Primary Sources on Nazism and the Holocaust: Nazi Germany

A comprehensive introductory essay, along with a detailed chronology, reference entries, primary sources, images, and a bibliography provide crucial information that readers need in order to understand Hitler's plan, as carried out through legislation and armed violence. In addition to entries on nearly 150 perpetrators, the book includes 25 primary source documents, ranging from government memoranda to first-hand observations of Nazi killing activities to field reports from senior officers on the scene of Holocaust killing sites. Also included are excerpts from literary memoirs.

Gathered here are thirteen key speeches of this historically significant movement, including Hitler's announcement of the party's reestablishment in 1925 following the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch, four addresses by Joseph Goebbels, the 1938 Kristallnacht speech by Julius Streicher, and four speeches drafted as models for party leaders' use on various public occasions. The volume concludes with Adolf Hitler's final public address on January 30, 1945, three months before his suicide. Several of these works are presented for the first time in English translation. Bytwerk provides a brief introduction to each speech and allows the reader to trace the development and downfall of the Nazi party.

Edited and introduced by esteemed historian Bob Carruthers, this unadulterated record of Wilhelm Keitel's trial at Nuremburg is essential reading for all history enthusiasts and an important account of events that truly shook the world.

Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda kept a diary throughout his time as a member of the Nazi Party and this covers the period of the last weeks of WW2 from February-April, 1945. Edited, Introduced and annotated by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, this is a remarkable account from within of the crumbling of the Nazi empire by its arch-apologist.

At the end of World War II, it was assumed that the letters of Heinrich Himmler were lost. Yet sixty years after Himmler's capture by British troops and subsequent suicide, the letters mysteriously turned up in Tel Aviv and, in early 2014, excerpts were published for the first time by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot providing a rare, if jarring, glimpse into the family life of one of Hitler's top lieutenants while he was busy organizing the mass extermination of the Jews. The letters in this edition were arranged by Katrin Himmler, the great-niece of Heinrich and Marga Himmler, and Michael Wildt, a renowned expert on the Nazi regime, who also provide historical context to the letters and their author. The entire work was translated by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen.

Felix Kersten, Himmler's personal manual therapist, has recorded their conversations between 1940 and 1945 as his dreaded patient lay, relaxed and grateful, under his soothing hands. But there is another side to this astounding document. Holding as he did the keys of Himmler's physical salvation, Kersten became the all-powerful confessor who could manipulate at will the conscience as well as the stomach of that terrible, impersonal, inhuman, but naive mystical credulous tyrant of the New Order.

Brunhilde Pomsel described herself as an apolitical girl 'and a figure on the margins'. How are we to reconcile this description with her chosen profession? Employed as a typist during the Second World War, she worked closely with one of the worst criminals in world history-Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. She was one of the oldest surviving eyewitnesses to the internal workings of the Nazi power apparatus until her death in 2017. Her life, mirroring all the major breaks and continuities of the twentieth century, illustrates how far-right politics, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships can rise, and how political apathy can erode democracy.

The adult children of Nazi officials speak frankly about their fathers.

On 16 October 1946 Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's wartime Foreign Minister, was executed at Nuremberg, convicted on four counts including deliberately planning a war of aggression and war crimes. In this first English Language edition of his memoirs, Rudolf von Ribbentrop frankly describes his relationship with his father when he was the German Ambassador in London and during the war years.

Schellenberg recounts with firsthand knowledge the motivations and machinations surrounding the Nazi Army's every move in Poland, Austria, and Russia. But this remarkable inside account is perhaps most memorable for its riveting portraits of Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, Heinrich Mueller, Ernst Kaltenbrunner–men whom Schellenberg calls, with stunning lack of irony, "Hitler's willing executioners."

Hans B. Gisevius knew or met the major figures-–including Beck, Canaris, Oster, Goerdeler, and von Stauffenberg-–and barely escaped after the coup's failure. One of the few survivors of the German Anti-Nazi Resistance, Gisevius traces its history, from the 1933 Reichstag fire to Germany's defeat in 1945, in a book as riveting as it is exceptional.

A Protestant pastor and a Catholic writer have collaborated with an American, Kathe Kuhn, by compiling the last words of those who, unwilling to condone or to obey injustice under the Nazi terror, were facing execution. Their letters and messages were addressed to their nearest and dearest, in a situation which calls forth the ultimate truth in each person.

Without doubt, Ulrich von Hassell was one of the most important members of the German Resistance: this is the first complete edition of his wartime memoir with new material from his grandson, Agostino von Hassell.

