Happy Holiday's Ya'll.
Mods, Im sorry if im breaking any rules. Please delete this if its not appropriate. This is the best subreddit for history, and the reading list you guys have is perfect.
This just seemed like the most appropriate place to post. My little brother is a smart kid, but he doesnt really have a passion for school because most subjects dont interest him. However, he has been enthralled with Nazi Germany for the past 5 years now, for whatever reason, and I would like to give him some materials for christmas that could stoke the fires a bit more.
He is a 17 year old Kid. He doesnt have much of an experience reading non-fiction.
He is particularity interested in
the politics of Nazi Germany (Facism and Nationalism)
Hitlers Invasion of Russia
the Holocaust
The German military itself and why they were so strong
The Impact of Nazi Germany on the World Today
Those are just some brief areas of the period that we talked about, and he gets as amped up about it as I do with Rome. If you guys could provide me with some material that would be perfect for his age group, I would be extremely grateful. Thanks guys.
tl;dr: Could you guys provide me with some Titles on Nazi Germany suitable for a 17 Year Old High School Kid?
Ian Kershaw wrote a fantastic biography of Adolf Hitler, which was published in two volumes, Hubris and Nemesis, but there is also a significantly abridged single volume edition titled "Hitler", which I haven't read, but if it is certainly a bit more accessible than the double-volume edition, so I'd recommend that. It is still a pretty daunting volume, to be sure, something that might be a bit more suited for college level reading, but if this is a topic that interests him, I think he would be able to manage it. Similar in challenge, but a bit more in depth is Richard Evan's "Third Reich Trilogy", which is easily the best history of the Third Reich out there, but again, it is three books long, so you'd have to judge whether that works.
If you want something a little more 'poppish' and less 'academic', I would suggest Erik Larson's "In the Garden of Beasts" which is about the American ambassador to Germany and his family as they witness the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.