Before History Devolves into Mythology: 2020’s Best Books on World War II

The scope of World War II still has the power to stagger the imagination, even 75 years after its end: More than 30 countries were drawn directly into hostilities that took the lives of between 70 million and 85 million people and reshaped vast swaths of the world. 

Books about the war are perennially popular, and publishers leaped to provide books for this anniversary year. The new titles include examinations of cultural changes, military history (which has always been the backbone of World War II studies), and hefty biographies of key players. 

University of Illinois professor Peter Fritzsche’s “Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich” is a brilliant, quietly horrifying new anatomy of precisely how Germany went from a traumatized and fragmented republic to a Nazi dictatorship, and the extent to which the much-debated “ordinary German” was an enthusiastic participant. (The latter was also the subject of historian Robert Gellately’s excellent book “Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis.”)

It’s been the essential question in the study of Nazi Germany: How did this happen? How did the educated, cultured, liberal population of a leading European nation come to embrace the vicious, anti-Semitic, violence cult of the Nazi Party? How did ordinary citizens live with themselves? How did they not rise up en masse and send the Nazis packing? How do we assess the culpability of an entire people? 

Fritzsche’s 2016 book “An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler” was astute, and “Hitler’s First 100 Days” is equally good, although necessarily even more unsettling.

Long after Hitler consolidated power, the reality of the menace he represented is everywhere in “1939: A People’s History of the Coming of the Second World War” by Frederick Taylor, which bookends his excellent 2011 “Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany.” Taylor’s latest starts with the flickering hopes sparked by the Munich Agreement and ends when those hopes were finally crushed by Germany’s invasion of Poland.