37 books like Berlin Diary

First of all, I loved this book because the historical background Larson writes about benefited my understanding of the early rule of Hitler as Germany’s Chancellor.

This is the period my novel opens in. As Larson’s story unfolds, he does an excellent job of making the historical truth read like a novel. I loved this. However, what disturbed me was Ambassador Dodd’s inability to convince the State Department of the horrors unfolding under Hitler’s rule. While this truth disturbed me, it also gave me insight as to how this information would enhance the reliability of my novel’s historical background.

Please understand what I’m trying to convey here. This was not a work simply to help me write a novel. No. This book is profound in revealing to a reader how Washington didn’t act quickly enough in recognizing Hitler as a world threat. And Larson presents this truth in a page-turning… show more.

The first half of the book is like watching a slow-motion car wreck. There were so many missed opportunities to stop Hitler before he did his worst, I wanted to shout ‘Stop this guy before it’s too late!’ Alas… Shirer was our man in Vienna and Berlin from the late 1920s-early 1940s, which adds an intimacy to his words that I find lacking in other similar accounts.

I love books where I cannot guess the outcome, and Cold Harbour is one of the best. The stakes are high for both the Allies and the Germans. You’re never really sure what will happen next, right down to the finish.

It’s May 1944 and excitement is running high with the Allies and the Germans. The Allies want to know about the German Atlantic Wall and Rommel’s plans to defeat the invasion, and for the Germans, where the Allies will land.

The Allies, like the Germans, used aircraft and U-boats, in carrying out their spy operations. In Cold Harbour, a small fishing port near Cornwall, Craig Osborne, an OSS agent and assassin, finds himself in an U-boat off the coast of Brittany, where he discovers the U-boat is manned by Royal Navy. With the help of the sister of a dead British agent, he is able to penetrate a… show more.

It’s a hard book to put down. It was written by Stevenson, a Canadian, along with William Donovan, who created a super spy agency that was responsible for a string of Allied successes. Their agency included a number of very talented men and women, including Ian Flemming who went on to create James Bond.

You’ll be fascinated by the way they handled their challenges and remember Donovan and Stevenson and what they did after the war years long after you’ve read the book. I really like spy stories and how they overcame their challenges. Their book is filled with how they were successful. I like to read books for the subtlety that often escapes listening to an audio-book.

The war was also operated at an unseen level and J. C. Masterson was in the midst of it–espionage. The Brits added another to it–double cross, in which they provided known German agents with false information, and were successful in convincing the Germans that D-Day landings would take place in the Pas de Calais.

The book is an authoritative account of their activities and the great nicknames they used to pull it off. Names like Snow, Celery, Biscuit, Charlie, Midas, Dragonfly, Tricycle, and what their responsibilities were. They also used letter-writing agents who were part of their deception to get the Germans to retain a Panzer division in the Bordeau area, away from the landing area. You’ll marvel at their cleverness.

I know the book intrigued me and I’m sure you’ll come away from it amazed as I was.

The story of a brave and insightful Canadian journalist sent by the Toronto Star to get a read on the Nazi regime shortly after Hitler’s 1933 seizure of power. As soon as he set foot in Germany, Matt Halton had a good sense of where this might be headed, and he remained in Europe for the next decade as Hitler ran roughshod over international treaties and norms and then plunged the continent, and much of the world, into war. You can sense the indignation in Halton’s public and private pronouncements – not just over Nazism’s outrages, but over the failure of politicians, other journalists, and the wider public to see what he was seeing. A timely reminder of why good journalists matter, and why authoritarian leaders hate them.

If you’re curious about what was happening in Germany throughout the war, you’ll love Albert Speer’s memoir, which provides a unique, inside look at Hitler and his closest associates before and after the Allies landed in Normandy. Speer was Hitler’s architect and paints a unique picture of Hitler from the start of the war. It also includes a wonderful series of pictures at every stage.

If you’re fascinated by The Second World War, this book is a must for your library, as it is in mine. I look at the pictures over and over and delight in seeing the principal players who made those years memorable. It’s a book that will stay in your head for a long time.

Fromm, too, was a journalist alarmed by the rise of Nazism and Germans’ increasing embrace of hatred and falsehood. She differs from Halton and Shirer in that she was 1) born in Germany, and thus had a deeper perspective on Nazism’s place in German history and culture, 2) a woman, and thus expected to report on “society” and fashion stories, although her interests and abilities soon drew her to politics, and 3) Jewish, and therefore subjected to the daily indignities, threats, and violence that in 1938 led her to flee a land her family had inhabited for five centuries. Fromm seemed to know everybody, including Nazi bigwigs, and was continually astounded by the degrees to which foreign visitors fell for blatant Nazi propaganda. Mackenzie King should have been listening.

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…

A remarkable novel about Truus Wijsmuller, a very brave woman in the Netherlands, resisting the Nazis by smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. A very moving and true story. The role of women in the resistance movement in the Netherlands has been neglected or underrepresented for way too long, so this story helps to shed light on the active resistance women carried out in WWII. This is exactly what my platform ‘Sophie’s Women of War’ sheds light on.