The most recommended books on Nazism

I was impressed by how the author seamlessly worked the dialogue into the story. The book was based on historical events about the Nazis' attempt to take over Hollywood in the 1930s.

The author brought the characters to life with personal backstories and natural conflicts of what it meant to be German versus Jewish in the 1930s and the courage that it took to stand up to a tyrant regardless of it being unpopular in your community.

I learned about an aspect of our history that I was unaware of and how the bravery of the few thwarted the diabolical plot of one Adolph Hitler and his goons.

The main character, an armaments engineer, becomes a target of the (then) Nazi government in Germany to prevent his expertise from being used to cement an Anglo-Turkish alliance in 1939. Their aim is to assassinate him. The story details the situation of an ordinary citizen caught up in international intrigue and how he manages to cope with it.

My liking and recommendation of this book is similar to that of my first choice, an innocent and ordinary individual who finds himself on the run to avoid capture and possible death by enemy agents, the means he utilises to make himself inconspicuous and evade them, and his fury at the end which enables him to turn the tables despite being out of his depth. 

This book has appeared under various titles and guises since its first publication in 1972. It is now available as The Penguin History of the Second World War. It is a bit like three books in one, since each author tackles a different theatre of World War 2.

There is a wonderful and possibly apocryphal publishing story about the changes the book underwent over the years. Peter Calvocoressi was always a distinguished historian, but at the time this book first appeared in 1972, "Calvo" was CEO of Penguin Books, and they were the book’s publishers. At that time, Penguin also boasted one of the most brilliant editors in British publishing, Dieter Pevsner. Dieter was (naturally) the right man to edit his boss’s book. Having read it through, Dieter had a question for the boss. “I just don’t understand,” Dieter told Calvo, “how we won the Atlantic submarine war.” Calvo… show more.

You don’t need to know about wine or WWII to enjoy the story of how French wine was ingeniously protected from pillaging Germans during the Occupation. It reads like a war movie, about wine. Some anecdotes with a touch of James Bond about them, with others more Allo Allo. Sadly, the heroism involved continues to this day, but now with Lebanese wine producers. Indeed, there is another more recent book covering this very topic too.

Marthe Cohn played a major role in the final year of World War II, spying for the French troops in Germany. She grew up in Metz, France speaking flawless French and German, and became a spy when members of her family and friends were tortured and killed. Faced with death many times, she survived to be decorated by the French government and finally told the story to her children. She lived for many years in Palos Verdes, California, where I live. When I heard her speak, I couldn’t believe that a woman who never reached five feet could have done all the things she did.

Brendon’s Magnus opus on the 1930s is both comprehensive and full of the telling anecdote. I found this to be one of the most informative, and best written, works of history that I have ever read. I can’t recommend it strongly enough, whether you’re researching this period or just looking for a very good book to read.

Since its publication, I have assigned this book every time I taught my course on Nazi Germany at Williams College.

Through his use of diaries, letters, and anecdotes, in combination with his profound knowledge of the history of the Third Reich, Fritzsche shows how, after January 1933, when Hitler became Reich Chancellor, the German people came rapidly to support and even to create National Socialism in Germany. The German people here were not simply duped or terrorized by the Nazis. Fritzsche shows how, in various different ways and to various different degrees, Germans became Nazis.

And, through empathy with those Germans, he helps the reader to understand why they did so. If you want to read only one book on the history of the Third Reich, this is the book I would recommend.

According to Hannah Arendt's famous description of Gestapo agent Adolf Eichmann, he was merely a cog in the larger machinery of murder–someone who could not think for himself.

In his detailed account of Eichmann's activities, historian David Cesarani argues instead that Eichmann's inner commitment to Nazi ideology led him to identify with his task of organizing the transport of Jews to the extermination camps—a fanatical dedication that continued through January 1945.

Dreams often reveal as much as, if not more, about a person, time, or place than objective eye-witness accounts. In this chilling collection of the nightmares of some 300 fellow Berliners under the Nazi regime, Jewish Berlin-based journalist Charlotte Beradt sounded the depths of the insidious effects of a dictatorship on the minds of those in its dominion and their stubborn refusal to comply. The English language edition includes an essay by child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, in which he remarked upon the potency of a totalitarian state, "forcing its enemies to dream dreams that showed that resistance was impossible & safety lay only in compliance." Nevertheless, such dreams are proof of the stubborn resistance of the psyche. For the very act of dreaming affirms the refusal of these Berliners to comply.  

This book contains a magisterial rendering of the mystical poet Angelus Silesius’s verse, “The Rose Is Without Why” as part of a critical analysis of the emergence of the modern idea of “reason.”

This book has never left me since I first encountered it in my doctoral dissertation on Heidegger back in the 1960s. It landed like a bombshell on a young Catholic like me, opening a poetic and mystical sense of life free from the creeds and authoritarianism of religion as well as from the doctrinaire dismissiveness of Enlightenment rationalism.

Written at the end of his career, it encapsulates everything Heidegger was getting at. We must never forget the horrible stain of Heidegger’s National Socialism, which I have analyzed (Demythologizing Heidegger), but there is more to Heidegger than that, and you can find it here.