Certain books, Kershaw’s Hubris foremost among them, proved exceptionally helpful in detailing the broad play of forces and men in the years that preceded World War II. I include here a couple of old but still worthy classics, Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, as well as the more recent works of Kershaw’s doppelgänger in scholarship, Richard J. Evans, whose The Third Reich in Power: 1933–1939 and The Third Reich at War: 1939–1945 are massive volumes lush with compelling, if appalling, detail.
