UC Santa Barbara > History Department > Prof. Marcuse > Courses > Hist 133d > Books for Review Essays
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The Holocaust in German History:
Books for Review Essays

compiled for UCSB Hist 133d

by Professor Harold Marcuse (homepage)
contact: marcuse@history.ucsb.edu
page begun Jan. 21, 2008; last update: 8/23/09
WW I
1920s & 1930s
1940s
Memoirs & Biography
Post-1945

Sample Essays

133d Course Homepage

Important Note (back to top)

  • Although I give links to the amazon pages for most books below, YOU SHOULD NOT RELY ON AMAZON ALONE TO OBTAIN YOUR BOOK. Be sure to check whether our library has it as well, so that you can start reading before your own copy arrives.
  • I DO recommend that you purchase the books (I really hate it when people mark up library books--and there are severe penalties for that), but in the past there have been problems with books students ordered taking more than 2 weeks to arrive. So you should have a back-up plan!

To Add for 2010 (back to top)

World War I (back to top)

  • category
    • Benjamin Ziemann. War Experiences in Rural Germany: 1914-1923. Translated
      by Alex Skinner. The Legacy of the Great War Series. (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007). 320 pp.(H-German review, 3/09)
    • Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany
      (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
      Standard work on the myth of the war enthusiasm.
    • Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
      Hanna's fascinating study analyzes the wartime experiences and correspondence of a French peasant turned artilleryman, Paul Pireaud, who served at Verdun and corresponded regularly with his wife back home over the course of the war.
    • Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and
      Controversies, 1914 to the Present       (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
      2005). {anthology only suited for advanced students]

1920s & 1930s (back to top)

  • Ideology
    • Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (PublicAffairs, 2002). (amazon)
  • Germany in the 1930s
    • Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (Harper Perennial, 2007). (searchable at amazon)
    • Peter Jelavich,Berlin Alexanderplatz. Radio, Film and the Death of
      Weimar Culture      , Berkeley: University of California Press 2006Sehepunkte review
    • Michael H Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004). DD253.5 .K28 2004 (amazon)
    • David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (Norton, 2007). (amazon)
  • Eugenics/Medicine
    • Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 2000). (amazon)
    • Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). (amazon)
    • Horst Biesold, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany (Gallaudet University Press, 2004). (amazon)
    • Benno Muller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933-1945 (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1997). (amazon)

1940s (back to top)

Concentration & Extermination Camps

  • Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: A New History (PublicAffairs, 2005). (amazon)

Resistance & Rescue (Warsaw Ghetto)

  • Emmanuel Ringelblum and Jacob Sloan, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (IBooks, Inc., 2006). (amazon)
  • Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Mariner Books, 1998). (amazon)

Children

  • Laurel Holliday, Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries (Washington Square Press, 1996). (amazon)
  • Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (Yale University Press, 1993). (amazon)

US & the Holocaust

  • Reinhold Billstein et al., Working For The Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor In Germany During The Second World War (Berghahn Books, 2004). (amazon). Note: this is an anthology, but acceptable.
  • Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press, 2006). (amazon)
  • Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (University Press of Kansas, 2003). (amazon)
    note: this is an anthology, thus more difficult, but still acceptable (also as group project-2)

Economics

  • Henry Ashby Turner, General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe's Biggest Carmaker (Yale University Press, 2005). (amazon)
  • Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation (Crown, 2001). (amazon). This was a very controversial book. The author has a website.

World War II

  • Keith Low, Inferno. The Devastation of Hamburg 1943, London: Viking
    2007, Sehepunkte review

Memoirs and Biography (back to top)

  • Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary (Arcade Publishing, 2005). (amazon) There is a film about this: Blind Spot. Also, Downfall is based on it.
  • Angela Lambert, The Lost Life of Eva Braun (St. Martin's Press, 2007). (amazon)
  • Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, The Women Who Knew Hitler: The Private Life of Adolf Hitler (Carroll & Graf, 2004). (amazon)
  • Guido Knopp, Hitler's Women (Sutton Publishing, 2006). (amazon) six leading women
  • Jurgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life (Faber & Faber, 2007). (amazon)
  • Colette Waddell, Through the Eyes of a Survivor (TopCat Press, 2007). (amazon) about Nina Morecki, who settled in Santa Barbara and has worked with Prof. Marcuse, by a former student in this same course
  • Tony Atcherley and Mark Carey, Hitler's Gay Traitor: The Story of Ernst Röhm, Chief of Staff of the SA (Trafford Publishing, 2007). (amazon)
  • Anthony Read, The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). 984 pages (searchable on amazon) appropriate for a group project (3 students)
  • Gerald L Posner, Mengele: The Complete Story (Cooper Square Press, 2000). (amazon)
  • Mark Kurzem, The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood (Viking Adult, 2007). (amazon) Nazi soldiers unknowingly "adopt" a Jewish boy
  • Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University Of Chicago Press, 1966). (amazon)

Post-1945 (back to top)

  • Jan Tomasz Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2006). DS146.P6 G76 2006 (amazon)
  • Genocide in Rwanda. There are a number of books that would be acceptable. I would expect that you be able to compare the causes of that genocide with the causes of the Holocaust as we investigate them in this course.
  • Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton University Press, 2007). (amazon)
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