Books like Heinrich Himmler

In 2019 I published a review of Mary Fulbrook’s Reckonings in the journal History. The review may have been the most laudatory I’ve written. Fulbrook’s study of the Holocaust and its noxious aftereffects lingers with me today. I’ve come to think of Reckonings as the War and Peace of Holocaust histories. Like Tolstoy’s epic, it paints on a sprawling canvas, exhausting the writer’s palette to portray the Holocaust as a searing multi-generational phenomenon. Reckonings does not approach the Shoah as most writers of the Holocaust do, namely, as a monumental but time-limited event. Fulbrook conceives of the Holocaust as a cancer that blights the victims and their families into the second and third generations. The radioactive fallout of the Shoah continues to the present day, poisoning people’s lives so deeply that no human response is adequate to deal with it. She upholds the tragedy of the Holocaust… show more.

If you only have time to read one book on the Nazi leadership, it should be this one. It is not the lightest of books (and it has two volumes), but it is well worth your time. Adolf Hitler was obviously central to the Nazi dictatorship and the number of books written about him reflects that. There are lots of biographies on Hitler – even a lot of good ones – but Ian Kershaw’s two-volume life of Hitler remains unsurpassed in my view. Kershaw skillfully combines his biography of the dictator with a wider social and political history of the Nazi dictatorship, so readers learn a great deal about both the man at the top of the regime and the ways in which the Third Reich functioned.

Albert Speer is one of the most enigmatic figures within the Nazi leadership. I have always been intrigued by the fact that most biographies of him – including Gitta Sereny’s famous Speer: His Battle with Truth – have been fairly benign in their judgment of Speer’s character and deeds. Although directly responsible for the slave labour programme in the later stages of the war and a member of Hitler’s inner circle until the end in 1945, Hitler’s favourite architect managed to get away with a comparatively light sentence at the Nuremberg Trials, where he admitted partial responsibility. Handsome and well-spoken, Speer was often publicly perceived as one of the “less bad” Nazis. Martin Kitchen’s biography revises that image and convincingly shows the reader how intimately involved Speer was in many of the crimes of the Nazis.

Commonly interpreted as the finest account of the ‘gigantic criminality’ of the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian regimes, Arendt’s book has for me a more immediately visceral significance. It has profound things to say about what she called a "terribly cruel" contradiction lurking within the modern democratic commitment to equality.

She pointed out that although democracy demands that we recognize others as our equals, certain groups, especially for reasons of their past sufferings, are prone to misuse and abuse their democratic freedoms. They do so by violently asserting their rights to live as a "sovereign people" at the expense of others whom they treat as "superfluous."

Would Arendt have been surprised by the way a "democratic" state born of the ashes of genocide is nowadays behaving? Would she have condoned its military efforts to destroy "in whole or in part" (Genocide Convention Article 2c) a "superfluous" people known as Palestinians? Almost… show more.

Dark and violent, this twelfth-century tale of love and revenge is a compelling vision of medieval values, combining many of the tropes of later pseudo-medieval sagas – treasure, gory battles, a cloak of invisibility, sexual deception and a dragon – with the spiritual angst that the later tales miss. From Siegfried’s brief encounter with a scaly beast to the fire-and-blood blitzkrieg of the climax – a ferocious battle in the hall of Attila the Hun – the story is told with breathless passion. Whether it glamourises war, or warns against its cost, is a matter of enduring debate. The tale has certainly had its share of cranky fans, from the silent movie filmmaker Fritz Lang to Heinrich Himmler, a testament to its provocative power.

Which version to read? The Penguin edition, translated by A.T. Hatto and published in 1965, offers a very readable prose version that captures the tale’s fiery… show more.

Years before Shackleton and his crew became locked in the ice in Antarctica, Fridtjof Nansen his crew, and more than one hundred dogs got their ship stuck at the opposite end of the earth. But they did it on purpose. Before the modern understanding of oceanic currents, Nansen proposed that if he let his ship become locked in the polar ice, he and his crew would drift, very slowly, all the way to the North Pole. Three years later he and one other emerged shipless, frozen, and covered in walrus skin on a rocky island above the arctic circle. His ship? Safely on its way back to Norway. What happened in-between is almost unbelievable. 

This is a gigantic book of 665 pages, and a reading task not for the faint-hearted. It has no index, but then, preparing one might have taken months and easily have added another 100 pages to the book.

It is a reference book which can aid anyone seriously interested in the SS security services, the SD. Much of it is based on the basic SS files seized after the War, and it summarises and reproduces those with meticulous and overwhelming thoroughness. But it must be pointed out that the higher-level secret files of the SS and SD have never been found.

The Heinrich Pfeifer book supplies a great deal of information which was unavailable to Tyas. The personnel files of the department heads of the SD have not been found, and the most detailed account of that level of the operations of the SD is to be found in Pfeifer’s… show more.

One of the strangest and morally-complex stories from WW2 and the one I most struggled with while exploring the nature of resistance for my own book.

Could someone at the heart of the apparatus of Nazi terror also be a resister? After joining the Waffen SS to expose its crimes, Kurt Gerstein become involved in the supply of the deadly Zyklon B gas to the death camps.

At the height of the war, he destroyed consignments of gas and tried to tell the Allies and the Vatican about the Holocaust, but was ignored.

Prague-born Friedländer’s parents were murdered by the Nazis but he explores the paradoxes in Gerstein’s story with heart-rending humanity.

This is the real-life biography of a little-known Canadian from Nova Scotia, Winthrop Bell.

Bell worked as a spy for British MI6 in Germany. Bell understood that Hitler, an insignificant minion, rose to lead the Nazi Party because he served as a tool for extreme and powerful Nationalists who fashioned the genocidal program—the Holocaust.

As Winthrop Bell pursues the truth, the twists and turns of his often dangerous life are fascinating. 

Where Gitta Sereny talks with people involved in Nazi atrocities, Ernst Klee presents documentary evidence of these crimes. No one has published better or more important compendia of documents on Nazi crimes than Klee. I discovered his books as an exchange student in Germany (1988-89) and quickly found them to be unique. Klee’s spare method is to portray the Nazis’ descent into evil through the medium of their own texts and photographs. Regrettably, few of his books have been translated into English. The one I’m recommending here is a fine introduction to his style of historical writing.  

Klee’s evidence shows the awful arc drawn by Nazi crimes, from German incitement of pogroms against Jews in the east and Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish men, women, and children to the development of stationary gassing installations in death camps. Klee has a point of view, but he doesn’t want to convince you with… show more.