I am looking for a book about how Germans felt when Hitler came to power

[Lulu KC]

I am talking about the people who did not like him, were not targeted specifically, and how they dealt with it all. I keep seeing posts saying that we need to be more aware than they were. I know there must be a classic that describes how it was--do you know what the book is?

I am also looking for a similar book regarding France, and how the French Resistance became organized and stayed aware.

Thanks--

[randr]

1. Do some research on how American progressive intellectuals thought about the rise

of that monster. You may find parallels to modern history.

[Little_Wing]

2. Try Diary of a Man in Dispair

A journal written from 1936 to 1944 by a German man who hated the Nazis. Just started it myself. Chillingly honest....

[Lulu KC]

4. Thank you! n/t

[PufPuf23]

3. They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (Mayer)

by Milton Mayer.

Classic book of Germans that were not overt Hitler followers to start but who became followers and their the slide into fascism and horror.


https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans-ebook/dp/B00D4M89A4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479503770&sr=1-1&keywords=They+thought+they+were+free


>First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”--from Chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late”<

[Lulu KC]

5. Thank you! n/t

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

6. While not exactly what you're asking for,

the following two books might be of interest:

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson is about the first American Ambassador to Nazi Germany. Chilling and fascination.

A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead is about some 230 French women who were in the Resistance, who were caught by the Nazis and sent off to the death camps in January of 1943. This one is heartbreaking because of the horrors of the death camps.

Again, I know that these are not what you've asked for, but they touch on both those themes.

[Lulu KC]

7. Thank you! n/t

[raccoon]

8. I think it's time to give this thread a good kick. Nt.

[Neoma]

9. Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner.

Great book.