I’m currently making my way through The Third Reich Trilogy as an audiobook and it is hands down the best researched, most in-depth piece of history I’ve ever read / listened to.
Evans must have spent half his life in primary sources and uses that research to great effect. The book includes many diary and newspaper extracts from the time for example (including liberal use of Goebbels diary) and goes into detail in all sorts of areas that paint a very clear picture of everyday life in Germany at the time.
It’s long (around 90 hours audio or over 2000 pages) but I have learned so much from it.
The Execution of Private Slovik by William Bradford Huie. Very niche book, but tightly wound narrative that sticks to the facts while giving you the complexities to come to your own nuanced opinion. It’s a biography of the only man to ever be executed in the 20th century for dereliction and refusing to fight after having been drafted. The entire affair is a microcosm of human tragedy.