Aside from Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy, a good recent survey of German daily lives is The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 by Nicholas Stargardt which is an excellent text about daily life in wartime and its unique German contexts. Peter Fritzche's Life and Death in the Third Reich is about the imperfect intersection of National Socialist ideology into the daily lives of Germans. Ian Kershaw's The Hitler Myth is one of the benchmark studies of Hitler's popularity, and Kershaw's The End examines the social history of the Third Reich in its death throes.

For Japan, Thomas Havens's Valley of Darkness is a classic in the field, but its paradigm of the war as a "dark valley" has been questioned by some recent historians, and should be supllemented with reading Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940-1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita is a slim introduction that is exactly what it says on the tin. The same author also edited the anthology Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese which offers a glimpse into the war. Japan at War: An Oral History by Haruko and Theodore Cook is a first-rate, and at times gripping, oral history of the war.

R. J. Bosworth's Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 aims to do with Italy what Evans did with Germany, albeit in one volume instead of three. Everyday Life in Fascist Venice, 1929-40 by Kate Ferris looks at the rise of Fascism in one city, while Christopher Duggan's Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy parses out the disjuncture between Party and dictator in the daily lives of Italians.

Destined to Witness by Hans J. Massaquoi is the very unusual autobiography of a black man growing up in Nazi Germany. Born to a German woman and the son of the Liberian ambassador to Germany in 1926, Massaquoi avoided the concentration camps because of his value as a munitions worker and because blacks were largely overlooked administratively by the Nazi authorities until near the end of the war.

The book covers his entire life, including post-war stretches in Africa and later the United States (where he worked at Jet and Ebony magazines), but he gives a very detailed account of life in wartime Hamburg.