Saturday, 24 November 2012
Matthew Seligmann - Daily Life In Hitler's Germany
I bought Daily Life in Hitler's Germany a few years ago because it was in the discount section of one of the local bookstores. I wasn't overly excited to read it, but it wasn't bad.
In general it was a fairly good outline of Germany under Nazi rule, but it wasn't overly exciting. I had a few problems with it as well. For one, there were problems with the chapter on German resistance to the Nazis. Resistance seemed to be a fairly poorly defined concept, with the author somehow including Himmler's secret negotiations with Britain as a resistance effort rather than an act of self-preservation. Including actions like that could quite easily give the reader the wrong impression that German resistance was of more significance than it really was. Another issue I had with the book was its use of pictures. One of the things that drew me to Daily Life in the first place was how many pictures were included, but unfortunately in many cases the pictures were irrelevant to the text of the page (as an example, a picture of German tanks in Paris was included next to the section on German resistance).
Other than these problems, the book does a decent job of outlining the issues faced by ordinary Germans during the Nazi period. I would recommend this as a good book for people with little knowledge of the Nazi system to become acquainted with it.
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