He has won numerous awards, has sold millions of copies of his books, and has translated them into many different languages. but I was wondering, what historians inspire you?
the first historian who inspired me was john keegan, with whom I studied at sandhurst, because he wrote the face of battle, which was one of the key moments in the turning points of military history. Until then, military history used to be written by retired officers or generals, trying to imply that commanders were chess grandmasters playing a brilliant game, when in reality everything was chaos, fear and smoke. it was the first time that military history was written as history from below.
You are reading: Best world war 2 books
then, interestingly, there was a later period when oral history suddenly started to catch on. I always had doubts about oral history because I felt it didn’t have a proper context. From my point of view, John Keegan’s book was the biggest influence because it pushed me in the direction I was eventually heading, of trying to integrate the story from above with the story from below.
what makes you particularly interested in the second world war?
In the beginning, I was particularly interested in the Napoleonic wars and will eventually return to them when, for me, the second world war is finally over. but the second world war remains the most important war in history because of the effect it had on the lives of so many people and so many countries.
the most important lesson i have learned came to me in the french archives when i was doing research for a book about paris after liberation. After six months of waiting for permission from the Ministry of the Interior, I found this security police report describing how a German woman had been found in Paris in the summer of 1945. In fact, she was the wife of a German farmer who had desperately fallen. in love with a french prisoner of war who had been working on her farm and she had followed him back to france by smuggling her onto the train carrying deported prisoners back to france. That suddenly raised a lot of other questions for me. We always think of those who have died and the victims of war without fully appreciating how the decisions of Stalin or Hitler changed everyone’s life.
The first book you have chosen is a novel by someone whose work you know very well: Russian writer Vasily Grossman. you edited his war notes. but this is his novel, life and fate of him, which was considered very controversial and banned in russia.
yes, the manuscript was confiscated when it was just written in 1960. the kgb entered his apartment and then went to his secretary’s apartment, confiscating even the typewriter ribbons and carbon papers because the novel was considered very dangerous .
why was that?
grossman was the first person to establish the moral equivalence between Nazism and Stalinism. that was what was so devastating. he clearly indicated that stalin had been responsible for the terrible disasters of the first part of the war and for the repression that took place towards the end of the war. The interesting thing about Grossman is that he is one of the few examples where you get physical courage and moral courage in the same person. that’s very rare – normally moral courage and physical courage are two separate things and don’t exist together.
How did he show physical courage?
showed physical courage as a totally disabled middle-aged moscow jewish intellectual who went to the front with the red army and lived the same life alongside many of the soldiers. this is where he got the stuff from him. obviously he was not one of the Stalinist hackers who came out with absurd propaganda. the soldiers had read about him in the red star, the army newspaper, and they knew he was the only honest one. and he didn’t take notes. he would just sit next to them and then write the notes afterwards, because he knew perfectly well that if he sat down with a pad he would turn them off. and he used to work incredibly long hours into the night writing down all the conversations he had ever had.
these were the notebooks we worked on in moscow and one realized that here was most of the raw material for life and destiny, which I think is probably the most important work of fiction about the second World War. but, in fact, it is more than just fiction because it is based on very close reports from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as can be seen from the title. it is definitely the war and peace of the 20th century.
Your next pick is a two-volume Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw.
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ian kershaw is a totally admirable historian. he is absolutely scrupulous. he does amazing research. His books have excellent scholarship and breadth of knowledge as a result. but above all, he has a clarity of thought and a clarity of prose that is not only enviable, but should be pursued by any kind of academic historian who wants to know how to write and how to reach a wider audience and also remain a scholar. entirely academic source.
His biography is largely based on primary sources.
yes, actually, and he knows them almost better than anyone. I don’t think any historian should ever accept that a book is final. nothing is final. but i don’t see kershaw’s work on hitler being really surpassed.
what did his book teach you about hitler?
