Hitler At Home

A look at Adolf Hitler’s residences and their role in constructing and promoting the dictator’s private persona both within Germany and abroad. Adolf Hitler’s makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator’s preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler’s bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator’s three dwellings—the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg—to foster the myth of the Führer as a morally upstanding and refined man. Author Despina Stratigakos also reveals the previously untold story of Hitler’s interior designer, Gerdy Troost, through newly discovered archival sources. At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler’s homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler’s domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book’s rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler’s homes and into the sheer power of the propaganda that influenced how the world saw him. “Inarguably the powder-keg title of the year.”—Mitchell Owen, Architectural Digest “A fascinating read, which reminds us that in Nazi Germany the architectural and the political can never be disentangled. Like his own confected image, Hitler’s buildings cannot be divorced from their odious political hinterland.”—Roger Moorhouse, Times

A “candid and revealing memoir shows a normal boy and a family at war and in its aftermath, determined to do what it took to survive . . . fascinating” (The Great War). When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in 1933, he promised the downtrodden, demoralized, and economically broken people of Germany a new beginning and a strong future. Millions flocked to his message, including a corps of young people called the Hitlerjugend—the Hitler Youth. By 1942 Hitler had transformed Germany into a juggernaut of war that swept over Europe and threatened to conquer the world. It was in that year that a nine-year-old Wilhelm Reinhard Gehlen, took the ‘Jungvolk’ oath, vowing to give his life for Hitler. This is the story of Wilhelm Gehlen’s childhood in Nazi Germany during World War II and the awful circumstances which he and his friends and family had to endure during and following the war. Including a handful of recipes and descriptions of the strange and sometimes disgusting food that nevertheless kept people alive, this book sheds light on the truly awful conditions and the twisted, mistaken devotion held by members of the Hitler Youth—that it was their duty to do everything possible to save the Thousand Year Reich.

The meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party cowed the masses into a sense of false utopia. During Hitler’s 1932 election campaign over half those who voted for Hitler were women. Germany’s women had witnessed the anarchy of the post-First World War years, and the chaos brought about by the rival political gangs brawling on their streets. When Hitler came to power there was at last a ray of hope that this man of the people would restore not only political stability to Germany but prosperity to its people. As reforms were set in place, Hitler encouraged women to step aside from their jobs and allow men to take their place. As the guardian of the home, the women of Hitler’s Germany were pinned as the very foundation for a future thousand-year Reich. Not every female in Nazi Germany readily embraced the principle of living in a society where two distinct worlds existed, however with the outbreak of the Second World War, Germany’s women would soon find themselves on the frontline. Ultimately Hitler’s housewives experienced mixed fortunes throughout the years of the Second World War. Those whose loved ones went off to war never to return; those who lost children not only to the influences of the Hitler Youth but the Allied bombing; those who sought comfort in the arms of other young men and those who would serve above and beyond of exemplary on the German home front. Their stories form intimate and intricately woven tales of life, love, joy, fear and death. Hitler’s Housewives: German Women on the Home Front is not only an essential document towards better understanding one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies where the women became an inextricable link, but also the role played by Germany’s women on the home front which ultimately became blurred within the horrors of total war. This is their story, in their own words, told for the first time.

This is a groundbreaking new study of an overlooked area of Second World War History.

Part novel, part movie reel, this book hums with the energy of the newly modern world - aeroplane, film projector, jazz. It tells the story of Audrey's awakening to politics, to love, and to a new age sweeping across the world like a maelstrom.

'Exquisitely written... haunting... Few books, I think, capture so well the sense of a life broken for ever by trauma and guilt' Sunday Times 'An unsparing, honest and insightful memoir, that shows how private failure becomes national disaster' Hilary Mantel Twenty years after the end of the war, Horst Krüger attempted to make sense of his childhood. He had grown up in a quiet Berlin suburb. Here, people lived ordinary lives, believed in God, obeyed the law, and were gradually seduced by the promises of Nazism. He had been 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'. With tragic inevitability, this world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble. Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides a searing portrait of life under the Nazis.

The true story behind the film The Nasty Girl: A memoir by a German woman who uncovered her hometown’s war crimes and complicity with the Nazis. Nestled along the Danube in southern Germany, Passau is a pleasant tourist destination known for its historic buildings and scenic views at the intersection of three rivers. But for decades, the small Bavarian city suppressed an intimate association with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Born in Passau in 1960, Anna Rosmus discovered those dark secrets as a teenager—sordid stories of slave labor, forced abortions, and a massacre of Russian POWs. In 1994, she set out to commemorate the forgotten Holocaust victims who had died there, expecting little if any controversy. What she encountered instead was an obstructionist city council, a virulently resentful local population, and an unsettling degree of latent anti-Semitism in a town whose several hundred Jewish citizens had been sent to concentration camps. Eventually the death threats led to her own emigration from Germany to the United States. Anna Rosmus has been hailed by Marc Fisher of the Washington Post as “a rigorous researcher burning with a passion to tell the story that must be told.” In Out of Passau, she explores not only the disturbing World War II history of her hometown, but also the life-changing fallout that resulted from her determination to recognize those who had lost their lives.

