100 Books Like Hitler's Thirty Days to Power

One of the best explanations I’ve read of the rise of Fascism in Hitler’s Germany. I agree that ignoring the lessons of history means we’ll be forced to endure repetition. And Kerr paints such a chilling scenario no one in their right mind would wish the maxim to come true. His prose applies color and form like an artist at the top of their game.

At times I found him reminiscent of Chandler in the way he portrays the Nazis as the worst gangsters in the game. This is the first book of the Bernard Gunther series, and I was so enthralled that I raced through the others in just a few days. His storyline is filled with horror, passion, fear, and pathos—a tour de force of emotions.

One of Rory Clements’ many writing skills is the ability to create tension and explore an angle of an historical event.

It’s London 1936, and the king is about to abdicate. A woman is murdered in Berlin, and a fascist-leaning couple in Britain are killed. I liked how Clements joins these seemingly separate tragedies into a memorable story. I liked his hero, an academic drawn into the world of spying, Professor Tom Wilde.

I think a great novel's elements are believable characters, forensic attention to detail, and terrific tension, and they are all here.

As I read this riveting account, I felt like I was watching the events leading to the Munich Agreement of 1938. We all know the result of the agreement, but this book is much more than a historical account of what happened.

Harris tells the story through two friends who met at Oxford University in the 1920s. Now, one is an aide to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and the other a senior German Foreign Office official. They join forces to try to stop Chamberlain from signing the agreement.

I was impressed with the skillful way Harris revealed the story, which the exemplary writing is matched in detail and tension. 

A book that takes me into the hallowed halls of Nazi power is an immediate drawcard for me. And with a brave and determined woman protagonist who overcomes the odds, this book didn’t disappoint. Jane Thynne’s angle of exploring the lives of the wives of the leading Nazis is new, different, and works well. 

Clara Vine has left Britain in less than happy circumstances and goes to Berlin, where she gets a job as an actor at the famous Ufa studios. After a chance meeting, she becomes part of the Nazi wives’ social circle. When Magda Goebbels discloses a life-threatening secret and asks Clara for her help, the tension is on. 

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.

In my view, this is the most readable and persuasive of a number of new biographical treatments that have appeared recently. In terms of interpretation, largely Ullrich confirms the line offered in an older two-volume biography, the equally magisterial account by Ian Kershaw published at the turn of the century. Like Kershaw, Ullrich is concerned to explain Hitler’s power in terms of charismatic authority, and not just dictatorial terror. But whereas Kershaw was of the view that Hitler had comparatively little personal hinterland, foregrounding instead his career as a public figure, Ullrich pulls out a remarkable range of often tiny, seemingly insignificant personal details or anecdotes to generate a compelling view of Hitler’s own interior landscape – it is all the more impressive for the fact that he uses this to explain better Hitler’s political outlook and actions.  

If Hitler had obtained a nuclear weapon, it would have had a dramatic geopolitical impact on world history. Hitler is poorly understood, especially in the United States, and is often miscaricatured as Charlie Chaplin, or brushed off superficially as evil, mad or sick.

John Toland’s definitive account, based on over 150 interviews with persons who had known or worked with Adolf Hitler, puts into sharp focus Hitler’s energy and tremendous memory, his high emotional quotient, manipulativeness, his doubts, and consequently the danger he posed in a far more vivid and creditable manner than are achieved by cosmetic popular accounts.

It is an important text because Hitler’s fantasies and mistakes are predictably reproduced by so many other dictators, especially those who find themselves among vulnerable people who share those fantasies. 

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.

This remains the outstanding full-length biography of Hitler, not least because it is brilliantly written; it is also extraordinarily prescient.

Fest’s portrayal of the Nazi leader, the first to be written by a German, shows how any human society, no matter how cultured or educated, if far enough degraded and humiliated will be willing to listen to a banal, humourless bully whose singular obsessions were to pick at Germany’s war wounds and delegate the slaughter of the blameless minority he deemed responsible.

In Fest’s hands, Hitler emerges as no freak of nature with god-like powers, no monster beyond our comprehension…but shockingly human, the living fulfillment of the racist fantasies of the ordinary, pot-bellied fascists who brought him to power.

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…