Suggested Reading and Media Resources

• Aly, Götz. Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. 2005. A controversial interpretation of popular support for the Hitler regime, focused on the material benefits of wartime plunder.

• Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. 2004. An excellent study of Soviet police terror.

• Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, 3d ed. 2016. A concise and accessible discussion of National Socialism and the murderous Nazi assault on European Jews and other groups.

• Bosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915–1945. 2007. An outstanding study of Italy under Mussolini.

• Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 2d ed. 2001. A carefully researched, unnerving account of German atrocities in Poland during World War II.

• Geyer, Michael, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. 2009. A collection of essays that compares the two dictatorships and challenges the usefulness of the totalitarian model.

• Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. 1998. A deeply moving book about the Jewish response to the Holocaust, with a compelling focus on women’s history.

• Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. 1997. An extraordinary account of Stalinism and forced industrialization in the 1930s.

• Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945. 2007. An in-depth look at the lives of ordinary Soviet soldiers.

• Roberts, David D. The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics. 2006. Makes a case for the totalitarian model by comparing Stalinism, Nazism, and Italian fascism.

• Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. 2010. A new synthesis that examines the murderous policies and practices of Nazi and Soviet authorities in east-central Europe before and during World War II.

• Weinberg, Gerhard L. World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, new ed. 2005. A masterful military history of World War II.

• A Film Unfinished (Yael Hersonski, 2010). This documentary takes a critical look at the infamous Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto.

• History of World War II (BBC, 2005). With thirty hours of programming, this collection of ten BBC programs offers a wide range of analysis of World War II.

• Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955). A justly famous, existentialism-influenced documentary about the Holocaust by a noted French film director.

• Burnt by the Sun (Nikita Mikhalkov, 1994). In a subtle, Oscar-winning film that ably expresses Russian attempts to come to grips with memories of Stalinism, Commander Sergei Kotov, an “Old Bolshevik,” senior Red Army officer, and civil war hero, is unexpectedly trapped in his summer house by the great purges of the late 1930s.

• The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970). This art film explores the Fascist mentality through an investigation of a young man who joins the Fascist secret police and helps assassinate his former professor.

• Hitler Youth Quex (Hans Steinhoff, 1933). A Nazi propaganda film about a youth in the last years of the Weimar Republic who spurns the Communists and joins the Nazi Hitler Youth. The film can be streamed from the Internet and is easy to understand despite the lack of English subtitles.

• Eyewitness to History: World War II. A remarkable collection of firsthand accounts from a variety of people, covering all theaters of the war. www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/w2frm.htm

• Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. Explores the history of the Soviet Gulags through various exhibits, such as “Days and Lives,” “Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom,” and “Tour a Gulag Camp.” gulaghistory.org/

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A vast collection of material on all aspects of the Holocaust and other acts of genocide. www.ushmm.org

• Windows on War: Soviet Posters, 1943–1945. A colorful collection of Soviet propaganda posters from the last years of the war. http://windowsonwar.nottingham.ac.uk/