Hitler

December 19th, 1941 - Hitler takes command of the German army.  Here are 10 books about or related to Adolf Hitler.

Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi by Thomas Weber - In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement. The tragedy for Germany and the world was that Hitler found himself in Munich; had he not been in Bavaria in the wake of the war and the revolution, his transformation into a National Socialist may never have occurred.
In Becoming Hitler, Weber brilliantly charts this tragic metamorphosis, dramatically expanding our knowledge of how Hitler became a lethal demagogue.

The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin Carter Hett - A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen.
Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time.
To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany's leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler's hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship.

Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi's Rise to Power by Andrew Nagorski - Some of the Americans in Hitler's Germany were merely casual observers, others deliberately blind, a few were Nazi apologists. But most began slowly to understand what was unfolding, even when they found it difficult to grasp the breadth of the catastrophe.
Among the journalists, William Shirer understood what was happening. Edgar Mowrer, Dorothy Thompson, and Sigrid Schultz, reporters, were alarmed. Consul General George Messersmith distinguished. Truman Smith, the first American official to meet Hitler, was an astute political observer. Historian William Dodd, who FDR tapped as ambassador in Berlin, left disillusioned; his daughter Martha scandalized the embassy with her procession of lovers, Nazis she took up with; she ended as a Soviet spy.
On the scene were George Kennan, the architect of containment; Richard Helms, who rose to the top of the CIA. The writers Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Wolfe, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, and the great athlete Jesse Owens came through Germany; so did a younger generation of journalists--Richard Hottelet, Hans V. Kaltenborn, Howard K. Smith, and Ed Murrow.
These Americans helped their reluctant countrymen begin to understand Nazi Germany as it ruthlessly eliminated political opponents, instilled hatred of Jews and anyone deemed a member of an inferior race, and readied its military and its people for a war for global domination. They helped prepare Americans for the years of struggle ahead.

Hitler and the Habsburgs: The Fuhrer's Vendetta Against the Austrian Royals by James Longo - A stunning work of narrative history revealing how and why Adolf Hitler targeted the children of the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, making the Archduke's sons the first two Austrians deported to the Dachau concentration camp, and how the family fought back. It was during five youthful years in Vienna that Adolf Hitler's obsession with the Habsburg Imperial family became the catalyst for his vendetta against a vanished empire, a dead archduke, and his royal orphans. That hatred drove Hitler's rise to power and led directly to the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The royal orphans of Archduke Franz Ferdinand--offspring of an upstairs-downstairs marriage that scandalized the tradition-bound Habsburg Empire--came to personify to Adolf Hitler, and others, all that was wrong about modernity, the twentieth century, and the Habsburg's multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were outsiders in the greatest family of royal insiders in Europe, which put them on a collision course with Adolf Hitler. As he rose to power Hitler's hatred toward the Habsburgs and their diverse empire fixated on Franz Ferdinand's sons, who became outspoken critics and opponents of the Nazi party and its racist ideology. When Germany seized Austria in 1938, they were the first two Austrians arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Germany, and sent to Dachau. Within hours they went from palace to prison. The women in the family, including the Archduke's only daughter Princess Sophie Hohenberg, declared their own war on Hitler. Their tenacity and personal courage in the face of betrayal, treachery, torture, and starvation sustained the family during the war and in the traumatic years that followed. Through a decade of research and interviews with the descendants of the royal Habsburgs, scholar James Longo explores the roots of Hitler's determination to destroy the family of the dead Archduke and uncovers the family members' courageous fight against the Führer.

Hitler, My Neighbor: Memories of a Jewish Childhood, 1929-1939 by Edgar Feuchtwanger with Bertil Scali - An eminent historian recounts the Nazi rise to power from his unique perspective as a young Jewish boy in Munich, living with Adolf Hitler as his neighbor. Watching events unfold from his window, Edgar bore witness to the Night of the Long Knives, the Anschluss, and Kristallnacht. Jews were arrested; his father was imprisoned at Dachau. In 1939 Edgar was sent on his own to England, where he would make a new life, a career, have a family, and strive to forget the nightmare of his past--a past that came rushing back when he decided, at the age of eighty-eight, to tell the story of his buried childhood and his infamous neighbor.

Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 by Volker Ullrich - The historical significance of Adolf Hitler has overshadowed the man behind the public persona. For decades, misconceptions about Hitler have percolated, but to cast Hitler as purely a psychopathic monster is to ignore the facets of his personality that help explain his enigmatic hold on the German populace. Ullrich recounts Hitler's personal journey from childhood to his consolidation of political power, and in doing so captures Hitler's canniness, instinctive grasp of politics, and gift for oratory as well as his megalomania, deep insecurity, and repulsive worldview.

Hitler's Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss by Laurence Rees - Fuelled by hate, incapable of forming normal human relationships, unwilling to listen to dissenting voices, Adolf Hitler seemed an unlikely leader, and yet he commanded enormous support and was able to exert a powerful influence over those who encountered him. How did Hitler become such an attractive figure to millions of people? That is the question at the core of Hitler's Charisma.
Acclaimed historian and documentary filmmaker Laurence Rees examines the nature of Hitler's appeal and reveals the role his supposed "charisma" played in his success. Here is a fascinating social, psychological and historical investigation into the formation of a personality whose determination and vision would at the outset convince a small group of like-minded political and social outcasts but would eventually win over an entire nation and plunge the rest of the world into a cataclysm unlike any that had ever been seen before. Hitler's Charisma is a natural culmination of twenty years of writing and research on the Third Reich and a remarkable examination of the man and the mind at the heart of it all.

Hitler's Last Days: The Death of the Nazi Regime and the World's Most Notorious Dictator by Bill O'Reilly - By early 1945, the destruction of the German Nazi State seems certain. The Allied forces, led by American generals George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower, are gaining control of Europe, leaving German leaders scrambling. Facing defeat, Adolf Hitler flees to a secret bunker with his new wife, Eva Braun, and his beloved dog, Blondi. It is there that all three would meet their end, thus ending the Third Reich and one of the darkest chapters of history. Hitler's Last Days is a gripping account of the death of one of the most reviled villains of the 20th century--a man whose regime of murder and terror haunts the world even today.

The Plots Against Hitler by Danny Orbach - In 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. A year later, all parties but the Nazis had been outlawed, freedom of the press was but a memory, and Hitler's dominance seemed complete. Yet over the next few years, an unlikely clutch of conspirators emerged - soldiers, schoolteachers, politicians, diplomats, theologians, even a carpenter - who would try repeatedly to end the Fuhrer's genocidal reign. This dramatic and deeply researched book tells the full storyof those noble, ingenious, and doomed efforts. This is history at its most suspenseful, as we witness secret midnight meetings, crises of conscience, fierce debates among old friends about whether and how to dismantle Nazism, and the various plots themselves being devised and executed.
 Orbach's fresh research takes advantage of his singular skills as linguist and historian to offer profound insight into the conspirators' methods, motivations, fears, and hopes. Though we know how this story ends, we've had no idea until now how close it came - several times - to ending very differently. The Plots Against Hitler fundamentally alters our view of World War II and sheds bright - even redemptive - light on its darkest days.

With Hitler to the End: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Valet by Heinz Linge - Heinz Linge worked with Adolf Hitler for a ten-year period from 1935 until the Führer's death in the Berlin bunker in May 1945. He was one of the last to leave the bunker and was responsible for guarding the door while Hitler killed himself. During his years of service, Linge was responsible for all aspects of Hitler's household and was constantly by his side.
Here, Linge recounts the daily routine in Hitler's household: his eating habits, his foibles, his preferences, his sense of humor, and his private life with Eva Braun. After the war Linge said in an interview, "It was easier for him to sign a death warrant for an officer on the front than to swallow bad news about the health of his dog." Linge also charts the changes in Hitler's character during their time together and his fading health during the last years of the war. During his last days, Hitler's right eye began to hurt intensely and Linge was responsible for administering cocaine drops to kill the pain. In a number of instances--such as with the Stauffenberg bomb plot of July 1944--Linge gives an excellent eyewitness account of events. He also gives thumbnail profiles of the prominent members of Hitler's "court": Hess, Speer, Bormann and Ribbentrop amongst them.
Though Linge held an SS rank, he claims not to have been a Nazi Party member. His profile of one of history's worst demons is not blindly uncritical, but it is nonetheless affectionate. The Hitler that emerges is a multi-faceted individual: unpredictable and demanding, but not of an otherwise unpleasant nature.