The scope of World War II still has the power to stagger the imagination, even 75 years after its end: More than 30 countries were drawn directly into hostilities that took the lives of between 70 million and 85 million people and reshaped vast swaths of the world.
Books about the war are perennially popular, and publishers leaped to provide books for this anniversary year. The new titles include examinations of cultural changes, military history (which has always been the backbone of World War II studies), and hefty biographies of key players.
University of Illinois professor Peter Fritzsche’s “Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich” is a brilliant, quietly horrifying new anatomy of precisely how Germany went from a traumatized and fragmented republic to a Nazi dictatorship, and the extent to which the much-debated “ordinary German” was an enthusiastic participant. (The latter was also the subject of historian Robert Gellately’s excellent book “Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis.”)
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