100 Best German History Books of All Time

Norman DaviesThe next one is Prussia, which is another huge topic. Prussia is not one of the forgotten countries. It’s one of the kingdoms which was so powerful in its final phase, in the late 18th century to 1918, that memory of Hohenzollern Prussia, Bismarck and the creation of the German Empire is so recent and powerful that the memory of the earlier Prussia has all but been obliterated. (Source)

Gunhee ParkA few months back, I read a book called A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II that led me to want to learn more about Nazi Germany and Hitler, so I then picked up The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which led me to wanting to learn more about Winston Churchill. (Source)

Eric Weinstein[Eric Weinstein recommended this book on Twitter.] (Source)

Antony BeevorThis book is about…the Stalinist repression of the areas known as the borderlands, which Snyder has termed the bloodlands. Snyder is looking at the deliberate mass murder of civilians in a particular zone of Europe between about 1930, at the start of the second Ukraine famine, and 1945. (Source)

Edward LucasBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin offers the best account of the most important and terrible years of the last century, when Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler jointly consigned the territories and people between their two empires to the meat-grinder. (Source)

Tim Fargo@Quixoticnance Good point, Nancy. The museum is a powerful experience, esp. when you've read her book. (Source)

Catalina PenciuI'm a huge fan of personal stories and biographies like this one. (Source)

Alice LittleI remember being a fourth grader and trying to check out [this book] and being told it was grossly inappropriate and going so far as to have my parents take it to the school board and petition for me to be allowed to read this book. (Source)

Lawrence KaplanThe takeaway from reading this horror-filled book is that depredations on the scale of those that Browning describes can be perpetrated anywhere and by anyone. (Source)

Norman NaimarkThe essential lesson of Ordinary Men is that genocide is not the exclusive preserve of fanatics, racist thugs and homicidal maniacs. It is part of the human condition, especially of humans living in society. (Source)

Steven KatzThe reason this is such an important book is that when you study the Holocaust you ask almost immediately: How could people do this? How could men who had their own children, go out and murder other children? Or husbands take women and rip open their wombs and kill their infants and shoot them behind the ear? This book raised that question in a very, very strong and powerful way, based on... (Source)

Doris Kearns GoodwinSo beautifully written. But more importantly, for me, she was writing about battles and military stuff and things that you don’t imagine that sometimes a woman might be so adept at. (Source)

Ruth HarrisThis is a very strange book for me to choose. For many people, it is the ultimate old-fashioned diplomatic history. But it enthuses me for several reasons. First of all, it’s an extraordinary narrative. It reads magnificently and is a breathtaking horizon of events and people. Secondly, like me, she is obsessed with people. In the first chapter we have the funeral of Edward VII in 1910, which is... (Source)

Matt CalkinsThe best way to understand how the world resolves its conflicts and its tensions is by looking at how a conflict that has been studied thoroughly, like World War I, unfolded and resolved. Business is like this too. If anyone were to ever get to the heart of Coke vs. Pepsi, they would see a parade of mistakes in the same way World War I looks in retrospect—so many ways you could have done better. (Source)

Steve Schmidt@egayle333 Ellyn, with respect Hitler was always clear about his intent. A great book to read from a US perspective is In the Garden of Beasts. Trump is much more analogous to Mussolini. (Source)

Daniel HamermeshAt a time of increased danger of totalitarianism in the U.S., reading a history of an insider’s view of its growth in Germany in the 1930s gives a good perspective on our contemporary problems, as well as being fascinating history and biography in its own right. (Source)

Johanna ReissElie Wiesel wrote..that he was considering running into the barbed wire once, but he didn’t because his father needed him. (Source)

Steven KatzProbably the best known memoir that has been written about the experience of the death camps. (Source)

Will StorrWhat Stasiland does really well, is it shows that these aren’t just arguments. That these people believed these views to the roots of their souls. (Source)

Hester VaizeyA collection of stories about people whose lives have been affected by the Stasi. (Source)

Dr. Phil Zimbardo[Talks] about Eichmann as illustrating the banality of evil. (Source)

Lucas MoralesI was introduced to the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt via Ian Shapiro’s Yale Open Courseware course The Moral Foundations of Political Science. This dramatically changed my outlook on the usual career path for graduates from my university that predominantly went into the defence industry. I am now perhaps overly conscious (maybe to a fault) that... (Source)

David BellPolitical philosopher Arendt sees the work of the Nazis as the inevitable result of colonialism and industrialisation. (Source)

Cécile FabreHe knows that his pleasure at a beautiful landscape, at the smell of good food, will forever be coloured by what the landscape looked like in the trenches, by the food that was cooked in the trenches. (Source)

Antony BeevorThis book, A Woman in Berlin, is one of the great diaries of the whole war. (Source)

Keith LoweIt’s by a German housewife in Berlin who was repeatedly raped when the Russians arrive in 1945. It’s heart-rending but, miraculously, not depressing. (Source)

Alison AlvarezWhat I really took with me from the book were the descriptions of how she dealt with the stress of solitary confinement and eventually the Ravensbruck concentration camp. I adapted some of her techniques for keeping her mind occupied to deal with my own problems with anxiety and worry. Also, it’s a book with a surprising amount of joy in it for subject matter that is so dark. (Source)

Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Peter SnowYes, it certainly was the turning point of the war. Whatever we British may claim for the titanic fight on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, the Battle of Stalingrad was the real decider and Beevor’s account of it is simply brilliant. He combines a sense of strategic grasp with the incredibly detailed story of ordinary men’s experiences based on their own accounts. He did a huge amount of research... (Source)

Lydia RufflesThe (Source)

David MarquandThis book is all about the way that Europe has managed – not always totally successfully, but managed nevertheless – to come to terms with its bloody and horrible past. (Source)

Keith LoweWhat (Source)

Antony BeevorI don’t think that any historian should ever accept that a book is definitive. But I don’t see Kershaw’s work on Hitler really ever being surpassed. (Source)

Brandon Stanton[Brandon Stanton recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

Chris MullinIn my opinion what a good diarist needs are an eye for detail, a light touch, and considerable self-discipline. You’ve got to make a record every day and the busier you are – at the top end of politics you do tend to be rather busy – the more difficult it is. As far as politics is concerned, the most successful diaries seem to be those who never made it too far up the greasy pole. Those who did... (Source)

Ruth Ben-GhiatHer most useful (and her most chilling) conclusion for today is that totalitarian tools were not specific to Nazism or Stalinism or any ideology. Arendt’s words should be studied today by those who want to prevent the further spread of authoritarian regimes and the ideologies they are propagating. (Source)

Gunhee ParkA few months back, I read a book called A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II that led me to want to learn more about Nazi Germany and Hitler, so I then picked up The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which led me to wanting to learn more about Winston Churchill. (Source)

Laurie HertzelShe finds that one of her relatives let Nazis park in his garage. So there are all these complicated themes of guilt and survival, and what you do to get along and live your life in a society that is going insane—and then, how does a family come out of that? (Source)

George SaundersPlease read this book. So smart, so timely. (Source)

Tom Holland"There isn’t a page of this magnificent book that does not contain some fascinating detail and the narrative is held together with a novelist’s eye for character and theme." #Dominion https://t.co/FESSNxVDLC (Source)

Maya WileyProf. Tim Snyder, author of “In Tyranny” reminded us in that important little book that we must protect our institutions. #DOJ is one of our most important in gov’t for the rule of law. This is our collective house & #Barr should be evicted. https://t.co/PPxM9IMQUm (Source)

Norman NaimarkFriedländer, a professor of history at UCLA, was born in Prague and his family moved to France in 1940. He himself survived the war in a Catholic monastery, even converting temporarily to Catholicism. But his parents were caught and eventually killed by the Nazis. His experiences surely influence the way he writes about the Holocaust. The Years of Extermination is a book of enormous erudition,... (Source)

Ryan HolidayGoddamn this guy can tell a story. (Source)

Ryan Stephens@Jon_Finkel Shadow Divers may be my favorite narrative non-fiction book, ever. I don't think I've recommended it to one person who didn't love it. (Source)

Tim Montgomerie@pspencerCSJ A great little book (Source)

John CusackGreat book ⬇️ RT @PuddockII: Wow. https://t.co/EF6Iyc0Kmc (Source)

Jonathan BoffWhat this book does is it views the war as a cultural phenomenon, rather than a military phenomenon. Eksteins is a cultural historian who thinks in terms of literature, music, plastic arts, and so on. (Source)

Brent GlassWhat the Civil War was about was mass killing on a scale that we had never ever dreamed of. (Source)

Jonathan GloverPrimo Levi’s books all reflect his experiences in Auschwitz. Perhaps because he was a scientist, he wrote with a precision and definiteness, at the opposite pole from rhetoric. This gives his books immense power, as what he describes could only be diminished by any striving for effect. The Drowned and the Saved is his most reflective book on the Nazi genocide and on his own experiences and what... (Source)

Jeffrey BenekerAgricola is a tribute to his father-in-law and it’s really nice to have this family connection. A lot of ancient literature can oftentimes seem so distant and cold that it’s hard to see the human connection, but it’s strong in this book. In the introduction and especially in the conclusion you can feel the real bond that Tacitus must have felt with this person. (Source)

Elizabeth TaylorDuring these challenging times, tales of resistance in World War II have found a receptive audience. In the case of Sonia Purnell’s biography, Americans are keen to read about our own countryman’s heroism.At the center of Purnell’s biography is socialite Virginia Hall of Baltimore, Maryland who had been shut out of the American diplomatic corps in the 1930s and stuck as a clerk in the State... (Source)

Michael BurleighHe died a couple of years ago. He was the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He was a very grand German journalist who also wrote marvellous history books. It’s beautifully written and very astute about him. Obviously he finds him to be an appalling individual. He spends a lot of time talking about whether or not he’s a ‘great’ historical figure, who made a huge impact on his time. I’m... (Source)

David MarquandI included this because I was hugely influenced both by the book and by actually visiting Verdun, which I did at the beginning of my work on my recent book. The point about Verdun is that it was the most unbelievably destructive battle ever fought on the European continent, west of the old Soviet Union. It had an enormous symbolic significance for me and also for a whole generation of French... (Source)

Steven KatzWhat happened is that there had been prior books about the Holocaust, for example by a Frenchman named Léon Poliakov, and they were important first steps. But the real professionalisation of the discipline, a tremendous change in the recognition of the importance of the Holocaust, came from the publication of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1960-1. (Source)

Ruth Ben-GhiatPaxton set out to look at what fascists do, not what they say. He’s very good at mapping the geography of power, and what I call the ‘authoritarian bargains’ among groups, parties, organs of the state and leaders. (Source)