Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books

Trump, Antisemitism & Academia

If the Trump administration were truly concerned about antisemitism, it would start in its own house.

April 10, 2025 issue

Hitler’s Enablers

The complicity of conservative nationalists in the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 offers disturbing parallels to the current American political situation.

Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power

by Timothy W. Ryback

Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich

by Peter Fritzsche

The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

by Benjamin Carter Hett

November 7, 2024 issue

Fragile, Resilient Weimar

Understanding how German democracy survived the crises it faced in 1923 helps illuminate its demise ten years later.

Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis

by Volker Ullrich, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase

1923: The Crisis of German Democracy in the Year of Hitler’s Putsch

by Mark William Jones

In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism

by Michael Brenner, translated from the German by Jeremiah Riemer

February 8, 2024 issue

An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory

Appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.

November 20, 2023

Adenauer’s Bargain

A new book argues that a delayed reckoning with the Holocaust was necessary for democratization in postwar West Germany.

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955

by Harald Jähner, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside

December 22, 2022 issue

When Did They Decide?

The Wannsee Conference was only one step in the Nazis’ protracted and incremental process of determining the fate of the Jews of Europe.

Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution

by Peter Longerich, translated from the German by Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes

March 24, 2022 issue

Blue Bloods and Brownshirts

The relationship between German nobles and the Nazis was a misalliance in which attraction prevailed over repulsion.

Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance

by Stephan Malinowski, translated from the German by Jon Andrews

July 1, 2021 issue

Imperiled Democracy, Imperiled Planet

November 19, 2020 issue

Who Resisted the Nazis?

The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945

by Olivier Wieviorka, translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd, with a foreword by Robert O. Paxton

Sudden Courage: Youth in France Confront the Germans, 1940–1945

by Ronald C. Rosbottom

Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule

by Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis

Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence, September 1944–January 1945

by Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke, edited by Helmuth Caspar von Moltke, Dorothea von Moltke, and Johannes von Moltke, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch and with an afterword by Rachel Seiffert

July 2, 2020 issue

Giving In to Hitler

When confronted with an analysis of Hitler’s own words that made his goal of war perfectly clear, Neville Chamberlain retreated into complete denial: “If I accepted the author’s conclusions I should despair, but I don’t and won’t.”

Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War

by Tim Bouverie

The Bell of Treason: The 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia

by P.E. Caquet

September 26, 2019 issue