In 1925, Adolf Hitler chose a remote mountain area in the south-east corner of Germany as his home. Hitler settled in a small house on the Obersalzberg, a district overlooking the picturesque town of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Obersalzberg area was transformed into the southern seat of power for the Nazi Party. Eventually, the locale became a complex of houses, barracks and command posts for the Nazi hierarchy, including the famous Eagle’s Nest, and the mountain was honeycombed with tunnels and air raid shelters. A bombing attack at the end of the Second World War damaged many of the buildings and some were later torn down, but several of the ruins remain today, hidden in woods and overgrown. Hitler’s Berchtesgaden: A Guide to Third Reich Sites in the Berchtesgaden and Obersalzberg Area will help history-minded explorers find these largely-forgotten sites, both on the Obersalzberg and in Berchtesgaden and the surrounding area, with detailed directions for driving and walking tours. Illustrations: 100 colour photographs

Zalampas applies the psychological model of Alfred Adler to Adolf Hitler through the examination of his views on architecture, art, and music. This study was made possible by the publication of Billy F. Price s volume of over seven hundred of Hitler s watercolors, oils, and sketches."

The fascinating untold story of how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model “Aryan” society in Norway during World War II Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model “Aryan” society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders. In Hitler’s Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire—one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings. Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler’s Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway’s Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme—a German cultural capital and naval base—remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance. A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler’s Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been—a world colonized under the swastika.

The faux-memoir of William Weber, who becomes a spy in Hitler's House.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times “Deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.” —USA Today DON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF.

Ian Kershaw’s biography of Adolf Hitler is widely regarded as the definitive work on the subject, as well as one of the most brilliant biographies of our time. In Making Friends with Hitler, the great scholar shines remarkable new light on decisions that led to war by tracing the extraordinary story of Lord Londonderry—one of Britain’s wealthiest aristocrats, cousin of Winston Churchill, confidant of the king, and the only British cabinet member to outwardly support the Nazi party. Through Londonderry’s tragic tale, Kershaw shows us that behind the accepted dogma of English appeasement and German bullying is a much more complicated and interesting reality—full of miscalculations on both sides that proved to be among the most fateful in history.

An exploration of the critical, formative years Adolf Hitler spent in Vienna, this study is both a cultural and political portrait of the city, and a biography of Hitler from 1906 to 1913. Photos and line illustrations.

A concise and timely account of Hitler’s—and fascism’s—rise to power and ultimate defeat, from one of America’s most famous journalists. American journalist and author William L. Shirer was a correspondent for six years in Nazi Germany—and had a front-row seat to Hitler’s mounting influence. His most definitive work on the subject, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is a riveting account defined by first-person experience interviewing Hitler, watching his impassioned speeches, and living in a country transformed by war and dictatorship. Shirer was originally commissioned to write The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler for a young adult audience. This account loses none of the immediacy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich—capturing Hitler’s ascendence from obscurity, the horror of Nazi Germany’s mass killings, and the paranoia and insanity that marked the führer’s downfall. This book is by no means simplified—and is sure to appeal to adults as well as young people with an interest in World War II history. “For nearly 100 years William L Shirer has spoken to us of fascism, Nazis, and Hitler . . . [He] tells the unvarnished truth as he experienced it . . . I figured this school-type book wasn’t going to tell me anything new. But when I started reading, I realized that I wasn’t reading for the facts anymore. I listened to his story and heard the urgency in his voice: a voice from nearly 60 years ago telling us the truth about today.” —Daily Kos

In a competition of the most hated memes of modern times, "Hipster" has now caught up with "Hitler." Artists James Carr and Archana Kumar thought, why not combine the two? After all, Hitler was indeed a hipster of his time, a failed artist in Vienna scrounging up extra dollars or kroner painting quick architecture scenes for the tourists. In their heavily trafficked website, "hipsterhitler.com," these comic artists posit a new sort of history in which Hitler, wears Silverlake-trendy glasses, thrift store sweaters, and outspoken T-shirts, and the reader begins to quickly understand the history of Hitler in a new and strangely engaging way. The Feral House book of Hipster Hitler includes a few dozen pages of comics heretofore unseen online.

From one of Germany’s leading young historians, the first comprehensive biography of Eva Braun, Hitler’s devoted mistress, finally wife, and the hidden First Lady of the Third Reich. In this groundbreaking biography of Eva Braun, German historian Heike Görtemaker reveals Hitler’s mistress as more than just a vapid blonde whose concerns never extended beyond her vanity table. Twenty-three years his junior, Braun first met Hitler when she took a position as an assistant to his personal photographer. Capricious, but uncompromising and fiercely loyal—she married Hitler two days before committing suicide with him in Berlin in 1945—her identity was kept secret by the Third Reich until the final days of the war. Through exhaustive research, newly discovered documentation, and anecdotal accounts, Görtemaker turns preconceptions about Eva Braun and Hitler on their head, and builds a portrait of the little-known Hitler far from the public eye.

History of Nazi Germany.

This collection paints a picture of Hitler from members of his household in the unique position of being “seemingly ever-present, yet totally unconnected to events.” The reader is introduced to Hitler's Bodyguard Karl Krause (1934-39), his house administrator Herbert Döhring (1935-43) and chambermaid Anna Plaim (1941-43). From these accounts we get a deeper sense of Hitler in close proximity. These accounts massively add to our understanding of Hitler as a three dimensional character, especially from subjects like Plaim who only knew Hitler's home life, having rarely left Berghof. The series is able to shed light on his likes and dislikes from foods to his hobbies, creating a strange sense of humanity. This collection also provides the reader with fresh anecdotes, observations and portraits of Hitler's entourage and relatives. Plaim's images of Eva Braun come from finding torn fragments in the bin, whilst Döhring sheds light on Martin Bormann's demeanour.

Analyzes how the Nazi past has become increasingly normalized within western memory since the start of the new millennium.