UBC: The Devil's Disciples
Mar. 15th, 2011 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyRead, Anthony. The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004.
Massive (nine hundred plus pages), extremely readable history of the second-tier Nazis: Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Bormann. After finishing this, I never want to hear anybody going on about how men are more rational than women and aren't controlled by their emotions and all the rest of that chauvinist bullshit, because these guys? In-fighting and backbiting and temper tantrums and hysterics--it's exactly like high school, only somehow, these guys are running Germany and organizing the Holocaust and, oh yeah, there's that little matter of World War II.
Read has an unfortunate tendency to accept the "homosexual"="morally bad person" equation I've complained about before (Ernst Röhm and Walther Funk were morally bad people, true, but is that really about their sexual preferences?), but he's very good at deconstructing the self-presentations, both public and private, of Göring and Goebbels, who are the only two Nazis smart enough to make it difficult.
Massive (nine hundred plus pages), extremely readable history of the second-tier Nazis: Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Bormann. After finishing this, I never want to hear anybody going on about how men are more rational than women and aren't controlled by their emotions and all the rest of that chauvinist bullshit, because these guys? In-fighting and backbiting and temper tantrums and hysterics--it's exactly like high school, only somehow, these guys are running Germany and organizing the Holocaust and, oh yeah, there's that little matter of World War II.
Read has an unfortunate tendency to accept the "homosexual"="morally bad person" equation I've complained about before (Ernst Röhm and Walther Funk were morally bad people, true, but is that really about their sexual preferences?), but he's very good at deconstructing the self-presentations, both public and private, of Göring and Goebbels, who are the only two Nazis smart enough to make it difficult.
