… show more.

As I was compiling this list, a memory of this book came to mind. I’ve read so many novels on the Holocaust and had other titles I was planning to recommend, yet I kept coming back to this book. I distinctly remembered where I was when I read it... in my childhood bedroom... and the fact that I finished it in one sitting. I vaguely recalled the plot, but the impression it left on me was so strong that I found myself researching the book once more. I was surprised to discover it was published in 1996 when I was 22 years old, since I thought I was younger when I read it. But as I reread the novel (again in one sitting), it was definitely the book from my memories.

The story is told from the point-of-view of a young girl named Korinna, who is a member of the… show more.

This was a spell-binding, nail-biting suspense thriller about a young French woman who must steal flawless diamonds from Belgium and deliver them to the Allied Forces before the industrial-grade gems fall into the hands of the Nazis. 

 I loved the intricate, well-developed plot, memorable characters, and imminent danger at every turn. As a French teacher who spent a summer in Normandy and visited many of the sites of the Allied invasion, I appreciated how the heroine was a French woman trying to save her country by aiding the Allies.

This novel was one of the best WW2 stories I have ever read!

This book is written about my uncle Bob Allen. He was a career RAF officer, not easy to know, quite distant and intimidating, and he had a secret.

This is a true story that lay deliberately hidden for fifty years until unearthed on his death by the author. I say deliberately because of the need – common-felt amongst survivors of war – to remain tight-lipped. Even when his hand-written memoirs were discovered, they had been written in the third person. But this is the story of an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary times. He joined the RAF aged nineteen, was flying a Hurricane in dogfights that year, saw action in West Africa, in Normandy at D-Day, was shot down, presumed killed and captured by the SS. Interrogated by the Gestapo and sent to Stalag-Luft 3. In 1945, he suffered one of the infamous winter marches on which many POWs… show more.

A novel set in Nazi-occupied France during World War 2? It promised to be gripping. It was.

I was quickly immersed in an oppressive environment where French citizens’ lives are strictly controlled. For many, it is a living nightmare. Failure to toe the line leads to often harrowing consequences.

This is the story of a courageous young woman who refuses to give in. She moves to Paris, where she joins the Resistance movement. Here, she is pushed to the limits of her resolve as she faces extreme danger.

Throughout, the author paints a superb picture of the period. Balanced by historical facts, the plot unfolds with vivid imagery. It is a compelling adventure with a catch that grabs the reader’s imagination. 

Famous for his crookbacked sleuth Shardlake series, CJ Sansom sets this standalone counter-factual historical thriller in 1950s Britain – one where the United Kingdom had capitulated to Nazi Germany in 1940 (with Lord Halifax and not Winston Churchill becoming prime minister) and has become a German client state. It conjures up the 1950s – the smog, the coal smoke, the tea shops – while sketching out an alternate reality, one which is highly plausible, thereby doing one of the things I love best about historical fiction – showing us how different things could easily have been and shaking us from any complacency. More than this, Dominion is a highly effective thriller, as civil servant David Fitzgerald becomes the man in the middle of a politico-spy page-turner that keeps you guessing till the end.

This was my father’s favourite book, and the teenage me agreed. It’s the greatest prolonged chase story ever written. An English tourist takes a pot shot at Hitler and is hunted all the way to the West Country in England, where he digs himself into the bank of an unused country lane, cornered like a fox. I lived in Devon at the time, and knew those huge high banks along the sides of ancient tree-covered lanes, and I and the village kids built ourselves exactly the same sort of hideaway, dug into a bank in the woods and invisible from above.