Tiem and again, small numbers of Germans, civilian nad military, noble and ignoble, scheme to topple the Fuhrer, and on several occasions they came within minutes - or inches - of succeeding. Fest explores why they tried, why they found so little support either in Germany or outside it, and why they failed.

Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-45

History

Fest, Joachim

World

Metropolitan Books

Albert Speer is a great enigma. An unemployed architect when Hitler came to power in 1933, he was soon designing the Third Reich's most important buildings. In 1942 Hitler appointed him Armaments Minister and he quadrupled production, an astonishing achievement that kept the German Army in the field and prolonged the war.  Yet Speer's life was full of contradictions. The only member of the Nazi elite with whom Hitler developed more than a purely functional relationship (he has even been called "Hitler's unrequited love"), Speer was always an outsider in Hitler's inner circle. He saw himself as an artist, above the crass power struggles of the roughnecks around him, but his enormous ambition blinded him to the crimes in which he played a leading role.  Brilliantly illustrated, this gripping account of one man's rise and fall helps explain how Germany descended so far into crime and barbarism.

Speer: The Final Verdict

Biographies & Memoirs

Fest, Joachim C.

Arts & Literature

Weidenfeld Nicolson Ltd

Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich

"A vivid reconstruction of the final weeks of Hitler’s regime." - Kirkus Reviews
Fest describes in riveting detail the final weeks of the war, from the desperate battles that raged night and day in the ruins of Berlin, fought by boys and old men, to the growing paranoia that marked Hitler's mental state, to his suicide and the efforts of his loyal aides to destroy his body before the advancing Russian armies reached Berlin.
 Inside Hitler's Bunker combines meticulous research with spellbinding storytelling and sheds light on events that, for those who survived them, were nothing less than the end of the world.

Europe

Picador

There is nothing in recent history that comes close to the cataclysmic events of the spring of 1945. Never before has the defeat of a nation been accompanied by such monumental loss of life, such utter destruction. Author Joachim Fest shows that the devastation was the result of Hitler's determination to take the entire country down with him; he would make sure that his enemies would find only a wasteland, where once there was a thriving civilization. Fest describes in riveting detail the final weeks of the war, from the desperate battles that raged night and day in the ruins of Berlin, fought by boys and old men, to the growing paranoia that marked Hitler's mental state--his utter disregard for the well being of both soldiers and civilians-- to his suicide and the efforts of his loyal aides to destroy his body before the advancing Russian armies reached Berlin. Inside Hitler's Bunker combines meticulous research with spellbinding storytelling and sheds light on events that, for those who survived them, were nothing less than the end of the world.

Historical

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The author documents more than a dozen plots to assassinate Hitler, surprisingly, from conservative and military circles within Germany

Plotting Hitler's Death: The Story of German Resistance

Fest recounts in vivid detail the events leading up to the July 20, 1944 attempt by German anti-Nazi conspirators to kill Hitler with a bomb, and for the first time, brings to a popular audience the full story of the German resistance.

Holt Paperbacks

Hitler's bunker was the setting for one of the most dramatic final acts in history. Using eye-witness accounts, and drawing on a working life's research into Hitler and the Nazi party, the great historian, Joachim Fest, has produced a gripping new narrative of the tortured collapse of the Third Reich. As Stalin's massive forces destroy Berlin around him, we are shown a drugged, enfeebled Hitler veering wildly between hysterical despair, lunatic optimism and psychopathic cravings for total destruction. As Russian tanks grind their way ever nearer, the Nazi regime crumbles amidst desperate acts of betrayal, suicide and mutual recrimination. These final days reveal the true nature of Hitler and his party: their deluded sense of historical purpose, their morbid love of self-destruction, and their murderous disregard for the fate of the German people. 'even those readers familiar with the material will be unable to put the book down' - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Inside Hitler's Bunker

Macmillan

One of the New York Times Books Review's 100 Notable Books of 2014!A portrait of an intellectually rigorous German household opposed  to  the Nazis and how its members suffered for their political stanceFew   writers have deepened our understanding of the Third Reich as much as   German historian, biographer, journalist, and critic Joachim Fest. His   biography of Adolf Hitler has reached millions of readers around the   world. Born in 1926, Fest experienced firsthand the rise of the Nazis,   the Second World War, and a catastrophically defeated Germany, thus   becoming a vital witness to these difficult years.In this memoir   of his childhood and youth, Fest offers a far-reaching view of how he   experienced the war and National Socialism. True to the German Bildung tradition,   Fest grows up immersed in the works of Goethe, Schiller, Mörike,  Rilke,  Kleist, Mozart, and Beethoven. His father, a conservative  Catholic  teacher, opposes the Nazi regime and as a result loses his job  and  status. Fest is forced to move to a boarding school in the  countryside  that he despises, and in his effort to come to terms with  his father’s  strong political convictions, he embarks on a tireless  quest for  knowledge and moral integrity that will shape the rest of his  life and  writing career.

Not I: A German Childhood

ATLANTIC BOOKS *

In fifteen incisive profiles, Joachim Fest, one of the greatest authorities on the Third Reich, offers a compelling and definitive examination of the lives of the most infamous Nazi leaders: the dark powers behind Hitler's throne. They include Hermann Goering: Hitler's designated successor and issuer of orders for the Final Solution; Joseph Goebbels: Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and the Kristallnacht mastermind; Heinrich Himmler: Reichsführer of the SS, responsible for the deaths of more than six million Jews; Martin Bormann: Hitler's private secretary, who wielded power by controlling access to the Führer; Rudolph Hess: Deputy of the Nazi Party who was tried at Nuremberg and controversially imprisoned for life; Albert Speer: "the Nazi who said sorry"; and of course, Hitler himself.

The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership

Tauris Parke Paperbacks

Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood

Memoirs

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fest, Joachim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fest, Joachim

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fest, Joachim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-45

Speer: The Final Verdict

Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich

Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich

Plotting Hitler's Death: The Story of German Resistance

Plotting Hitler's Death: The Story of German Resistance

Inside Hitler's Bunker

Not I: A German Childhood

The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership

Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood