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Historical person
1889–1945
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who led the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and established a totalitarian dictatorship after becoming chancellor in January 1933. A veteran of the First World War, he entered radical nationalist politics in Munich, helped organise the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and rebuilt the Nazi movement around electoral mobilisation, propaganda and paramilitary intimidation. Once in government, the Nazis rapidly destroyed parliamentary democracy and eliminated organised political opposition.
Hitler’s dictatorship was founded on racial antisemitism, aggressive nationalism and the systematic persecution of groups defined as enemies of the regime. Nazi Germany’s expansion brought Europe into war in September 1939, while German authorities and collaborators organised the Holocaust, murdering six million Jews and millions of other victims. As Allied forces closed on Berlin in 1945, Hitler remained in the Führerbunker, where he died by suicide on 30 April, shortly before Germany’s unconditional surrender.
David Boyle’s Munich 1938 follows Adolf Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland, Neville Chamberlain’s repeated journeys to meet him, French uncertainty under Édouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini’s role in the final conference, while also considering German opponents who contemplated moving against Hitler if he launched a reckless war. In Rory Clements’ A Prince and a Spy, Prince George, Duke of Kent, meets his cousin Prince Philipp of Hesse, a committed Nazi with close access to Adolf Hitler. Days later George dies when his aircraft crashes in northern Scotland, and official explanations leave unanswered questions about the purpose of his journey. Further fictional perspectives on Adolf Hitler can be found in Kimberley Woodhouse’s A Song in the Dark, Jeffrey Archer’s Adam and Eve, Sven Hassel’s Assignment Gestapo, Sven Hassel’s Blitzfreeze, and Sven Hassel’s Comrades of War.
Series
The Breaking Point series follows RAF fighter pilot Johnnie Shaux and mathematician-turned-military analyst Eleanor Rand, later Eleanor Shaux, through the successive years of the Second World War. Johnnie experiences the conflict from cockpits, airfields and operational units, while Eleanor works in headquarters where intelligence, logistics and strategy determine…
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The Caje Cole series follows an Appalachian hunter serving as an American sniper from the Normandy landings through the final campaigns in Europe and into the Korean War. The Second World War novels place Cole against German marksmen during D-Day, the Falaise fighting, the Ardennes offensive and Operation…
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The Morland Dynasty is a thirty-six-book family saga tracing the fictional Morlands of Yorkshire from 1434 to the approach of the Second World War. Beginning with the marriage of Robert Morland and Eleanor, a ward of the Beaufort family, the sequence follows successive generations as Morland Place grows…
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The Maisie Dobbs series follows a working-class London girl who becomes a nurse, psychologist and private investigator after education and service during the First World War. Beginning with her first independent case in 1929, the novels combine murder investigations with Maisie’s continuing effort to understand the physical and…
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The Assegai Sequence follows Leon Courtney and his daughter Saffron from British East Africa before the First World War through the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the early post-war struggle over colonial Kenya. The books combine family conflict, espionage and military history across Africa and…
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The Burning Shore Sequence follows Centaine de Thiry and later Courtney generations from the Western Front and the aftermath of the First World War through the Great Depression, the rise of apartheid and the Cold War conflicts of southern Africa. Rage is restored as book 3 between Power…
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The CI Schenke novels follow Berlin criminal inspector Horst Schenke during the Second World War. A professional detective who has avoided joining the Nazi Party, Schenke must solve ordinary crimes inside a dictatorship whose police, party and security organisations protect the powerful and turn private secrets into mortal…
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The Jack Tanner series follows a sergeant in the fictional King’s Own Yorkshire Rangers through the British Army’s changing fortunes between 1940 and 1943. The Odin Mission begins during the retreat from Norway, Darkest Hour moves through the fall of France and Dunkirk, and Blood of Honour places…
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The Legion of the Damned series follows a fictionalised Sven and the recurring soldiers of a German penal armoured regiment across the Second World War. Porta, Tiny, the Legionnaire, the Old Man, Julius Heide and their comrades move between the Eastern Front, Nazi Germany, Italy, occupied France, Warsaw,…
