Table Of ContentIntroduction i
David Irving
Hitler’s
War
and The War Path
‘Two books in English stand out from the vast literature of the
Second World War: Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe,
published in 1952, and David Irving’s Hitler’s War’
john keegan, Times Literary Supplement
F
FOCAL POINT
Hitler’s War
ii
Twenty years still to go: Wealthy benefactor Lotte Bechstein took this snapshot of
Adolf Hitler, then , at the balustrade of the villa that became the Berghof, after
author’s collection
his release from Landsberg prison in ( )
Introduction i
A Doctor quotes Hitler on Biographers, in August
a foreigner fi
, said Hitler, ‘probably nds it easier to pass judgment on a statesman,
provided he is familiar with the country, its people, its language, and its archives.
‘“Presumably,” I said, “Chamier didn’t know the Kaiser personally, as he was still
relatively young. But his book not only shows a precise knowledge of the archives and
papers, but relies on what are after all many personal items, like the Kaiser’s letters
and written memoranda of conversations with friends and enemies.”
‘“Hitler then said that for some time now he has gone over to having all impor-
tant discussions and military conferences recorded for posterity by shorthand writers.
And perhaps one day after he is dead and buried an objective Englishman will come
and give him the same kind of impartial treatment. The present generation neither
can nor will.”’ – The Diary of Dr Erwin Giesing, on a discussion with Hitler
author’s collection
about the Kaiser’s English biographer J. D. Chamier ( )
David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Imperfectly
educated at London’s Imperial College of Science & Technology and
at University College, he subsequently spent a year in Germany
working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the language.
Among his thirty books (including three in German), the best-known
Hitler’s War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field
include
Marshal Rommel; Accident, the Death of General Sikorski; The
Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe; Göring: a Biography
, and
Nuremberg, the Last Battle
. He has translated several works by
other authors including the autobiographies by Field-Marshal Wilhelm
Keitel, General Reinhard Gehlen, and Nikki Lauda. He lives near
Grosvenor Square, London, and has raised five daughters.
The Destruction of Dresden
In he published . This became a
best-seller in many countries. In he issued a revised edition,
Apocalypse 1945 Goebbels.
, as well as his important biography,
Mastermind of the Third Reich Churchill’s
. A second volume of
War 2001
appeared in and he is now completing the third. His works
are available as free downloads on our Internet website at www.
fpp.co.uk/books.
Hitler’s War
ii
for Josephine Irving
in memoriam ‒
copyright ©
Parforce (UK) Ltd
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication
may be made without written permission. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission of the author
in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act (as amended).
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may
be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Hitler’s War was first published by The Viking Press (New York) and Hodder
& Stoughton (London) in ; The War Path was published by The Viking
Press and Michael Joseph Ltd in . Macmillan Ltd continued to publish
these volumes until . We published a revised edition of both volumes in
. Hitler’s War and The War Path has been extensively revised and
expanded on the basis of materials available since then. The volume is also
available as a free download from our website at www.fpp.co.uk/books.
FOCAL POINT PUBLICATIONS
Duke Street, London wk pe
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
isbn
Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Bath Press
Introduction iii
Contents
Introduction vii
Prologue:The Nugget
w Part I: Approach to Absolute Power
Dictator by Consent
Triumph of the Will
‘One Day, the World’
First Lady
Goddess of Fortune
‘Green’
The Other Side of Hitler
Whetting the Blade
Munich
One Step Along a Long Path
w Part II: Toward the Promised Land
In Hitler’s Chancellery
Fifty
Extreme Unction
The Major Solution
Pact with the Devil
Entr’acte: His First Silesian War
Hitler’s War
iv
w Part III: Hitler’s War Begins
‘White’
Overtures
Incidents
Clearing the Decks
‘We Must Destroy Them Too!’
Hors d’Œuvre
w Part IV: ‘War of Liberation’
The Warlord at the Western Front
The Big Decision
The Dilemma
Molotov
The ‘Barbarossa’ Directive
Let Europe Hold its Breath
Behind the Door
A Bitter Victory
Hess and Bormann
Pricking the Bubble
w Part V: Crusade into Russia
The Country Poacher
Kiev
Cold Harvest
A Test of Endurance
Hitler Takes Command
Hitler’s Word is Law
‘Blue’
The Black Spot for Halder
Introduction v
Africa and Stalingrad
w Part VI: Total War
Trauma and Tragedy
Retreat
Silence of the Tomb
Clutching at Straws
Correcting the Front Line
‘Axis’
Feelers to Stalin
‘And So It Will Be, Mein Führer!’
