Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books

Adenauer’s Bargain

A new book argues that a delayed reckoning with the Holocaust was necessary for democratization in postwar West Germany.

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955

by Harald Jähner, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside

December 22, 2022 issue

When Did They Decide?

The Wannsee Conference was only one step in the Nazis’ protracted and incremental process of determining the fate of the Jews of Europe.

Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution

by Peter Longerich, translated from the German by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes

March 24, 2022 issue

Blue Bloods and Brownshirts

The relationship between German nobles and the Nazis was a misalliance in which attraction prevailed over repulsion.

Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance

by Stephan Malinowski, translated from the German by Jon Andrews

July 1, 2021 issue

Imperiled Democracy, Imperiled Planet

November 19, 2020 issue

Members of the French resistance erecting barriers in Paris to obstruct the German military as Allied forces approached the city, August 1944

Who Resisted the Nazis?

The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945

by Olivier Wieviorka, translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd, with a foreword by Robert O. Paxton

Sudden Courage: Youth in France Confront the Germans, 1940–1945

by Ronald C. Rosbottom

Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule

by Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis

Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence, September 1944–January 1945

by Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke, edited by Helmuth Caspar von Moltke, Dorothea von Moltke, and Johannes von Moltke, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch and with an afterword by Rachel Seiffert

July 2, 2020 issue

German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, German chancellor Adolf Hitler, Paul Schmidt, an interpreter, and Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Berlin, at a meeting in Berchtesgaden to discuss Hitler’s demand that Czechoslovakia cede the Sudetenland to Germany, September 1938

Giving In to Hitler

Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War

by Tim Bouverie

The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia

by P.E. Caquet

September 26, 2019 issue

The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism

Paul Hanebrink’s ‘A Specter Haunting Europe’

A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism

by Paul Hanebrink

February 21, 2019 issue

The Bills of The Great War

December 20, 2018 issue

German President Paul von Hindenburg and Chancellor Adolf Hitler on their way to a youth rally at the Lustgarten, Berlin, May 1933

The Suffocation of Democracy

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics.

October 25, 2018 issue

Letter

Albion M. Urdank

The Bills of The Great War

December 20, 2018 issue

Stormtroopers without their brown uniforms, which were banned by German authorities several times between their introduction in 1926 and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933. Daniel Siemens writes that an ‘SA troop...with members dressed in white shirts or other surrogate “uniforms” still remained highly recognizable.’

‘For Fighting We Were Born’

Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts

by Daniel Siemens

April 5, 2018 issue

Supporters greeting Adolf Hitler as he arrived at the Berghof, his retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, circa 1935

Lessons from Hitler’s Rise

‘Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939’ by Volker Ullrich

Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939

by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase

April 20, 2017 issue

Niklas Frank—son of Hans Frank, Adolf Hitler’s personal lawyer—looking at Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine for the first time since he was a small child, Wawel Castle, Kraków, January 2014. According to Philippe Sands in East West Street, the elder Frank confiscated the painting from a Polish museum for ‘protective’ reasons while he was governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland, and kept it in his private rooms at the castle.

The Two Different Ways of Looking at Nazi Murder

East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity”

by Philippe Sands

The Extermination of the European Jews

by Christian Gerlach

November 24, 2016 issue

A woman in the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, Poland, 1940–1944; from Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross, edited by Maia-Mari Sutnik, published by the Art Gallery of Ontario, and distributed by Yale University Press

A New Vision of the Holocaust

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

October 8, 2015 issue

German soldiers shaking hands with French volunteers bound for the front, July 1944

When Europe Failed

Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution During World War II

by István Deák

August 13, 2015 issue

The German industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau, who was from a wealthy Jewish family, in the car in which he was assassinated in Berlin in June 1922

How Envy of Jews Lay Behind It

Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust

by Götz Aly, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase

January 8, 2015 issue

German soldiers captured by American forces, Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, France, June 1944

How Ordinary Germans Did It

A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust

by Mary Fulbrook

Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying: The Secret World War II Transcripts of German POWs

by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase

June 20, 2013 issue

What Defense Was Possible?

October 11, 2012 issue

Josef Löwenherz, head of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG), Vienna’s Jewish community organization, with SS officers at the IKG offices, March 18, 1938

In the Cauldron

Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945

by Doron Rabinovici, translated from the German by Nick Somers

The Nazi, The Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road

by G.H. Bennett

We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust

by Ellen Cassedy

August 16, 2012 issue

Letter

Doron Rabinovici

What Defense Was Possible?

October 11, 2012 issue