A lot of this is in the details and not in general. one sees so much written about hitler that it just produces the same kind of material. Where Kershaw is so judicious and masterful is that he manages to put the details and, above all, Hitler’s words into a much larger context. one sees the implications particularly when it comes to the difficulties of a scenario and the exact progress towards the final solution. For example, he discusses the decision about when to launch the Holocaust or the Shoah by gas, as Grossman called it, which is one of the key areas of debate among historians. and the kershaw evaluation is probably the most reliable and accurate of all.
what is your evaluation?
In his book he defines “the final solution to the Jewish question” as “the systematic [Nazi] attempt to exterminate all European Jewry”. and this is the traditional view and the one currently accepted by mainstream historians. Kershaw goes on to state the three main issues that, in his opinion, surround the final solution. they are: how and when the decision was made to exterminate the Jews; what was hitler’s role in this policy of mass murder, and did the final solution follow a single order from a long-standing program or did it evolve in a random and piecemeal fashion over a period of time?
after raising these questions, he concludes: “the deficiencies and ambiguities of the evidence, enhanced by the language of euphemisms and camouflage used by the Nazis, including each other, when it comes to the extermination of the Jews, make the absolute certainty in answering these complex questions cannot be achieved”. he is saying that there is room for doubt regarding the answers mainstream historians have given to the above questions.
His next book takes us to a part of World War II in which he has a particular interest. Leningrad by Anna Reid reveals the Nazis’ deliberate decision to starve the city of Leningrad into surrender.
This was the longest and most devastating siege in the history of World War II. Hitler was determined to seize the Russian city for symbolic reasons, and during the two-and-a-half-year siege, 750,000 civilians deliberately starved to death. this was equivalent to a quarter of the population of Leningrad. Much has been written about Leningrad in the past. One famous book is Harrison Salisbury’s 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, and while it’s excellent, there weren’t any open files at that particular stage, so you were limited by what you could get through official sources in Leningrad. it is still an extraordinary book.
but anna reid’s book goes much further because, with some excellent research in archives that were not available before, she can show how utterly cynical stalin’s attitude towards leningrad was. in fact, it was a major factor in the terrible loss of life and suffering, which is very difficult to appreciate. When I was doing research for my own Stalingrad book, and for years afterward, I couldn’t look at a plate of food without thinking about what that would have meant to a dozen people in Stalingrad. in leningrad it was even worse. there are photographs, for example, of the same woman taken a few months apart for her identity documents and in a matter of months she has become an old hag, although she started out as a rather chubby young woman. therefore it is worth studying the effects of hunger on a whole society and i think anna reid has done this brilliantly. Another interesting aspect of her book is her exploration of the extent to which people living in Leningrad had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.
you mentioned that stalin had a cynical attitude towards leningrad. What does anna reid’s book reveal that he did to his own people?
the problem was that stalin was unable to evacuate leningrad before the siege closed and made little attempt to stockpile additional food when it was still possible. as famine approached, the inhabitants began boiling calf hides for the expected nutrition or eating woodpecker glue made from the bones and hooves of slaughtered cattle. At the height of the German advance on Moscow, Stalin was even prepared to withdraw all troops from Leningrad and abandon the city to a terrible fate. He had always mistrusted Leningrad as a city of intellectuals and lovers of Western influences, which made them traitors in his eyes.
That’s an interesting aspect of World War II that you don’t often hear about. you are obviously famous for your book stalingrad. can you explain why that was another key moment in the war?
Stalingrad was the psychological turning point of the war. it took place between August 23, 1942 and February 2, 1943 and was the largest battle on the Eastern Front. Nazi Germany and its allies were fighting for control of the city of Stalingrad in southwestern Russia. the geopolitical turning point of the war came a little earlier, although people didn’t really recognize it at the time. it was in december 1941, when the german armies were repelled in front of moscow and hitler decided to declare war on the united states after pearl harbor. But Stalingrad was vital in its own way because the Red Army for the first time held its ground in the city, fighting in desperate circumstances. furthermore, their new commanders had the foresight to do what they deemed necessary instead of being terrified of being arrested for their actions, as was the case in the early part of the war.