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The After Dunkirk series follows the Littlefield family from the evacuation of 1940 through the final campaigns of the Second World War. Separated across occupied France, Britain, North Africa, Italy, Germany and the Pacific, the siblings serve as pilots, soldiers, intelligence officers, codebreakers and resistance operatives while their…
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Duty Calls is James Holland’s young-adult sequence about teenage servicemen caught inside the major British battles of 1940. Duty Calls: Dunkirk follows the under-age Private Johnny Hawke through the collapse of the British campaign in France and the evacuation from Dunkirk, presenting combat from the limited viewpoint of…
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The Odessa Novels begin in West Germany in 1963, when journalist Peter Miller follows a Holocaust survivor’s diary into a clandestine network protecting fugitive SS officers. More than sixty years later, Revenge of Odessa follows Peter’s grandson Georg as a new generation of extremists uses terrorism, propaganda and…
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The Century Trilogy follows five interconnected families from Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States from the years before the First World War to the collapse of Communist rule in Europe. Across three generations, miners, aristocrats, diplomats, political organisers, soldiers and journalists experience public events through marriages, rivalries…
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The Tom Wilde series follows an American-born Cambridge history professor drawn into British and Allied intelligence work from the crises of 1936 through the Second World War and the early Cold War. The novels combine espionage with political extremism, scientific research, royal scandal, propaganda and contested wartime memory.…
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The Alex Kovacs series follows a Czech-born Viennese businessman who is drawn into espionage during the destruction of interwar Europe. Books one and two place him against the rise of Nazism and the approach of war; books three to seven follow his work in the French Resistance from…
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The Commando trilogy, first published under the Alan Savage pen name, follows Harry Curtis from the retreat at Dunkirk into Britain’s newly formed raiding forces. Early operations combine sabotage, coastal attack and code intelligence, while the losses at Lofoten and St Nazaire establish the physical and psychological cost…
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The Clifton Chronicles follow the Clifton and Barrington families from working-class Bristol in the 1920s through the upheavals of the twentieth century. Harry Clifton’s uncertain parentage, education and friendship with Giles Barrington bind him to a shipping dynasty whose wealth is repeatedly threatened by inheritance disputes, wartime loss,…
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The Spy Masters quartet ranges from D-Day deception and wartime Switzerland to the fall of Vienna and the long shadow of the Cold War. The Best of Our Spies is rooted in Operation Fortitude and occupied France; The Swiss Spy uses neutral Switzerland and the approach to Operation…
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The Double Agent series follows two intertwined espionage stories from the mid-1930s into the closing months of the Second World War: Charles Cooper, a British writer drawn into Soviet intelligence, and a traitor known as Archie who has penetrated the British establishment. Every Spy a Traitor moves from…
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Traitors follows Englishman Conrad de Lancey and his German Oxford friend Theo von Hertenberg through the conspiracies surrounding Hitler’s Germany on the eve and opening months of the Second World War. Friendship, patriotism and conscience repeatedly pull them into contacts between British intelligence and German officers who believe…
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Roads to War follows soldier of fortune Cal Jardine through the crises that lead Europe towards the Second World War. His missions take him from Nazi Germany and threatened Abyssinia to the Spanish Civil War and the struggle over Czechoslovakia. Each novel places Jardine among volunteers, agents and…
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The Foreign Correspondent mysteries follow British historian and Great War veteran Sir Archie Laverick and ambitious American journalist Esme Carmichael as they investigate crimes in European capitals during the unstable early 1930s. Operation Berlin places them in Germany in 1930; the novella Operation Lost Hours continues their Berlin…
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Set in the unsettled United States and Europe of the 1920s, the Seth Armitage novels follow a World War I veteran working with the young Bureau of Investigation as he confronts crimes in which the recent past remains dangerously active. Political corruption, unresolved wartime trauma and the legacy…
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The Detective Sebastian Wolff series follows a Munich police detective attempting to investigate crime as Nazi rule destroys judicial independence. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the novels place disappearances, murder and political violence inside propaganda spectacles, party rivalries and the personal compromises demanded by dictatorship. Wolff’s professional duty repeatedly…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
