UBC: The Devil's Disciples

[truepenny]

Read, Anthony. The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004.

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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.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

And if you read say, The War Between the Generals, you will find that the Allies were hardly immune from those emotions at the very highest level. My admiration for Ike went through the roof after reading what he had to deal with.

[marycatelli]

Just reading about the Pacific War myself, and about Japanese army-navy conflicts. Whereupon the author commented that the American army-navy conflicts were as bad, but the United States could afford them. Japan couldn't.