Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler
Hitler’s blueprint for the 1,000-year Reich that lasted, oh, how many years? At its peak in popularity, outsold the Bible in Germany.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Paperback: 694 pages
Parallax
Auschwitz was a world unlike any other because it was created and governed according to the principles of absolute evil. Its only function was death. The first question, then, is whether we see Auschwitz as the epitome of life itself, an incarnation of the darkest principles of Machiavelli and Hobbes, or whether we see it as a mirror image of the true life, a Satanic perversion of some divine plan that we have not yet discovered. From that central enigma, flow all the lesser contradictions that still bedevil anyone who seeks to understand the mystery of Auschwitz. Did it represent the ultimate evil of the German nation, and was that the evil of German rationality or of German irrationality? Or did it represent, conversely, the apotheosis of Jewish suffering? And was that suffering simply the result of centuries of anti-Semitism, or was it part of the fulfillment of the prophecy that the tormented Jews would someday return to Palestine, return, as Ezekiel had written, to “the land that is restored from the ravages of the sword, where people are gathered out of many nations upon the mountains of Israel”?
It can be argued that Auschwitz proves there is no God, neither for the Jews nor for the Catholics, neither for atheists nor for Jehovah’s Witnesses, who all went equally helpless to their death. “If all this was possible,” wrote one Hungarian survivor, Eugene Heimler, “if men could be herded like beasts toward annihilation, then all that I had believed in before must have been a lie. There was not, there could not be, a God, for he could not condone such godlessness.” But such declarations have been made at every moment of extreme crisis by those who see God only in success and happiness. Since all efforts to prove or explain God’s purpose demonstrate only the futile diligence of worker ants attempting to prove the existence of Mozart, Auschwitz can just as well prove a merciful God, an indifferent God, or, perhaps best, an unknowable God.
From The Kingdom of Auschwitz by Otto Friedrich
Reviews
The Men With the Pink Triangle
Heinz Heger
Kissing or embracing another man, gossip spread by neighbors or receiving a letter from a gay friend were grounds for arrest under Paragraph 175, a strengthened German sodomy law pushed through in 1935, endorsed by the SS and the Gestapo. Tagged as “degenerates” and “undesirables,” lesbians and “filthy queers” were systematically hunted down, brutalized and exterminated along with the rest of Hitler’s Aryan phobias: the Jews, Gypsies, the mentally ill. The story of a gay Austrian man who endured the death camps, forced to wear a pink triangle to identify his crime against the state. GR
Publisher: Alyson
Paperback: 120 pages
Illustrated
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
Alfred Rosenberg
“Represents the most ambitious attempt to present a historical, racial philosophy of National Socialism. While not the Nazi Summa Theologica it has sometimes been mischaracterized as, only Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf exceeded The Myth of the Twentieth Century in authority—and in commercial success—as a statement of the values and aims of the National Socialist movement during the Third Reich… an intellectual and spiritual call to arms in defense of the Aryan, or white, race, and in particular of the Nordic type, which has epitomized that race since the dawn of history.”
Publisher: Noontide
Hardback: 470 pages
Nuremberg: The Last Battle
David Irving
“Using the unpublished diaries and papers of the principal actors—the judges, lawyers and the war criminals themselves—David Irving has pieced together the remarkable history of how the Trial of the Century came about.”
Publisher: Noontide
Hardback: 377 pages
Illustrated
Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
Christopher R. Browning
This is a genuinely disturbing book, written by one of the leading Holocaust historians of our time. By narrowing his focus to examining the activities of one Nazi police battalion, the author provides a chilling portrait of men whose humanity is torn from their very souls. This book would seem to have served as the catalyst for Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. JB
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Paperback: 231 pages
Illustrated
The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution
Christopher R. Browning
“Studies three aspects of the events leading up to the Final Solution in Nazi Germany. First, Nazis’ solutions to their self-imposed ‘Jewish problem,’ before resorting to mass murder, are examined, specifically ghettoization and early resettlement plans to expel Jews to Eastern Poland or the island of Madagascar. Second, the responsibility of shaping Nazi Jewish policy is shown to extend to the lower and middle echelon of government, through accommodation and conformity of a wide variety of perpetrators, including bureaucrats, doctors and policemen. Finally the role of Adolf Hitler in the decision making process is examined, with a historiographical analysis of other accounts of his role. Browning argues that while Hitler did not operate according to a premeditated plan or blueprint, he did make the key decisions.”
Publisher: Cambridge University
Paperback: 207 pages
The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler
Robert G.L. Waite
A psychoanalytical study focusing on the Fuehrer as personality: his transformation from disillusioned artist to semi-divinity; his childlike traits; his Oedipal conflicts; his obsessions with time, cleanliness and wolves; his tastes in visual art and literature; his fears of women and sexual interests; his love affairs and much more, with a very good analysis of how his private neuroses translated into public policy. Especially interesting is the author’s exposition on Hitler’s personality as the literal foundation of National Socialism: “He was not the interpreter of an ideology; he was the idea made incarnate. He was Nazism.” BS
Publisher: Da Capo
Paperback: 482 pages
Illustrated
Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust
Robert Melson
“Jews in Imperial Germany and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had survived as ethnic and religious minorities until they suffered mass destruction when the two old regimes were engulfed by revolution and war. Focusing on these episodes as well as mass killings in the Soviet Union and Cambodia, Melson creates a framework for understanding the link between genocide and revolution.”
Publisher: University of Chicago
Paperback: 363 pages
Simon Wiesenthal: Bogus “Nazi Hunter”
Mark Weber
“Wiesenthal’s reputation as the world’s foremost ‘Nazi hunter’ is completely undeserved. His greatest achievement in more than 30 years of searching for ‘Nazi criminals’ was his alleged role in locating and capturing Adolf Eichmann… but Isser Harel, the Israeli official who headed the team that captured Eichmann, has declared unequivocally that Wiesenthal had ‘absolutely nothing’ to do with the capture. ‘All the information supplied by Wiesenthal before and in anticipation of the operation was utterly worthless, and sometimes even misleading and of a negative value,’ Harel says.” SC
Publisher: Noontide
Pamphlet: 2 pages
The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century
Christopher Simpson
“Dulles told the SS envoy that ‘due to the inflamed state of public opinion in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the U.S. Government would not accept Hitler as a postwar chief of state. But it might be willing to negotiate with a National Socialist Germany led by another powerful Nazi, such as SS Chief Heinrich Himmler.’” In a second meeting, Dulles advised Hohenlohe that the SS should “act more skillfully on the Jewish question” to avoid “causing a big stir.” Obviously, there would be no war-crimes trials for Nazis with Himmler as head of state. And so it goes, from deception to deception, through all those garish little skeletons carefully hidden away in the closet by the government for which thousands of American boys sacrificed their lives in order to make the world “safe for politicians.” Ultimately, the author of The Splendid Blond Beast blames intrigue between international representatives as the major cause of genocide in our century. The book is well-written and meticulously documented, and holds a surprise or two even for those who think they have read it all. JB
Publisher: Common Courage
Paperback: 400 pages