Can anyone recommend a good book on the rise of Hitler?

[chaska]

Or other Bushlike leaders. One points out the similarities would be ideal, of course.

[MrSlayer]

1. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Probably the definitive documentation of the whole thing from beginning to end.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671728687/qid=1116373442/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-1621795-4111921?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

[Cleita]

11. I second that.

This book is practically my bible on what happened.

Also, Hitler's own book "Mein Kampf" gives you a good insight into his mind and what he was thinking.

[Blue_In_AK]

22. Excellent book. n/t

[Postman]

2. The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich

n/t

[jmowreader]

3. Besides "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"?

That's your standard Nazi text.

[Warpy]

9. It is the standard because it remains the definitive work

written not long after the fall and detailing everything that led up to Hitler's rise, his descent into madness, and the full scope of Nazi horror. No other work has come close.

A companion book might be Hitler's "Mein Kampf," a study in meticulous logic based on lunatic premises.

Another might be the works of Hannah Arendt or a little number called "Babi Yar," which details Nazi crimes and seeks to answer the questions of why and how they occurred.

[jmowreader]

14. Mein Kampf is good to read, but not as a way of understanding...

how Hitler came to power.

A more appropriate title for Mein Kampf would be "Diary of a Madman," but Ozzy would be pissed.

Mein Kampf is an excellent tool to use to understand Hitler himself.

[asthmaticeog]

4. You should consider reading "The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich." n/t

[chaska]

5. Isn't that rather long? Is there anything more recent and, well, succinct?

Okay, yeah, I'm lazy. Anyone want to read it to me? :^)

[kliljedahl]

8. There aren't any Cliff's Notes

Sometimes learning is Hard Work®



Keith’s Barbeque Central

[Cleita]

13. Sorry, no cliff notes on this. You have to read the whole

thing to understand what happened. I have read it three times and am on my fourth reading. I always find something I missed or that wasn't that important on previous readings, but that stands out on a subsequent reading.

[kliljedahl]

6. See the above

The first two words are "The Rise"


Keith’s Barbeque Central

[nytemare]

7. "Explaining Hitler" and "Seduced by Hitler"

Both go into what Germans were thinking, and go some into the German resistance. This is a very interesting subject to me, being that the holocaust and WW2 were not brought about only by Hitler.

Also, you might want to try "The President of Good and Evil" about Bush. It goes into the contradictory nature of his presidency.

on edit: Seduced by Hitler is a Barnes and Noble book, I think it was only about 6 bucks.

[libnnc]

10. "Before the Deluge"

"Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s"
by Otto Friedrich

Published by Harper Collins (1972, 1995)

A great book about the Weimar years. Takes you from 1918-1933.

[BeHereNow]

12. "They Thought They Were Free" Milton Mayer / Link

http://www.thirdreich.net/Thought_They_Were_Free_nn4.html
Site Intro:
"How and why "decent men" became Nazis.
Written by an American journalist of
German\Jewish descent. Mr. Mayer provides a
fascinating window into the lives, thoughts and
emotions of a people caught up in the rush of the
Nazi movement. It is a book that should make
people pause and think -- not only about the
Germans, but also about themselves."

"The discrepancy between the kind of society many Germans thought they
were building and the reality of the horror of the Third Reich presents one of the
most intriguing questions of our age. "How could it -- the Holocaust -- have
happened in a modern, industrialized, educated nation ? The genesis of my
interest in the Third Reich lies in my search for an answer to that enigmatic question.
The excerpt reproduced below is one of the most insightful I have yet
discovered. I share it with you - Pass it on - Lest we forget. RCD - Web Host"

The KILLER passage, SO reminiscent of our times:

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. "One had no time to
think. There was so much going on." "Your friend the baker was right,"
said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming
into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for
people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your "little
men", your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself,
learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about
fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave
us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent
people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and
so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national
enemies", without and within, that we had no time to think about these
dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.
Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?"

Sound familiar?
BHN

[Orsino]

20. A great book, indeed...

...for anyone who wonders why and how ordinary Germans let it happen. On eof the few assigned college textbooks I recall with chilling clarity.

[queeg]

15. also read The Rising Sun

By John Toland (he just died the other day) for an idea of why we went to war in the first place in WW2--- It wasn't all a German --European war after all.

[Journeyman]

16. There are many good books on Adolf Hitler's life . . .

Alan Bullock, "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny" (1963) is a strong, though conventional historical account of his life and work .

Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer, (1936 & 1944), are insightful accounts of Hitler's rise told contemporaneously by a journalist who attended the meetings and met the players.