Trouble from Providence
The Most Reviled
w Part VII: The Worms Turn
Man with a Yellow Leather Briefcase
‘Do You Recognise My Voice?’
He Who Rides a Tiger
Rommel Gets a Choice
On the Brink of a Volcano
w Part VIII: Endkampf
The Gamble
Waiting for a Telegram
Hitler Goes to Ground
‘Eclipse’
Abbreviations
Notes and sources
Hitler’s War
vi
Introduction vii
Introduction
To historians
is granted a talent that even the gods are denied – to
alter what has already happened!’
I bore this scornful saying in mind when I embarked on this study
of Adolf Hitler’s twelve years of absolute power. I saw myself as a stone
cleaner – less concerned with architectural appraisal than with scrubbing
years of grime and discoloration from the facade of a silent and forbidding
monument. I set out to describe events from behind the Führer’s desk,
seeing each episode through his eyes. The technique necessarily narrows
fi
the eld of view, but it does help to explain decisions that are otherwise
inexplicable. Nobody that I knew of had attempted this before, but it seemed
ff
worth the e ort: after all, Hitler’s war left forty million dead and caused all
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of Europe and half of Asia to be wasted by re and explosives; it destroyed
Hitler’s ‘Third Reich,’ bankrupted Britain and lost her the Empire, and it
ff
brought lasting disorder to the world’s a airs; it saw the entrenchment of
communism in one continent, and its emergence in another.
In earlier books I had relied on the primary records of the period rather
than published literature, which contained too many pitfalls for the historian.
I naïvely supposed that the same primary sources technique could within
fi
ve years be applied to a study of Hitler. In fact it would be thirteen years
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before the rst volume, Hitler’s War, was published in and twenty
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years later I was still indexing and adding to my documentary les. I
remember, in , driving down to Tilbury Docks to collect a crate of
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micro lms ordered from the U.S. government for this study; the liner that
brought the crate has long been scrapped, the dockyard itself levelled to
the ground. I suppose I took it all at a far too leisurely pace. I hope however
that this biography, now updated and revised, will outlive its rivals, and that
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more and more future writers nd themselves compelled to consult it for
vii
Hitler’s War
viii
materials that are contained in none of the others. Travelling around the
world I have found that it has split the community of academic historians
from top to bottom, particularly in the controversy around ‘the Holocaust.’
In Australia alone, students from the universities of New South Wales and
Western Australia have told me that there they are penalised for citing Hitler’s
War; at the universities of Wollongong and Canberra students are disciplined
ffi
if they don’t. The biography was required reading for o cers at military
academies from Sandhurst to West Point, New York, and Carlisle, Penn-
sylvania, until special-interest groups applied pressure to the commanding
ffi
o cers of those seats of learning; in its time it attracted critical praise from
the experts behind the Iron Curtain and from the denizens of the Far Right.
Not everybody was content. As the author of this work I have had my
home smashed into by thugs, my family terrorised, my name smeared, my
fi
printers rebombed, and myself arrested and deported by tiny, democratic
Austria – an illegal act, their courts decided, for which the ministerial culprits
ff fl
were punished; at the behest of disa ected academics and in uential citizens,
in subsequent years, I was deported from Canada (in ), and refused
entry to Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, and other civilised
countries around the world (in ).
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In my absence, internationally a liated groups circulated letters to
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librarians, pleading for this book to be taken o their shelves. From time to
time copies of these letters were shown to me. A journalist for Time magazine
dining with me in New York in remarked, ‘Before coming over I read
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the clippings les on you. Until Hitler’s War you couldn’t put a foot wrong,
you were the darling of the media; but after it...’
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I o er no apology for having revised the existing picture of the man. I
have tried to accord to him the kind of hearing that he would have got in an
English court of law – where the normal rules of evidence apply, but also
where a measure of insight is appropriate.
There have been sceptics who questioned whether the heavy reliance on
– inevitably angled – private sources is any better as a method of investigation
than the more traditional quarries of information. My reply is that we
certainly cannot deny the value of private sources altogether. As the
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Washington Post noted in its review of the rst edition in , ‘British
historians have always been more objective toward Hitler than either German
or American writers.’
