If This is a Man was the first book published by renowned Italian author and chemist Primo Levi after his liberation from the Auschwitz concentration camp. Finished in early 1947, the manuscript was eventually followed by two sequels, ‘The Truce’ (describing Levi’s journey back to his hometown Turin after the …
Book reviews
The Fear and the Freedom (Keith Lowe) – Book review
Book Review by Michael from @ww2bookreviews (instagram) Does the Second World War still matter today? ‘The Fear and the Freedom – Why the Second World War Still Matters’ by Keith Lowe answers this question with a resounding ‘yes’. At a time when the interest in in the Second World War …
Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (Timothy W. Ryback) – Book Review
Book Review by Michael from @ww2bookreviews (instagram) The German poet, Heinrich Heine, once observed that “where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also”. His words turned out to be prophetic, as his own books were burnt by the Nazis during the 1930s. Adolf Hitler, the German dictator who …
By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz (Max Eisen) – Book review
At 86 years old, after decades of speaking and educating on the topic, Max Eisen, an Auschwitz survivor, finally published his memoirs in 2016. Mr. Eisen, a Hungarian Jew from Czechoslovakia, was 15 years old when he reached the selection ramp at Auschwitz in 1944. This is his story. The …
The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels) – Book Review
Originally a 40 something page pamphlet commissioned by the Communist League in 1848, The Communist Manifesto has become one of the most important political documents of modern history. In the length of a brochure, this propaganda piece pretty much encapsulates the entire Communist ideology (remarkable how such a simplistic doctrine …
The Work I Did: A Memoir of the Secretary to Goebbels (Brunhilde Pomsel) – Book Review
The Work I Did: A Memoir of the Secretary to Goebbels is a book published by Thore D. Hansen in 2018, based on memoirs shared by Brunhilde Pomsel for the 2016 documentary, Ein Deutsches Leben. Brunhilde Pomsel was a secretary and stenographer in the Reich Minister of Propaganda during World …
Hitler’s Last Witness: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Bodyguard (Rochus Misch) – Book Review
As the title of the book suggests, Rochus Misch was Hitler’s bodyguard between 1940 and 1945, being one of the last people to leave the Fuhrerbunker – thus witnessing Hitler’s last days in their entirety. Misch published this book in 2008 due to the increasing interest in his persona, and …
Children of Nazis (Tania Crasnianski) – Book Review
Children of Nazis: The Sons and Daughters of Himmler, Göring, Höss, Mengele, and Others — Living with a Father’s Monstrous Legacy is a 2018 book by French Author Tania Crasnianski, which goes deep into the lives of children of high ranking Nazi officials. What was their relationship with their fathers …
Leningrad: A History From Beginning to End (Hourly History) – Book Review
Hourly History is an e-book publisher focusing on short, concise stories from history which you can read in roughly an hour. Leningrad: A History From Beginning to End makes to exception. For a 50 page manuscript, this book does a great job of not only summarizing the Siege of Leningrad, …
Eastern Inferno: The Journals of a German Panzerjäger on the Eastern Front, 1941–43 (Hans Roth) – Book Review
Hans Roth, a member of the Sixths Army anti-tank panzerjager battalion, 299th Infantry Division, offers a breathtaking account of the War on the Eastern front through the journals he kept from the start of Operation Barbarossa until his likely demise on the front in the Summer of 1943. Roths’s journals …