For Dracula's Secret, I had to do a lot of research into the Nazi war effort. I wasn't satisfied with the usual secondary and tertiary sources, so I went hunting.
I got sidetracked by some research. I was figuring out how modern Berlin differed in layout from World War II Berlin, especially what happened to the land where the final bunker was.
(It's an apartment block and playground now. How very cool!)
In the course of looking that up, I found a book called In the Bunker with Hitler by Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven.
Von L, as I started to call him, was a Captain in the regular Army, and was aide-de-camp to the Army chiefs of staff- Guderian and Krebs. He describes his experiences in the Bunker from July 23, 1944 to April 29, 1945.
It's a fast, fascinating read, and I suddenly wanted to do a paper on Group Think and the Third Reich. Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, by Irving L. Janis is one of my favorite books. This would be an amazing study, full of footnotes and quotes (and parenthetical statements).
But alas, there is only so much time in the world. So instead, I'm going to use In the Bunker... as a primary source on Hitler's behavior and personality in the last days of World War II. Some of my notes:
1. Never underestimate the power of charismatic, motivated, deluded idiot.
2. As much as it sucks, it really does help to listen to people who disagree with you.
3. As nice as it is in your own little world where your soldiers are at full strength with plenty of food, ammunition, fuel, and not being killed by your enemy, you might want to maybe, just maybe try playing make-believe.
4. The regular Army really didn't know about the war atrocities. I never understood that before, but after hearing how Hitler ran things, I see how he did it, and why. (Secret meetings with the Nazi party because he didn't trust or like the regular Army men).
This is why primary source research is the most fun of all.
