Nazi Party

Nazis have their own pop-history, cultural references and a devoted Hollywood industry. Partly because of that, and party because of sustained right-wing propaganda (i.e. Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism), the history of Nazi Germany's rise and fall is confused. Americans do not really understand its ideology, its relationship to big business, the church, organized resistance, and the socialist movement. I'm giving you the best of political science in English (voting, business-government relations, ideology, bureaucracy, and resistance) because I don't know German. Also including must-read classics of social and narrative history.

Top picks:

• Tooze, Adam. 2008. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Penguin.

• Turner, Henry Ashby. 1985. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. Oxford University Press.

• Evans, Richard J. 2005. 1 The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin.  [First in trilogy: best narrative history]

• O’Loughlin, John, Colin Flint, and Luc Anselin. 1994. “The Geography of the Nazi Vote: Context, Confession, and Class in the Reichstag Election of 1930.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84(3): 351–80.

• Jr, Henry Ashby Turner. 1997. Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933. Basic Books.

General History

• Noakes, Jeremy, and Geoffrey Pridham. 1990. Nazism, 1919-1945: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts. Schocken Books. [part of trilogy]

• Evans, Richard J. 2015. Rethinking German History (Routledge Revivals): Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich. Routledge.

• Bullock, Alan. 1962. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Penguin Books.

Nazis and Voting

• Childers, Thomas. 1983. The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933. Univ of North Carolina Press.

• O’Loughlin, John, Colin Flint, and Luc Anselin. 1994. “The Geography of the Nazi Vote: Context, Confession, and Class in the Reichstag Election of 1930.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84(3): 351–80.

• Frey, Bruno S., and Hannelore Weck. 1983. “A Statistical Study of the Effect of the Great Depression on Elections: The Weimar Republic, 1930–1933.” Political Behavior 5: 403–20.

• Hamilton, Richard F. 2014. Who Voted for Hitler? Princeton University Press.

• Fritz, Stephen G. 1987. “The NSDAP as Volkspartei? A Look at the Social Basis of the Nazi Voter.” The History Teacher 20(3): 379–99.

• Brown, Courtney. 1982. “The Nazi Vote: A National Ecological Study.” American Political Science Review 76(2): 285–302.

• Fischer, Conan. 1991. “Workers, the Middle Classes, and the Rise of National Socialism.” German History 9(3): 357. [also check out 1996 book-length treatment].

Nazi Political Economy

• Turner, Henry Ashby. 1985. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. Oxford University Press.

• Barkai, Avraham. 1990. Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy. Yale University Press.

• Tooze, Adam. 2008. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Penguin.

  • Gordon, Robert J. 2009. “The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. By Adam Tooze. London and New York: Allen Lane for Penguin, 2006. Pp. Xvii, 800. $30.” The Journal of Economic History 69(1): 312–16.

  • Roth, Karl Heinz. 2014. “Wages of Destruction?: A Reappraisal.” Historical Materialism 22(3–4): 298–311.

• Abelshauser, Werner. 1998. “Germany: Guns, Butter, and Economic Miracles.” The economics of World War II: Six great powers in international comparison: 122–76.

• Charnysh, Volha, and Evgeny Finkel. 2017. “The Death Camp Eldorado: Political and Economic Effects of Mass Violence.” American Political Science Review 111(4): 801–18. 

• Bel, Germà. 2010. “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany.” The Economic History Review 63(1): 34–55. 

• Buchheim, Christoph, and Jonas Scherner. 2006. “The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry.” The Journal of Economic History 66(2): 390–416.

• Dell, Fabien. 2005. “Top Incomes in Germany and Switzerland over the Twentieth Century.” Journal of the european economic association 3(2–3): 412–21.

• Braun, Hans-Joachim. 2012. The German Economy in the Twentieth Century: The German Reich and the Federal Republic. Routledge.

• Overy, R. J. 1994. War and Economy in the Third Reich. Oxford University Press.

