Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Who's Reviewing What?, August 19, 2005
I don't know which book the previous reviewer was reading, but it wasn't this one. Professor Wistrich's book is intended as a reference work, providing brief biographies of important or significant persons in Germany under the Nazi regime. It is not intended to provide a comprehensive biography of every member of the Nazi Party, nor to be a compendium of evil-doers, and it does neither. For example, it includes listings for Bertolt Brecht (playwright and poet), Otto Dix (German-expressionist painter), Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize-winning physicist), and Kathe Kollwitz (Socialist and painter)-- none of them Nazis. The big-name Nazis are there, but so are church leaders, artists, scientists, and business people, of a variety of political and ideological orientations, some of them offering active resistance to National Socialism.
The book is a biographical dictionary, providing a ready reference and point of departure for further research by the serious student. If I have a criticism, it is in some of those selected for inclusion-- a necessarily subjective decision, as the author acknowleges.
The previous reviewer's contention that Wistrich cites four of his own works in the bibliography again left me wondering what book he had read. In my copy, the author cites a grand total of ONE of his own works. Nor is the book the protracted drumbeat about how evil the Nazis were that the previous reviewer would have us believe it is, though failure to acknowledge the fact would be a falsification of history worthy of an ideologue-- not a historian.
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35 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not for academic pursuits..., January 20, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Who's Who In Nazi Germany (Paperback)
If you want to discover that Nazis were very, very bad people, then this book is for you! However, if you are writing a paper or piece of historical fiction, or if you simply want to gain understanding about the political underpinnings and society of Nazi Germany, then this wouldn't be a good choice. This book only features the well-known Nazis, and is very general in scope. You definitely won't find anything new here if you are a history buff. If you need info on a particular influential Nazi, for example Gregor Ebner or Emil Strom, look elsewhere. Only brief (page-and-a-half or so) bios with lists of evil deeds are included--nothing about organizations, timelines, or political relationships. Nothing of any substance. I was very disappointed by the lack of info in this book, and feel somewhat cheated.(It took twenty days to arrive, too.) This book seems to have suffered from the author's passion for the subject. In the bibliography, he cites four of his own previous books, which is bad form for a scholar. I can't imagine how this book could be useful to anyone except for those who need to be reassured that the bastards are still evil after all these years. Most of this book is hot air. One star (two if you need to be reminded that Nazis are not good Volks).
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must Reference Book on your shelf, March 10, 2009
This resource book is a must for anyone who reads about WWII; the Russians, the US, and especially Germany. For a begineer its a great resource book to learn exactly who you are reading about. For more formal studiers it gives in-depth discriptions that you might find interesting. This is a reference book not a fictional read. It's good to have handy. It is a big book so you will never run out of people to look up. I keep it on my shelf and use it when reading about Germany.
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