Volume 26, Number 8 · May 17, 1979
The Nazi Boom
By Geoffrey Barraclough
The Bunker: The History of the Reich Chancellery Group
by James P. O'Donnell
Houghton Mifflin, 399 pp., $13.95
On Trial at Nuremberg
by Airey Neave
Little, Brown, 348 pp., $12.95
The Secretary: Martin Bormann, The Man Who Manipulated Hitler
by Jochen von Lang, with the assistance of Claus Sibyll, translated by Christa Armstrong, by Peter White
Random House, 430 pp., $15.95
Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler's Rise to Power, 1919-1933
by James Pool, by Suzanne Pool
Dial Press, 535 pp., $10.95
Gods and Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult
by Dusty Sklar
Crowell, 180 pp., $9.95
A Backward Look: Germans Remember
by Daniel Lang
McGraw-Hill, 112 pp., $8.95
'It all reads like a movie scenario,' writes James P. O'Donnell at one point, as he recounts the lurid goings-on in Hitler's underground bunker in Berlin in 1945—the wish, no doubt, being father to the thought. The same verdict, unfortunately, applies to far too much recent writing about Nazi Germany. In part, I suppose, we must attribute this to the success of 'Holocaust,' and the prospect it holds out of another golden jackpot for another lucky author. But I suspect the trouble reaches further back—to Walter Langer and his progeny of psychohistorians.[1] Once historians began prying into Hitler's sex life and alleged sexual aberrations, anything was permissible, provided it was sordid, scurrilous, and scandalous enough.
Review, 4454 words
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