Best WWII non-fiction you've read

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A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous - she kept her identity secret for decades. It’s about how the author and other women coped / had to cope when the Soviet forces “liberated” Berlin in 1945

This is harrowing. A book you won't forget.

Is it the one by Norman Longmate or Rodney Foster? Both appear to have been colonels and used the same book title! Or was it by someone else entirely?

@whatausername Rodney Foster. (How daft of a publisher to put another book on the same subject out under an existing title.)

Berlin by Antony Beevor

I read Piepel by Ka-Tzetnik when I was about 15. My mum used to collect second hand books for Oxfam, and I often used to choose a book or two to read before they went to Oxfam. This book was among them.

It is the most unbelievably harrowing account of life in Auschwitz. I don't think I could read it again.

Seconding or thirding Nella Last’s War. Brilliant, as was the follow up, Nella Last’s Peace.
Mischling, Second Degree, memoirs of a girl in Nazi Germany with one Jewish grandparent is also excellent.

Ungentlemanly warfare by Giles Milton is superb and all about how the SOE started.

The Bomber Boys Trilogy by Kevin Wilson, I'm just reading them again for the fourth time. My uncle was shot down & killed while serving in Bomber Command as part of 626 Squadron & I was so proud that his crew got a mention in the last book.

Lancaster Target by Jack Currie, the story of his tour as part of 626 Squadron as a pilot of a Lancaster Crew.

The wartime memoir of Władysław Szpilman, the English translation is called The Pianist. About the gifted musician's fight for survival in Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto, and later in the ruins of the city, by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming.

Two different books with the same name.
Operation Sealion - Leo McKinstry.
Operation Sealion - Peter Schenk.

I Will Bear Witness, the war diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic. Written in secret and hidden during the war, as it was illegal for him to keep a diary, they tell an often harrowing story of the minutiae of his daily life, as he lived continually with fear and hunger.
He survived the bombing of Dresden, and the desperate chaotic months of the fall of the Third Reich.

Savage Continent Keith Lowe

If this is a man Primo Levi

A woman in Berlin

If this is a woman Sarah Helm

Their darkest hour Laurence Rees

East West Street by Philippe Sands, about the two Jewish lawyers who developed the ideas of genocide and international human rights laws, interwoven with their family histories.

A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous - she kept her identity secret for decades. It’s about how the author and other women coped / had to cope when the Soviet forces “liberated” Berlin in 1945

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor

Dambusters by James Holland

Dresden by Frederick Taylor - about the bombing of 13th / 14th February 1945

Berlin
Stalingrad

Both books by Anthony Beevor

Just started Operation Pedestal by Max Hastings which is the story of the convoy sent to relieve Malta, pretty good so far

Also Operation Mincemeat by Ben McIntyre

For fiction books still don't think you can beat The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Montserrat and Das Boot by Lothar Gunther Buchheim. Battle of the Atlantic seen from both sides

All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings. It’s a history of the entire of the war but he never lets you loose the thread of what’s happening and puts some fascinating things in context. Like how the Pacific and North African was were partly driven by a need to keep the war “going” until the European invasion was ready.

Whoops those stars were my copy & pasting gone wrong

Home front diaries:-

Mr Brown's War

These Wonderful Rumours!: A Young Schoolteacher's Wartime Diaries 1939-1945 by May Smith

Sand in My Shoes by Joan Rice (mother of Sir Tim)

Betty's Wartime Diaries by Betty Armitage

We Are At War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times by Simon Garfield

Books by Stephen E Ambrose

D Day
Citizen Soldiers
Band of Brothers
Wild Blue
Pegasus Bridge

Parachute Infantry by David Kenyon Webster

Currahee!: A Screaming Eagle at Normandy by Donald R Burgett

4.7 out of 5 stars

4.6 out of 5 stars

Think it might be Foster if it's a diary-style book!

Not strictly non fiction (based on a true story) but mine would be The Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly.

Is it the one by Norman Longmate or Rodney Foster? Both appear to have been colonels and used the same book title! Or was it by someone else entirely?

Night by Elie Wiesel (Holocaust)

Schindlers list

I came on to recommend this book. I found myself reading it with my jaw dropped, periodically saying "they'll never get away with that, surely!" But they did.

Travellers in the Third Reich.