Peter Longerich

Chronicles the life of the Nazi leader, including his childhood and youth, his transformation of the SS from a small bodyguard unit into a powerful organization within the Nazi Party, and how his political maneuvering and rise in power set the tone for the party's goals.

A Life

Heinrich Himmler

The renowned historian and author of The Unwritten Order presents a comprehensive portrait of Hitler's Minister of Propaganda to discuss his narcissist personality issues, descent into anti-Semitism and pivotal role in advancing Nazi agendas. 20,000 first printing. Illustrations.

A Biography

Goebbels

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE TELEGRAPH • From renowned German Holocaust historian Peter Longerich comes the definitive one-volume biography of Adolf Hitler’s malevolent minister of propaganda. In life, and in the grisly manner of his death, Joseph Goebbels was one of Adolf Hitler’s most loyal acolytes. By the end, no one in the Berlin bunker was closer to the Führer than his devoted Reich minister for public enlightenment and propaganda. But how did this clubfooted son of a factory worker rise from obscurity to become Hitler’s most trusted lieutenant and personally anointed successor? In this ground-breaking biography, Peter Longerich sifts through the historical record—and thirty thousand pages of Goebbels’s own diary entries—to provide the answer to that question. Longerich, the first historian to make use of the Goebbels diaries in a biographical work, engages and challenges the self-serving portrait the propaganda chief left behind. Spanning thirty years, the diaries paint a chilling picture of a man driven by a narcissistic desire for recognition who found the personal affirmation he craved within the virulently racist National Socialist movement. Delving into the mind of his subject, Longerich reveals how Goebbels’s lifelong search for a charismatic father figure inexorably led him to Hitler, to whom he ascribed almost godlike powers. This comprehensive biography documents Goebbels’s ascent through the ranks of the Nazi Party, where he became a member of the Führer’s inner circle and launched a brutal campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda. Though endowed with near-dictatorial control of the media—film, radio, press, and the fine arts—Longerich’s Goebbels is a man dogged by insecurities and beset by bureaucratic infighting. He feuds with his bitter rivals Hermann Göring and Alfred Rosenberg, unsuccessfully advocates for a more radical line of “total war,” and is thwarted in his attempt to pursue a separate peace with the Allies during the waning days of World War II. This book also reveals, as never before, Goebbels’s twisted personal life—his mawkish sentimentality, manipulative nature, and voracious sexual appetite. A harrowing look at the life of one of history’s greatest monsters, Goebbels delivers fresh insight into how the Nazi message of hate was conceived, nurtured, and disseminated. This complete portrait of the man behind that message is sure to become a standard for historians and students of the Holocaust for decades to come. Praise for Goebbels “Peter Longerich . . . has delved into rarely accessed material from his subject’s diaries, which span thirty years, to paint a remarkable portrait of the man who became one of Hitler’s most trusted lieutenants.”—The Daily Telegraph Praise for Heinrich Himmler “There have been several studies of this enigmatic man, but Peter Longerich’s massive biography, grounded in exhaustive study of the primary sources, is now the standard work and must stand alongside Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, Ulrich Herbert’s Best and Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich as one of the landmark Nazi biographies. As the author of a celebrated study of the Holocaust, Longerich is better able than his predecessors to situate Himmler within the vast machinery of genocide. And he brings to his task a gift for capturing those mannerisms that are the intimate markers of personality.”—London Review of Books “[An] excellent and comprehensive biography.”—The New York Review of Books

Uma Biografia

Joseph Goebbels

Argues that anti-Semitism was not a consequence of Nazi political mobilization but rather, from 1933 onwards, a central principle of the Nazi movement's attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule.

The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

Holocaust

The fact that the Holocaust was the result of conscious decisions made by the highest levels of the Third Reich has been under-emphasized. Although it would be a mistake to put the murder of the Jews down to Hitler s will alone, it is time to make clear that Hitler was the driving force behind radicalization of the National Socialist policy of extermination. Without Hitler there would be no Holocaust. This book offers documentary proof of Hitler s central role in the murder of European Jews. Various documents and fragments of documents have been pieced together and the codified language of the dictator has been deciphered."