Bradley F. Smith, Adolf Hitler: His Family, Childhood and Youth, is a fascinating account of Hitler's origins and youth, while Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (1977) is a well documented account of the judicial decision making process at work in the trial of the major Nazi war criminals.

William Carr, Hitler: A Study in Personality and Politics (1979) is a well-researched, well-reasoned psychological examination, while another book in this same vein is Robert G.L Waite's, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1977).

Joachim Fest, Hitler (1974) is a very readable account of Hitler's life and Reich, as is John Toland's Adolf Hitler (1976).

Joachim Fest also wrote a fascinating series of profiles on the leadership of the Third Reich that you may want to consider as your starting point, as it provides well-conceived, very illuminating portraits of the main players in Hitler's life: The Face of the Third Reich (1970).

Once you've immersed yourself in some of these writings, and feel you have an adequate command of the Reich's chronology and the forces at play in Hitler's life, you may want to tackle Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). I've read nothing that is half as insightful as Dr. Arendt's analysis.

And as I tell all my students, everything you truly need to know about Adolf Hitler is in one book: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1968). You just need to know how to look.

Reading your original question again, I see you're looking more for a quick study that paints the comparisons and avoids the messy contrasts between Hitler and Bush. I'm sure you'll find plenty of sources for these quick and easy analyses with a minimum of effort right here on the web. After 30 years of study, and two books of my own on aspects of the Reich, I find more contrasts between the two than I do comparisons, and even where there's comparisons to be made, Bush comes out much the lesser. . .

[JanMichael]

17. Defying Hitler

It's a journal published posthumously by a man living in Germany. Scary as hell to read now--but, I highly recommend it.

[Top Lizard]

18. Other Possibilities

I would second many of Journeyman's recommendations. Several of the better works on Hitler and the Nazis are quite long, in part because the Third Reich lasted 12 years and had many dimensions. The noted historian Ian Kershaw, for instance, recently wrote a two-volume Hitler biography that received much acclaim but also serves well as a portable doorstop!

One somewhat smaller work is J.P. Stern, Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People (1992 rev. ed.). It runs 232 pages (including notes), and largely focuses on the questions of how and why Nazism and its leader appealed to German citizens.

Another book is William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945 (1984 rev. ed.). This is a more in-depth local portrait which gives you a better sense of Nazism's operation at the community level. It's also longer, at 388 pages.

You might be interested in learning more about the overall European shift towards totalitarianism between the wars. Two good books for this are David Clay Large, Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930s (1990), and Mark Mazower, Dark Continent (Sorry, but I don't have the bibliographic info for this). The latter especially explains how many citizens became disillusioned with democracy and saw dictatorship as a more effective, even beneficial alternative.

One more interesting book is The Wave (I don't recall the author and publisher), which is a fictionalized account of a 1960s school experiment that mimicked Nazism. It helps to explain how some of the same beliefs and techniques could appeal to Americans three decades later.

And, for the ultimate in light reading, there's always television! Although I love to read, I greatly enjoy documentaries and often use them in my teaching. A ton of quickie documentaries on Nazism exist, but they're usually not too deep. One of the better ones is The Third Reich, 3 episodes which Thames Television produced as an offshoot of its excellent 1970s series The World at War (also recommended).

Unfortunately, as other DUers may have noted, exact historical parallels between Hitler and George III are hard to find. (Most historians are more leery of exact analogies than journalists, politicians, or pundits seem to be.) But if you read and reflect enough, you'll notice disturbing similarities, and come away feeling (as the writer Sinclair Lewis said), "it can happen here."

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

19. For a look at what life was like, try "I Will Bear Witness".

By Victor Klemperer. It's a diary kept by a German Jew, WWI veteran, married to an "Aryan". He was a professor of French literature, rather conservative, non-observant Jew, who initially didn't take Hitler seriously.

It's a day by day account of what Jews (and, to a lesser degree) ordinary Germans went through from 1933 - 1945.

I found it impossible to put down and have read it twice.

[thebigidea]

21. Shirer's is a must, but his diaries are even better: "The Nightmare Years"

[alfredo]

23. John Toland's "Adolph Hitler." He risked his life by seeking out

members of Hitler's inner circle. It's a terrific read.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385420536/qid=1116381983/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/102-4087824-8224128

Toland also did a book on airships. I recommend that one too. It reads like an adventure book.

http://print.google.com/print?id=5_Ouf9mOQCcC&lpg=0_2&prev=http://print.google.com/print%3Fq%3Djohn%2Btoland%26oi%3Dprint&pg=0_1&printsec=0&sig=krXDtzLxG7jRaZZrsHo3Bl8TZ-Q