What do you read at the moment?

[phylo_roadking]

Hitler's Thirty Days to Power: January 1933 by Henry Ashby Turner Jr.

[Mike36]

Im reading ARMAGEDDON by Max Hastings at this time.Very good end of the war book.Is interesting the American and British soldiers as well as the soviets have great respect for the training and talent of the German armed forces.It is obvious from the book that the Germans were in general man for man the better soldiers of the war.

Just got thru with the soviet taking of East Prussia.Good grief that was certainly an offensive with a vengence.Appears it was either fight or die for the Wermacht.And the fate of all those civilians is beyond our tragic imagination to even comprehend today.

Mike

[John Hilly]

The Battle of Britain, John Ray.

I´m reading "The Battle of Britain" also, but by Len Daughton. Its old but exellently written and documentated.
Greets
Johnny B Goode

[phylo_roadking]

John - also a bit "popularist" nowadays. I won't say "low-brow" - nothing written by Deighton could be called low-brow, its too good - more..."easy-access" to the whole topic. Look for a copy of John Ray's The Battle of Britain in the Cassell Military Papebacks series, you'll pick it up in a decent secondhandbookshop. VERY readable, a better pre-battle analysis, and covers whole aspects that Deighton browses over.

[seewolf]

Siegfried Knappe & Ted Brusaw, "Soldat"

[nord]

i have just read
stormtrooper on the eastenfront
campaign in russia - leon degrelle
german cross in gold -nordland vol3
budapest - stalingrad of the ss
and to read
32nd ss freiwilligen-grenader division

nord

[Rolf Steiner]

JG Ballard's Cocaine Nights - no WWII connection at all, but you have to vary the diet. And you can seldom go wrong with Ballard I've found.

[Rolf Steiner]

Whoops, unless you take into account he's author of Empire of the Sun I guess!

[Annelie]

The Forever War.....by Dexter Filkins.......about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lots of graffic details.

[John Hilly]

Hella!
I've had an Air-War period:
Zorner, Paul: Nächte im Bomberstorm - Erinnerungen 1920-1950 (in Finnish). Very good, I recommend.
Clostermann, Pierre: Une Sacrée Guerre! (I.F.) So and so...
Wellum, Geoffrey: First Light (i.F.) About the Battle of Britain and France. Teaches You how to fly.
Rall, Günther: Mein Flugbuch - Erinnerungen 1938 - 2004. Very interesting, I'm glad that it is also translated in Finnish.

Right now I'm back in studying the siege of Leningrad. I'll be back about this subject.

Greets Juha

[ericv]

Hellmuth Spaeter's Die Geschichte der Panzerkorps Großdeutschland Band II

[Michael Miller / ABR]

Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

From the dustjacket:

"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.
From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism. Ordinary Germans were prepared for wartime atrocities by racial concepts widely disseminated in media not perceived as political: academic research, documentary films, mass-market magazines, racial hygiene and art exhibits, slide lectures, textbooks, and humor. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.
The Nazi Conscience chronicles the chilling saga of a modern state so powerful that it extinguished neighborliness, respect, and, ultimately, compassion for all those banished from the ethnic majority."

[phylo_roadking]

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.
From 1933 to 1939, Nazi public culture was saturated with a blend of racial fear and ethnic pride that Koonz calls ethnic fundamentalism.

She thought we didn't know??? On a more serious note, Mike, what's it like? A worthwhile read?

[Aragorn2008]

I'm reading Mittlere Ostfront Juni '44 by Gerd Niepold, about the collapse of Army Group Centre in the summer of 1944. By far the best and most detailed account on this series of battles. Hardly suprising since Niepold was an officier in the 12. Panzer-division and knows what he is talking about. Another book I'm enjoying at the moment is Duel in the Mist, the first part about the Leibstandarte during the Ardennes offensive. I'm looking forward to the next part in this series.

Finally I'm reading Tony Le Tissiers book ' Zhukov at the Oder', a good read, like most of his books.

[Zoll]

Recently finished Gerd Niepold's excellent Battle For White Russia: The Destruction of Army Group Centre June 1944.

Zetterling & Frankson's very fine The Korsun Pocket.

Reread Niehorster's The Royal Hungarian Army, 1920-1945 again.