Erik Larson is one of our best non-fiction writers.

The Devil in the White City is the best of his books I’ve read, so far.

This one is excellent too. An inside early look at Berlin under the physically unimpressive Adolf Hitler and his lickspittles.

WW II would result in 70–85 million dead, or about 3% of the 1940 world population. Hitler personally responsible for many of those millions.

He committed suicide April 30, 1945. Could Hitler have been stopped earlier?

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin is the true story of American Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, particularly the years 1933 to 1937 when he and his family, including his daughter Martha, lived in Berlin. …

Martha, separated from her husband and in the process of divorce, became caught up in the glamor and excitement of Berlin’s social scene and had a series of liaisons, most of them sexual, including among them Gestapo head Rudolf Diels and Soviet attaché and secret agent Boris Vinogradov. 

In fact, daughter Martha was once presented to Hitler. One of the Führer’s henchmen hoped the dictator would be attracted. An American concubine would make his hateful regime more palatable to the USA.