Books like Confronting the Nazi Past by Michael Burleigh

Places the Holocaust in its historical, political, social, cultural, and military contexts, focusing on the two goals that drove the Nazis in their persecution of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and other groups they deemed as undesirables.

In the Nazi state, women had received the opportunity to create the largest women's organization in history, with the blessings of the blatantly male-chauvinist Nazi Party. Here was the nineteenth-century feminists' vision of the future in nightmare form. In this book I would bring to light the contribution to evil made by Scholtz-Klink and other women leaders, find out what they had done, what they believed they were doing, and why. I would ask how "normal" people (women, in this case) brought Nazi beliefs home in everyday thought and action. Above all, I would record the history of average people without normalizing life in Nazi society. Women's history during the Third Reich lacks the extravagant insanity of Hitler's megalomania; often it is ordinary. But there, at the grassroots of daily life, in a social world populated by women, we begin to discover how war and genocide happened by asking who made it happen. - Preface.

The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders. Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Her careful reading of the voluminous Nazi writings on race traces the transformation of longtime Nazis' vulgar antisemitism into a racial ideology that seemed credible to the vast majority of ordinary Germans who never joined the Nazi Party. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk. - Jacket flap.

Henry Friedlander details how the Nazi "euthanasia" program against handicapped and disabled people became the prototype for the systematic extermination of Jews and Roma during the Holocaust.

xx, 636 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm1640L Lexile

The writings are arranged in three sections—Hitler and the Final Solution, popular opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Final Solution in historiography—and Kershaw provides an introduction and a closing section on the uniqueness of Nazism.

Saul Friedländer’s definitive study of the Holocaust from 1939 to 1945, examining German extermination policies, the role of local authorities, and the experiences of Jews, based on extensive documents and personal testimony.

Jay Gonen argues that Adolf Hitler was not an isolated aberration but a mirror of early‑20th‑century German psyche, using psychohistorical analysis to show how Nazi ideology reflected and exploited widespread cultural anxieties about identity, expansion, and anti‑Jewish sentiment.

Hitler's Germany provides a comprehensive narrative history of Nazi Germany and sets it in the wider context of nineteenth- and twentieth- century German history. Stackelberg analyses how it was possible that a national culture of such creativity and achievement could generate such barbarism and destructiveness. The book includes discussion on:* the relationship of Nazism to conservatism, socialism, liberalism, fascism and communism* the weakness of the Weimar democracy* the causes and foundations of the emergence and triumph of Nazism* the consolidation of Nazi power across a diverse society and in every day life in Hitler's Germany* the sporadic revival of the radical right up to the present* the afterlife of Nazism in German historical memory* the Holocaust.

Alon Confino explores the roots of Nazi anti‑Jewish ideology, showing how the German conception of a "world without Jews" directed persecution and the Holocaust, linking state policy to cultural narratives and the 1938 burning of Hebrew books.