The true story of the Nazi villains that spent the war searching for archaeological treasures that inspired the Indiana Jones movies.

During the 1930s, in the build up to the Second World War, the Nazis established a band of specialists, the SS-Ahnenerbe, under the command of Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Wirth. Their aim was nothing less than to prove the superiority of the Aryan race, and with it the unique right of the German people to rule Europe. The occult figured as a key feature in many of these increasingly desperate quack research efforts. Part science, part espionage, and part fantasy. Archaeological expeditions were sent to Iceland, Tibet, Kafiristan, North Africa, Russia, the Far East, Egypt, and even South America and the Arctic. The Nazi Ancestral Heritage Societys chief administrator was Dr Wolfram Sievers, who cruelly conducted medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps, and was responsible for the looting of historic artefacts considered Germanic for return to Germany. He rewarded those academics that took part with high military office, whilst those academics who contradicted or criticized the SS-Anenerbe were carted off to concentration camps where they faced certain death. This book tells the true history of the real life villains behind the Indiana Jones movies. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction!

“The best single volume available on the torturous life and savage reign of Adolf Hitler.” —Time A bestseller in its original German edition and subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages, Joachim Fest’s Hitler has become a classic portrait of a man, a nation, and an era. Fest tells and interprets the extraordinary story of a man’s and nation’s rise from impotence to absolute power, as Germany and Hitler, from shared premises, entered into their covenant. He shows Hitler exploiting the resentments of the shaken, post–World War I social order and seeing through all that was hollow behind the appearance of power, at home and abroad. Fest reveals the singularly penetrating politician, hypnotizing Germans and outsiders alike with the scope of his projects and the theatricality of their presentation. Perhaps most importantly, he also brilliantly uncovers the destructive personality that aimed for and achieved devastation on an unprecedented scale. As history and biography, this is a towering achievement, a compelling story told in a way only a German could tell it: “dispassionately, but from the inside” (Time).

The compelling story of leading physicists in Germany—including Peter Debye, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg—and how they accommodated themselves to working within the Nazi state in the 1930s and ’40s. After World War II, most scientists in Germany maintained that they had been apolitical or actively resisted the Nazi regime, but the true story is much more complicated. In Serving the Reich, Philip Ball takes a fresh look at that controversial history, contrasting the career of Peter Debye, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, with those of two other leading physicists in Germany during the Third Reich: Max Planck, the elder statesman of physics after whom Germany’s premier scientific society is now named, and Werner Heisenberg, who succeeded Debye as director of the institute when it became focused on the development of nuclear power and weapons. Mixing history, science, and biography, Ball’s gripping exploration of the lives of scientists under Nazism offers a powerful portrait of moral choice and personal responsibility, as scientists navigated “the grey zone between complicity and resistance.” Ball’s account of the different choices these three men and their colleagues made shows how there can be no clear-cut answers or judgment of their conduct. Yet, despite these ambiguities, Ball makes it undeniable that the German scientific establishment as a whole mounted no serious resistance to the Nazis, and in many ways acted as a willing instrument of the state. Serving the Reich considers what this problematic history can tell us about the relationship between science and politics today. Ultimately, Ball argues, a determination to present science as an abstract inquiry into nature that is “above politics” can leave science and scientists dangerously compromised and vulnerable to political manipulation.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of V2 and Fatherland—a WWII-era spy thriller set against the backdrop of the fateful Munich Conference of September 1938. Now a Netflix film starring Jeremy Irons. With this electrifying novel about treason and conscience, loyalty and betrayal, "Harris has brought history to life with exceptional skill" (The Washington Post). Hugh Legat is a rising star of the British diplomatic service, serving at 10 Downing Street as a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Paul von Hartmann is on the staff of the German Foreign Office--and secretly a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. The two men were friends at Oxford in the 1920s, but have not been in contact since. Now, when Hugh flies with Chamberlain from London to Munich, and Hartmann travels on Hitler's train overnight from Berlin, their paths are set on a disastrous collision course. And once again, Robert Harris gives us actual events of historical importance--here are Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, Daladier--at the heart of an electrifying, unputdownable novel.

In this powerful expose about Hitler's secret funding, James Pool tells the full story of the financial calculation, exploitation, and greed at the core of the Third Reich--including startling revelations about those who provided Hitler with money and the moral support he needed. The current furor over Nazi money held in Swiss banks makes this book extremely timely. photos. Print reviews.

A look at Adolf Hitler’s residences and their role in constructing and promoting the dictator’s private persona both within Germany and abroad. Adolf Hitler’s makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator’s preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler’s bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator’s three dwellings—the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg—to foster the myth of the Führer as a morally upstanding and refined man. Author Despina Stratigakos also reveals the previously untold story of Hitler’s interior designer, Gerdy Troost, through newly discovered archival sources. At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler’s homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler’s domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book’s rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler’s homes and into the sheer power of the propaganda that influenced how the world saw him. “Inarguably the powder-keg title of the year.”—Mitchell Owen, Architectural Digest “A fascinating read, which reminds us that in Nazi Germany the architectural and the political can never be disentangled. Like his own confected image, Hitler’s buildings cannot be divorced from their odious political hinterland.”—Roger Moorhouse, Times