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Two soviet generals, georgy zhukov and aleksandr vasilevsky, came up with this incredibly ambitious plan to encircle the entire sixth army. The Germans saw that it was a possibility but simply did not believe that the Red Army was capable of pulling it off. And the very act of achieving it meant that the whole psychology of war, not just in the Soviet Union but elsewhere, led to this belief that the Germans were finally beaten and the Allies might win. as far away as chile the poet pablo neruda wrote his homage to stalingrad so stalingrad had this tremendous effect on resistance all over the world. Stalingrad itself was synonymous with courage and it was also synonymous with suffering.
this is actually what i was trying to do when i researched the russian military archives. I wanted to know the details of what life was like for soldiers and it was just terrifying. they executed 13,000 of their own men over the course of the battle, something we simply couldn’t imagine.
why did they do that?
because they were so afraid they would break. anyone who left without orders was executed.
much of the story focuses on politics and people in power, but your next election tells the very personal story of a young woman who preferred to remain anonymous, living in berlin in 1945 and wearing a daily record of your life.
this book, a woman in berlin, is one of the great diaries of the entire war. although it was published anonymously, we now know the name of the woman who wrote it. her name was marta hillers and she was a highly intelligent journalist who had traveled quite a bit before the war and was certainly not a nazi. She was extremely open-minded and it was her inquiring mind and her observation that really showed the reality of the Soviet attack on Berlin in April 1945 until early May.
There’s the whole issue of mass rape by the red army. this is a very controversial subject, as I know very well. his account is so obviously well observed of what was going on. there is no self-pity, despite the fact that she herself was raped on numerous occasions. through it you see the reality of life and the war of civilians in those kinds of circumstances. there is this need for unity, particularly among women, in order to survive. they manage to get over their ordeals by being able to talk to each other.
And then, of course, they discovered that their men when they came back from the war just couldn’t face the reality that they hadn’t been able to protect their women. and one saw a fascinating but daunting gender divide in that particular way. in many ways, it was women who were morally much stronger than men. she describes how the role of women is to support all these fragile men and basically massage their egos because otherwise they will fall apart.
your final choice is timothy snyder’s bloodlands.
This book deals not only with the Second World War, but also with the Stalinist repression of the areas known as the borderlands, which Snyder has called “lands of blood”. area of europe between about 1930, at the start of the second ukrainian famine, and 1945. the area is the territory between central poland and roughly the russian border, covering eastern poland, ukraine, belarus and the Baltic republics. it is a remarkable work, not only of scholarship and research, but above all, of a new angle on how the interplay between Nazism and Stalinism actually caused such egregious levels of hate and murder in this particular area.
for example, the communists blamed the jews for the great famine in the ukraine in the early 1930s. they created rumors to indicate that the jews were responsible for the famine when it was the communist authorities themselves. And this fueled a kind of latent anti-Semitism within Ukraine. so, of course, when the Germans came, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, who actually served the Germans as volunteers in the army but also as concentration camp guards, gave additional impetus to the terrible massacres that took place .
One of the themes of the book is the power of propaganda used during World War II.
yes, and even before. i think goebbels was a diabolical genius. he saw that hate was not enough and that you had to combine hate with fear if you wanted to get the most murderous potential out of your followers. snyder, in this remarkable book, shows how some 14 million people were killed in this particular region, which basically stretches from eastern germany to eastern belarus and ukraine, as well as the baltic states, poland, and hungary to the Balkans. These were the areas where most of the Jews who had suffered in the holocaust lived, but also where the Nazis placed their death camps. the border areas were the most blood-soaked regions of the second world war.
What particular aspects of war does your book, World War II, focus on?
somehow the book does not have a very admirable genesis. I became more and more aware that I had concentrated on certain areas of the second world war and always felt a bit of a fraud in being labeled as the great expert because I knew perfectly well that there were certain areas that I knew nothing about. and I also realized how important it was to bring everything together. for example, i start with the battle of khalkhyn gol on the mongolian border of manchuria in 1939. it was a battle between the soviets and japan and was one of the most influential battles of the entire second world war. you have all these collateral effects between the pacific war and the european war and that’s what prompted me to write the book.
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