• Charnysh, Volha. 2024. Uprooted: How Post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe. Cambridge University Press. [More about political economic legacies of violence]

Nazi Bureaucracy & Military

• Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin. [This is like the classic one that everyone knows]. 

• Noakes, Jeremy. 1990. Nazism, 1919-1945: The Nazi Party, State, and Society, 1919-1939. Schocken Books.

• Bartov, Omer. 1992. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. Oxford University Press.

• Forester, J. 1995. “The Relationship between the German Armed-Forces and the Nazis in the Decisive Year of 1933.” German Studies Review 18(3): 471–80.

• Jr, Franklin G. Mixon. 2019. A Terrible Efficiency: Entrepreneurial Bureaucrats and the Nazi Holocaust. Springer Nature.

• Breton, Albert, and Ronald Wintrobe. 1986. “The Bureaucracy of Murder Revisited.” Journal of Political Economy 94(5): 905–26. 

• Feldman, Gerald D., and Wolfgang Seibel. 2005. Networks of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucracy, Business, and the Organization of the Holocaust. Berghahn Books.

Resistance

• Scholl, Inge. 2012. The White Rose: Munich 1942-1943. Wesleyan University Press.

• Schumann, Dirk. 2012. Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War. Berghahn Books.

• Braun, Robert. 2016. “Religious Minorities and Resistance to Genocide: The Collective Rescue of Jews in the Netherlands during the Holocaust.” American Political Science Review 110(1): 127–47.

• Stern, Fritz, and Elisabeth Sifton. 2013. No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State. New York Review of Books.

• Fischer, C. 1991. The German Communists and the Rise of Nazism. Springer.

• Ward, James J. 1981. “‘Smash the Fascists…’ German Communist Efforts to Counter the Nazis, 1930–31.” Central European History 14(1): 30–62.

Nazi Ideology and Propaganda

• Holborn, Hajo. 1964. “Origins and Political Character of Nazi Ideology.” Political Science Quarterly 79(4): 542–54. 

• Berman, Sheri. 1998. The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe. Harvard University Press.

• Herf, Jeffrey. 2008. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. Harvard University Press.

• Noakes, Jeremy, and Geoffrey Pridham. 1983. Nazism, 1919-1945: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination. University of Exeter Press.

• Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1960. “Fascism–Left, Right and Center.” Political Man: 131–76.

• See Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism (2004) for a canonical treatment. 

• Marrus, Michael R., and Robert O. Paxton. 1982. “The Nazis and the Jews in Occupied Western Europe, 1940-1944.” The Journal of Modern History 54(4): 687–714. 

• Steigmann-Gall, Richard. 2003. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945. Cambridge University Press. [good to read responses to it]

• Welch, David. 2002. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. Psychology Press.

Nazi Take-Over

• Bessel, Richard. 2004. “The Nazi Capture of Power.” Journal of Contemporary History 39(2): 169–88.

• Lepsius, M. Rainer. 2017. “From Fragmented Party Democracy to Government by Emergency Decree and National Socialist Takeover: Germany.” In Max Weber and Institutional Theory, ed. Claus Wendt. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 111–51.

Regional Experiences

Allen, William Sheridan. 1973. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930-1935. New York: New Viewpoints.

• Bessel, Richard. 1984. Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925-1934. New Haven: Yale University Press.

• Grill, Johnpeter Horst. 1983. The Nazi Movement in Baden, 1920-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

• Koshar, Rudy. 1982. “Two 'Nazisms' : The Social Context of Nazi Mobilization in Marburg and Tübingen∗.” Social History 7(1): 27–42. 

• Noakes, Jeremy. 1971. The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 1921-1933. Oxford University Press.

• Szejnmann, Claus-Christian W. 1999. 4 Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in Red’Saxony. Berghahn Books. 

• Pridham, Geoffrey. 1973. Hitler’s Rise to Power; the Nazi Movement in Bavaria, 1923-1933. London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon.