Bibliography
for Nazi Germany.

General works

The whole twelve years

• Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich; The Third Reich in Power; The Third Reich at War. London: Allen Lane, 2003–2008. The standard modern narrative in three volumes; the obvious starting point for any general reader.
• Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889–1936, Hubris and Hitler: 1936–1945, Nemesis. London: Allen Lane, 1998–2000. The definitive biography, and in practice a history of the regime through one man.
• Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. London: Macmillan, 2000.
• Bracher, Karl Dietrich. The German Dictatorship. Trans. Jean Steinberg. New York: Praeger, 1970. Older, German, and still the clearest analysis of how the seizure of power actually worked.
• Broszat, Martin. The Hitler State. Trans. John W. Hiden. London: Longman, 1981.

Chapters I–III

The Republic, the seizure of power, the consolidation

• Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Turner, Henry Ashby. Hitler's Thirty Days to Power: January 1933. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1996. A day-by-day account of the negotiations that produced the appointment. Very short, very good.
• Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Hett, Benjamin Carter. Burning the Reichstag. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. On the fire and the eighty years of argument about who set it.
• Caplan, Jane. Government without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Chapters IV–VI

Society, economy and the road to war

• Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Allen Lane, 2006. The book that demolished the economic-miracle account. Essential.
• Aly, Götz. Hitler's Beneficiaries. Trans. Jefferson Chase. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.
• Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Peukert, Detlev. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life. Trans. Richard Deveson. London: Batsford, 1987.
• Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003.
• Overy, Richard. The Origins of the Second World War. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 2016.

Chapters VII–IX

The war, the occupation and the Holocaust

• Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. 2 vols. New York: HarperCollins, 1997–2007. The standard account, and the one that keeps the victims' voices in the narrative.
• Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
• Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. The most disturbing book on this list, and the most important.
• Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. The foundational study of the administrative machinery. Three volumes.
• Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
• Wette, Wolfram. The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. Trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. On the construction and demolition of the clean-Wehrmacht story.
• Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe. London: Allen Lane, 2008.
• Longerich, Peter. Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Chapter X

Defeat, the trials and the afterlife

• Beevor, Antony. Berlin: The Downfall 1945. London: Viking, 2002.
• Taylor, Telford. The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. New York: Knopf, 1992. By one of the prosecutors, and still the best account of the legal argument.
• Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Heinemann, 2005. The first chapters are the best short account of what was left in 1945.
• Frei, Norbert. Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past. Trans. Joel Golb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
• Neiman, Susan. Learning from the Germans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. On the memorial culture this volume's travel guide describes.

Documents and contemporary accounts

In their own words, and their victims'

• Noakes, Jeremy, and Geoffrey Pridham, eds. Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader. 4 vols. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1983–1998. The standard English-language document collection.
• Klemperer, Victor. I Shall Bear Witness and To the Bitter End. Trans. Martin Chalmers. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998–1999. The diaries of a Jewish professor in Dresden who survived. The single best contemporary source in this list.
• Klemperer, Victor. LTI: The Language of the Third Reich. Trans. Martin Brady. London: Athlone Press, 2000.
• Haffner, Sebastian. Defying Hitler: A Memoir. Trans. Oliver Pretzel. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002. Written in 1939 and unpublished until 2000. On what 1933 felt like from inside.
• Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man and The Truce. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Bodley Head, 1965.
• Shirer, William L. Berlin Diary. New York: Knopf, 1941. A correspondent's contemporary record; unreliable in places, invaluable in others.
• Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. 42 vols. Nuremberg, 1947–1949. The complete proceedings, freely available online through the Avalon Project.