Hitler's Role in the Final Solution

The Unwritten Order

The story of how Adolf Hitler created his 'Führer dictatorship' -- consistently and ruthlessly destroying everything that stood in his way, and with with terrifying and almost limitless power over the German people.

Hitler

From the authoritative biographer of Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, a culminating work on the commanding figure of the Third Reich

The first-ever comprehensive biography of Heinrich Himmler, SS-Reichsführer, Nazi Interior Minister, and Chief of Police, whose name has become a byword for the terror, persecution, and destruction that characterized the Third Reich.

The Holocaust differs from other genocides in recent history for one main reason: there is no other example in which a minority was annihilated systematically and as completely as possible on the orders of a head of state and through the apparatus of government. To reconstruct Hitler's central role in the Final Solution represents a particular challenge. Hitler treated the murder of the Jews as a matter of the utmost secrecy and was careful wherever possible not to leave behind any written orders. Wherever his instructions on this matter are recorded he has used codified language. He kept away from the implementation of the orders and feigned ignorance, even to his closest friends and colleagues. Under these conditions, the surviving source material can only be described as fragmentary. The Unwritten Order aims to offer documentary proof of Hitler's central role in the murder of the European Jews. In order to achieve this aim, various documents and fragments of documents have been pieced together and the codified language of the dictator deciphered.

The complete story of the Wannsee Conference, the meeting that paved the way for the Holocaust. On 20 January 1942, fifteen men arrived for a meeting in a luxurious villa on the shores of the Wannsee in the far-western outskirts of Berlin. They came at the invitation of Reinhard Heydrich and were almost all high-ranking Nazi Party, government, and SS officials. The exquisite position by the lake, the imposing driveway up to the villa, culminating in a generously sized roundabout in front of the house, the expansive, carefully landscaped park, the generous suite of rooms that opened on to the park and the lake, the three-level terrace that stretched the entire garden side of the house, and the winter garden with its marble fountain, all give today's visitor to the villa a good idea of its owner's aspiration to build a sophisticated, almost palatial structure as a testament to his cultivation and worldly success. But the beauty of the situation stood in stark contrast to the purpose of the meeting to which the fifteen had come in January 1942: the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question'. According to the surviving records of the meeting, items on the agenda included the precise definition of exactly which group of people was to be affected, followed by a discussion of how upwards of eleven million people were to be deported and subjected to the toughest form of forced labour, and following on from this a discussion of how the survivors of this forced labour as well as those not capable of it were ultimately to be killed. The next item on the agenda was breakfast.

The Road to the Final Solution

Wannsee

Tyrant, psychopath, and implementer of a ruthless programme of racial extermination, Adolf Hitler was also the charismatic Führer of millions of dedicated followers. In this major new biography, internationally acclaimed German historian Peter Longerich brings Hitler back to centre-stage in the history of Nazism, revealing a far more active and interventionist dictator than we are familiar with from recent accounts, with a flexibility of approach that often surprises. Whether it was foreign policy, war-making, terror, mass murder, cultural and religious affairs, or even mundane everyday matters, Longerich reveals how decisive a force Hitler was in the formulation of policy, sometimes right down to the smallest details, in a way which until now has not been fully appreciated. Consistently and ruthlessly destroying both the people and the power structures that stood in his way, Longerich shows how over time Hitler succeeded in forging his 'Führer dictatorship' - with terrifying and almost limitless power over the German people.

Lesley Sharpe

Jeremy Noakes

Winfried Nerdinger

Hans Günter Hockerts

Marita Krauss

Mirjana Grdanjski

Markus Eisen

Catalogue of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism

Munich and National Socialism

A comprehensive history of the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews, paying detailed attention to an unrivalled range sources. Focusing clearly on the perpetrators and exploring closely the process of decision making, Longerich argues that anti-Semitism was not a mere by-product of the Nazis' political mobilization or an attempt to deflect the attention of the masses, but that anti-Jewish policy was a central tenet of the Nazi movement's attempts to implement, disseminate, and secure National Socialist rule - and one which crucially shaped Nazi policy decisions, from their earliest days in power through to the invasion of the Soviet Union and the Final Solution. As Longerich shows, the 'disappearance' of Jews was designed as a first step towards a racially homogeneous society - first within the 'Reich', later in the whole of a German-dominated Europe.

Peter Longerich

Books

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