/lit/ - Literature

>>15770035
I haven't read that, but the series by Rich Evans is pretty good. However, it is three full books. I know some other books related to the NSDAP if you're interested in those.

>>15770095
Rich Evans wrote a wwii history book? What the fuck?

>>15770099
Nah not that Rich Evans lmao. Richard J. Evans. We also know that Jay is the secret racist anyway.

>>15770117
Hahaha, I see

I would also recommend Evans. His trilogy is well written and covers just about everything. Not strictly about Nazis but Ullrich and Kershaw have written exhaustive biographies about Hitler that are different enough that you can feel justified in reading both (if you can stomach that many pages of the man). There are a few historians that write regularly about Nazis, those three are probably the most prominent.

If all this Nazi era Germany makes you curious about what exactly happened before, Christopher Clark's book on Prussia is fantastic.

>>15770793
Iron Kingdom is good. For more NSDAP history Peter Longerich's Goebbels biography as is Daniel Siemens's Stormtrooper.

>>15770035
I think 'The Hitler of History' by John Lukacs is a good intro to WWII historiography since it goes over the major historical interpretations and disagreements of the study of the period while also functioning as a biography and history in its own right. I can't remember but I think it mentions some drawbacks/errors of Shirer's book.

>>15770035
Shrier’s book is worthless as a historical account and only oft cited nowadays as a primary source. Richard Evans Third Reich Trilogy is one of the best histories of the third Reich at a general level. If you want to get more detailed you’ll need to look into books on specific aspects of Nazi Germany.

>>15770035
Interested but not really comfortable about reading a book with giant swastika in public

>>15770838
Cuck

>>15770836
I disagree. Rise and Fall is solid until Barbarossa, when Shirer starts to parrot Keitel.

>>15770838
The book is generally anti-German if that makes you feel better.

>>15770872
Richard Evans is the one who called it worthless, not me. It's not that he gets all the facts wrong, it's that his narrative is out of date by many decades (like claiming the rise of the Nazis was more or less inevitable due to a cultural heritage of antisemitism going back to Luther). I can post what Evans said if you want.

>>15770884
>like claiming the rise of the Nazis was more or less inevitable
Doesn't Evans make the same argument essentially? He basically says that even if Hitler had died, that there would've been some sort of antisemitic dictatorship IIRC.

>>15770884
I'm posting it anyway
>Shirer’s book has probably sold millions of copies in the four decades or more since its appearance. It has never gone out of print and remains the first port of call for many people who want a readable general history of Nazi Germany. There are good reasons for the book’s success. Shirer was an American journalist who reported from Nazi Germany until the United States entered the war in December, 1941, and he had a journalist’s eye for the telling detail and the illuminating incident. His book is full of human interest, with many arresting quotations from the actors in the drama, and it is written with all the flair and style of a seasoned reporter’s dispatches from the front. Yet it was universally panned by professional historians. The emigré German scholar Klaus Epstein spoke for many when he pointed out that Shirer’s book presented an ‘unbelievably crude’ account of German history, making it all seem to lead up inevitably to the Nazi seizure of power. It had ’glaring gaps’ in its coverage. It concentrated far too much on high politics, foreign policy and military events, and even in 1960 it was ‘in no way abreast of current scholarship dealing with the Nazi period’. Getting on for half a century later, this comment is even more justified than it was in Epstein’s day. For all its virtues, therefore, Shirer’s book cannot really deliver a history of Nazi Germany that meets the demands of the early twenty-first-century reader.

>>15770904
Shrier is putting forward a version of the Sonderweg thesis which Evans rejects.

>>15770907
Thank you. This just tells me that Shirer has bias and gaps. Everything else on the subject seems to suffer likewise. Regardless, like I said earlier, it becomes worthless as of Barbarossa for anyone that already knows Keitel's story.

>>15770950
It's more that even at the time Shrier didn't engage with current scholarship and try and integrate his work into a larger body of academic work. Like Evans said this is doubly true now. You could read him because he's of value as a primary witness but he's not a good popular history for a modern reader.

>>15770035
The only person worth reading about ww2 and Hitler's Germany is David Irving.

>>15770973
>The only person worth reading about ww2 and Hitler's Germany is David Irving.

>>15770035
It's a dated early narrative history/travel blog from a guy that was in Berlin briefly in the lead up to the war and of no interest beside, and of dubious value for the neophyte WWII history reader.

Just pick up Beevor's trilogy.

>>15770099
>Rich Evans wrote a wwii history book? What the fuck?
OHH MAAII GAAAAHHD

>dude Hitler set the Reichstag on fire because, uh, he's the bad man so of course he did it!
>c-cui bono am i right??

>>15770035
industrial revolution made half of population into migrants without education and work permit. revolutions, wars and "genocides" were neets killing each other. that is all you are missing in regular stupid history books. vagina is a border through which legal migrants appear.

>>15770838
pixels make you angry, schizo? lol

>>15770035
That cover design is a bit much.

>>15771012
A bit much of what?

>>15770973
This.

He was considered the world's greatest WW2 historian untill he disagreed on the number of sacred Jews.
Was talking to surviving relatives, seeking out memoirs etc.

>>15770976
When Hobsbawm does the same whitewashing for the Soviet Union you have no problem with it. Many people would even say that Hobsbawm is the greatest historian of the 20th century, while Irving had an entire smear movie made about him and was jailed for months. Why is that? I think both Irving and Hobsbawm are hack historians but at least pretend to be fair.

>>15770035
Ernst Nolte's "The Three Faces of Fascism" is probably the closest thing to an actual assessment among academic historians that is willing to discuss fascism on its own terms.

>>15771544
I prefer the work of Zeev Sternhell and A. James Gregory

>>15770884
>like claiming the rise of the Nazis was more or less inevitable due to a cultural heritage
It was?

>>15771528
hate Hobsbawm's politics but as far as I know unlike Irving he hasn't been shown to intentionally misinterpret documents to push an agenda

>>15770877
>anti-German
You mean anti-nazi? Not a controversial position.

>>15771517
>He was considered the world's greatest WW2 historian
He wasn't, he's an autodidact without so much as a bachelor in history who became famous thanks to his controversial opinions. If anything he's a competent amateur beset by bias even bigger than the average historian's.
If he had applied the same methods he did but without coming to controversial conclusion almost nobody would know his name, least of all historians.

>>15772042
>You mean anti-nazi
No

>>15772086
>a bachelor in history
Is that actually worthwhile in any way? Doesn't seem like it

>>15772117
A bachelor of history? It is not, but the absence of something worthless is not in itself a sign of worth. However a bachelor is a gateway to better credentials, and Irving doesn't even have that. No way he could be considered a major historian by an academic community that is vastly more professional than he is. Especially since most his work is made of pop books built on questionable use of documents. Only boomer housewives can believe Irving is a world-class historian.

Again, his main merit is popularizing controversial thesis with some measure of competence, and he benefited from writing in an area of history that was still rather new (at the time he started). He's not entirely unskilled, far from that, but to call him the most respected historian of WWII when doesn't even qualify as an average professional is laughable.

>>15770035
This book is as biased as it can be and it pushes all sorts of wartime propaganda like Hitler chewing on carpets and how Mein Kampf was going to replace the Bible. Skip it

>>15772042
Lmao Shirer literally calls Nazism an inevitability of the German racial spirit. So yes if Shirer is anti-Nazi he is anti-German by his own concession.
Try reading a book nigger