Best German History Books
Here you will get Best German History Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
Author: by Erik Larson
B07TRVW6VX
Crown (February 25, 2020)
February 25, 2020
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, launching World War Two, its army seemed an unstoppable force. The Luftwaffe bombed towns and cities across the country, and fifty divisions of the Wehrmacht crossed the border. Yet only two decades earlier, at the end of World War One,Germany had been an utterly and abjectly defeated military power.
Foreign troops occupied its industrial heartland and the Treaty of Versailles reduced the vaunted German army of World War One to a fraction of its size, banning it from developing new military technologies. When Hitler came to powerin 1933, these strictures were still in effect.
By 1939, however, he had at his disposal a fighting force of 4. 2 million men, armed with the most advanced weapons in the world. How could this nearly miraculous turnaround have happened? The answer lies in Russia. Beginning in the years immediately after World War One and continuing for more than a decade, the German military and the Soviet Union-despite having been mortal enemies-entered into a partnership designed to overturn the order in Europe.
4. Mein Kampf
Author: by Adolf Hitler
English
694 pages
0395925037
Proceeds donated to Jewish Charities & Organizations In the pages of Mein Kampf Hitler presented the world with his dark vision for the future. Years would pass before he attained the power to realize that vision, but Mein Kampf’s existence denies the free world the excuse of ignorance.
We dismissed him as a madman and we ignored his wretched book; the result was a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. This is yet another lesson to take from Mein Kampf: the lesson of vigilance and responsibility, of not closing our eyes to the evil around us.
From the introduction by Abraham Foxman
5. Stalin's War: A New History of World War II
Author: by Sean McMeekin
English
864 pages
1541672798
A prize-winning historian reveals how Stalinnot Hitlerwas the animating force of World War II in this major new history. World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events.
But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asiaand he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war.
That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east.
Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 19411945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.
6. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Author: by Christopher R. Browning
Harper Perennial
English
384 pages
A remarkableand singularly chillingglimpse of human behavior… This meticulously researched book… Represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.”Newsweek Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jewsnow with a new afterword and additional photographs.
Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions.
Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.
7. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Author: by William L. Shirer
B07XD76H41
October 23, 2011
English
National Book Award Winner: The definitive account of Nazi Germany and one of the most important works of history of our time (The New York Times). When the Third Reich fell, it fell swiftly. The Nazis had little time to destroy their memos, their letters, or their diaries.William L.
Shirer’s sweeping account of the Third Reich uses these unique sources, combined with his experience living in Germany as an international correspondent throughout the war. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich earned Shirer a National Book Award and continues to be recognized as one of the most important and authoritative books about the Third Reich and Nazi Germany ever written.
The diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, as well as evidence and other testimony gained at the Nuremberg Trials, could not have found more artful hands. Shirer gives a clear, detailed, and well-documented account of how it was that Adolf Hitler almost succeeded in conquering the world.
With millions of copies in print, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a chilling and illuminating portrait of mankind’s darkest hours.A monumental work.Theodore H.White
8. The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
Author: by Corrie Ten Boom
Bantam Books
English
242 pages
I pray that God forgive them… Corrie Ten Boom stood naked with her older sister Betsie, watching a concentration camp matron beating a prisoner. Oh, the poor woman, Corrie cried.Yes. May God forgive her, Betsie replied. And, once again, Corrie realized that it was for the souls of the brutal Nazi guards that her sister prayed.
Both woman had been sent to the camp for helping the Jews. Christ’s Spirit and words were their guide; it was His persecuted people they tried to saveat the risk of their own lives; it was His strength that sustained them through times of profound horror.
Here is a book aglow with the glory of God and the courage of a quiet Christian spinster whose life was transformed by it. A story of Christ’s message and the courage woman who listened and lived to pass it alongwith joy and triumph!
9. Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World
Author: by Giles Milton
Henry Holt and Co.
English
400 pages
From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before BERLIN’S FATE WAS SEALED AT THE 1945 YALTA CONFERENCE: the city, along with the rest of Germany, was to be carved up among the victorious powers the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.
On paper, it seemed a pragmatic solution. In reality, once the four powers were no longer united by the common purpose of defeating Germany, they wasted little time reverting to their prewar hostility towardand suspicion ofone another. The veneer of civility between the Western allies and the Soviets was to break down in spectacular fashion in Berlin.
Rival systems, rival ideologies, and rival personalities ensured that the German capital became an explosive battleground. The warring leaders who ran Berlin’s four sectors were charismatic, mercurial men, and Giles Milton brings them all to rich and thrilling life here.
10. Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection
Author: by Sam Apple
Liveright (May 25, 2021)
English
416 pages
The extraordinary story of the Nazi-era scientific genius who discovered how cancer cells eatand what it means for how we should. The Nobel laureate Otto Warburga cousin of the famous finance Warburgswas widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the twentieth century, a man whose research was integral to humanity’s understanding of cancer.
He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it.
In Ravenous, Sam Apple reclaims Otto Warburg as a forgotten, morally compromised genius who pursued cancer single-mindedly even as Europe disintegrated around him. While the vast majority of Jewish scientists fled Germany in the anxious years leading up to World War II, Warburg remained in Berlin, working under the watchful eye of the dictatorship.
11. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Author: by Erik Larson
B004HFRJM6
Crown
May 10, 2011
Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Devil in the White City, delivers a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence.
Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home.
Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romanceand ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.
12. A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II
Author: by Adam Makos
Dutton Caliber
English
400 pages
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER: Beautifully told. CNN A remarkable story… Worth retelling and celebrating. USA Today Oh, it’s a good one! Fox News A beautiful story of a brotherhood between enemies emerges from the horrors of World War II in this New York Times bestseller by the author of Spearhead.
December, 1943: A badly damaged American bomber struggles to fly over wartime Germany. At the controls is twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown. Half his crew lay wounded or dead on this, their first mission. Suddenly, a Messerschmitt fighter pulls up on the bomber’s tail.
The pilot is German ace Franz Stiglerand he can destroy the young American crew with the squeeze of a trigger… What happened next would defy imagination and later be called the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.The U.S.
8th Air Force would later classify what happened between them as top secret. It was an act that Franz could never mention for fear of facing a firing squad. It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search the world for each other, a last mission that could change their lives forever.
13. Thunderstruck
Author: by Erik Larson
Crown (September 25, 2007)
English
480 pages
A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s great hush. In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two menHawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communicationwhose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners; scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed; and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth.
Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, the kindest of men, nearly commits the perfect murder.
14. The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
Author: by Nick Lloyd
Liveright (March 30, 2021)
English
688 pages
A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare. The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt.
This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare.
In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918.
Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter.
15. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich
Author: by Norman Ohler
Mariner Books
English
304 pages
New York Times Bestseller [A] fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich. Washington Post The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers.
In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meththe elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories.
Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugsultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroinadministered by his personal doctor. Thoroughly researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows.Delightfully nuts.
16. The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century
Author: by Peter Watson
B003M69A64
HarperCollins e-books
June 9, 2010
The German Genius is a virtuoso cultural history of German ideas and influence, from 1750 to the present day, by acclaimed historian Peter Watson (Making of the Modern Mind, Ideas). From Bach, Goethe, and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Freud, and Einstein, from the arts and humanities to science and philosophy, The German Genius is a lively and accessible review of over 250 years of German intellectual history.
In the process, it explains the devastating effects of World War II, which transformed a vibrant and brilliantly artistic culture into a vehicle of warfare and destruction, and it shows how the German culture advanced in the war’s aftermath.