Höttl was the first person to tell Allied interrogators that Eichmann boasted of having killed 4 million Jews in the concentration camps, plus 2 million more through "other means." Reporting to the infamous Walter Schellenberg, head of Nazi foreign espionage, Höttl ran a series of important spy networks, 24 in all, covering Southeast Europe, including the Vatican. His account of espionage in the Balkans helps to explain the origins of many of the horrors of the last decade in the former Yugoslavia. Höttl was in charge of the greatest foreign currency forgery of all time. His false British Sterling banknotes were used to pay off CICERO, the notorious Axis spy inside the British embassy in Ankara, Turkey. At the end of the war, Höttl saved his own life by serving as intermediary between Allen Dulles, the OSS representative in Switzerland, and the SS during the German surrender in 1945.

While the "Valkyrie" plot by Nazi officers to kill Adolf Hitler is the best known instance of German opposition to his dictatorship, there were many other significant acts of resistance. Behind Valkyrie collects documents, letters, and testimonies of Germans who fought Hitler from within, making many of them available in their entirety and in English for the first time.

Story of the Helmuth Hubener Group vs. Hitler. This chilling, true story of four courageous German teenagers who defied the Nazis and Hitler.

A mid-level official in a provincial town, Friedrich Kellner kept a secret diary from 1939 to 1945, risking his life to record Germany's path to dictatorship and genocide, and to protest his countrymen's complicity in the regime's brutalities. Just one month into the war he notes how soldiers on leave spoke openly about the extermination of the Jews and the murder of POWs, while he also documents the Gestapo's merciless rule at home from euthanasia campaigns against the handicapped and mentally ill to the execution of anyone found listening to foreign broadcasts.

Leber's thumbnail portraits bring to life and record the heroism of sixty-four members of the Resistance from every walk of life. Their stories are sometimes spectacular, often quiet and almost commonplace accounts of men and women striving to maintain dignity and decency in the face of the ruthless, total power of the Nazis.

One of the few survivors of the German Resistance, von Schlabrendorff traces his anti-Nazi activity from his student days in the 1920s, through Hitler's rise to power, to the war and his involvement in the July 20, 1944, plot. He vividly recalls the double life of the Resistance leaders during World War II, the futile secret meetings of the conspirators, and their efforts to enlist the aid of weak and vacillating German generals.

Presents a history of the rise and fall of Hitler and Nazism through original source documents, including Nazi party records and propaganda and documents from witnesses, Holocaust survivors, and individuals who resisted the Nazi regime. Each chapter has a general introduction as well as commentary about the individual documents.The excerpts are drawn from government papers, Nazi propaganda, letters, diaries, articles, reminiscences, and trial and hearings testimony. The text is supplemented with black-and-white period photos, art, and documents, including reproductions that show how the Nazis used propaganda to create a mythical Hitler who became the all-powerful embodiment of the German nation.

Edgar Feuchtwanger came from a prominent German-Jewish family. He was a carefree five-year-old when Adolf Hitler moved into the building opposite. In 1933 the joy of this untroubled life was shattered. Hitler had been named Chancellor. Edgar's parents, stripped of their rights as citizens, tried to protect him from increasingly degrading realities. In class, his teacher had him draw swastikas, and his schoolmates joined the Hitler Youth. In 1939 Edgar was sent alone to England. It wasn't until the age of 88 he felt ready to tell the story of his buried childhood and his infamous neighbour.

One of the most significant documents of recent history. This book records private, off the record, informal conversations of a man, who, more then anyone else, came close to destroying the western world.

During World War II Adolf Hitler held innumerable meetings with diplomats, Nazi leaders, Axis allies, German generals, and others. This is a selection of significant conversations that are assembled for the first time in a single volume. They feature: Benito Mussolini, Sumner Welles, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Philippe Pétain, Yosuke Matsuoka, Vyacheslav Molotov, Gustaf Mannerheim, Joseph Goebbels, Galeazzo Ciano, Francisco Franco, Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, Miklós Horthy, the Grand Mufti, Subhas Chandra Bose, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Erich von Manstein, Erwin Rommel, Walter Schellenberg, Karl Wolff, Albert Kesselring, Kurt Zeitzler, Albert Speer, and others.

After dinner at the Wolfs Lair it was Hitlers custom to retire to his private quarters where Hitler and his entourage often listened to gramophone records of Beethoven symphonies, selections from Wagner while Hitler would hold forth with lengthy and rambling monologues touching on a wide variety of subjects. Hitler was invariably joined by Keitel and his two secretaries, also present was Martin Bormann who decided to commission a recording of Hitlers words for posterity.