The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb


Neal Bascomb - 2016
    They have the physicists. They have the will. What they don’t have is enough “heavy water," an essential ingredient for their nuclear designs. For two years, the Nazis have occupied Norway, and with it the Vemork hydroelectric plant, a massive industrial complex nestled on a precipice of a gorge. Vemork is the world’s sole supplier of heavy water, and under the threat of death, its engineers pushed production into overtime. For the Allies, Vemork must be destroyed. But how would they reach the castle fortress high in a mountainous valley? The answer became the most dramatic commando raid of the war. The British Special Operations Executive together a brilliant scientist and eleven refugee Norwegian commandos, who, with little more than parachutes, skis, and Tommy Guns, would destroy Hitler’s nuclear ambitions and help end the reign of the Third Reich. Based on exhaustive research and never-before-seen diaries and letters of the saboteurs, The Winter Fortress is a compulsively readable narrative about a group of young men who endured soul-crushing setbacks and Gestapo hunts and survived in one of the coldest, most inhospitable places on earth to save the world from destruction.

Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood


Nechama Tec - 1982
    Dry Tears is a dramatic tale of how an eleven-year-old child learned to pass in the forbidding Christian world and a quietly moving coming-of-age story. This book is uniquecelebration of the best human qualities that surface under the worst conditions.

Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a "Desk Murderer"


David Cesarani - 2004
    He was personally responsible for transporting over two million Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps. This is the first account of Eichmann's life to appear since the aftermath of his famous trial in 1961 and his subsequent execution in Jerusalem a year later. It reveals that the depiction of Eichmann as a loser who drifted into the ranks of the SS is a fabrication that conceals Eichmann's considerable abilities and his early political development. Drawing on recently unearthed documents, David Cesarani shows how Eichmann became the Reich's "expert" on Jewish matters and reveals his initially cordial working relationship with Zionist Jews in Germany, despite his intense anti-Semitism. Cesarani explains how the massive ethnic cleansing Eichmann conducted in Poland in 1939-40 was the crucial bridge to his later role in the mass deportation of the Jews. And Cesarani argues controversially that Eichmann was not necessarily predisposed to mass murder, exploring the remarkable, largely unknown period in Eichmann's early career when he first learned how to become an administrator of genocide. This challenging work deepens our understanding of Adolf Eichmann and offers fresh insights both into the operation of the Final Solution and the making of its most notorious perpetrator.

Women of the Third Reich


Anna Maria Sigmund - 1998
    Many women in German high society were fascinated by Adolf Hitler and helped him to achieve political power, while women like filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl were fueling Hitler's propaganda machine. The private lives of Hitler's assistants' wives are also explored-revealing Magda Goebbels's complicity in the murder of her six children in 1945, Carin and Emmy Gring's relations with their morphine-addicted husbands, and the knowledge that Margaret Himmler had of her husband's actions as leader of the SS.