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Introduction i Version: Last updated Friday, April 13, 2001 Endnotes will be found from page 842 Hitler’s War and The War Path Website download edition © Parforce UK Ltd This Adobe .pdf (Portable Document Format) edition is uploaded onto the FPP website as a tool for students and academics. It can be downloaded for reading and study purposes only, and is not to be commercially distributed in any form. Readers are invited to submit any typographical errors they spot to David Irving at the address below, or to submit them via email direct to him at [email protected]. Rewards are paid for each error found and accepted. The website edition will be constantly updated and corrected. Informed comments and corrections on historical points are also welcomed. David Irving Focal Point Publications Duke Street London phone: fax: email: [email protected] ii Introduction David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Educated at Imperial College of Science & Technology and at University College London, he subsequently spent a year in Germany working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the German language. Among his thirty books, the best-known include Hitler’s War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field 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. He lives in Grosvenor Square, London, and has raised five daughters. In he published The Destruction of Dresden. This became a best-seller in many countries. In he issued a revised edition, Apocalypse 1945, as well as his important biography, Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. A second volume of Churchill’s War will appear shortly. Introduction iii David Irving Hitler’s Wa r 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 iv Introduction Josephine 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 considerably revised and expanded on the basis of materials available since then. The volume is also available as a free download in PDF format 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 Biddle & Co. Ltd, Guildford Introduction v Contents vii Introduction 1 Prologue: The Nugget 13 Dictator by Consent 33 Triumph of the Will 43 ‘One Day, the World’ 53 First Lady 67 Goddess of Fortune 83 ‘Green’ 95 The Other Side of Hitler 103 Whetting the Blade 113 Munich 131 One Step Along a Long Path 153 In Hitler’s Chancellery 169 Fifty 181 Extreme Unction 187 The Major Solution 199 Pact with the Devil 215 Entr’acte: His First Silesian War 223 ‘White’ 237 Overtures 249 Incidents 261 Clearing the Decks 271 ‘We Must Destroy Them Too!’ 281 Hors d’Œuvre 295 The Warlord at the Western Front 309 The Big Decision 323 The Dilemma 335 Molotov 345 The ‘Barbarossa’ Directive 353 Let Europe Hold its Breath 363 Behind the Door 373 A Bitter Victory 383 Hess and Bormann 399 Pricking the Bubble 411 The Country Poacher vi Introduction 425 Kiev 443 Cold Harvest 461 A Test of Endurance 473 Hitler Takes Command 485 Hitler’s Word is Law 501 ‘Blue’ 511 The Black Spot for Halder 523 Africa and Stalingrad 539 Trauma and Tragedy 553 Retreat 567 Silence of the Tomb 579 Clutching at Straws 593 Correcting the Front Line 607 ‘Axis’ 623 Feelers to Stalin 635 ‘And So It Will Be, Mein Führer!’ 649 Trouble from Providence 663 The Most Reviled 681 Man with a Yellow Leather Briefcase 697 ‘Do You Recognise My Voice?’ 715 He Who Rides a Tiger 731 Rommel Gets a Choice 747 On the Brink of a Volcano 767 The Gamble 779 Waiting for a Telegram 795 Hitler Goes to Ground 811 ‘Eclipse’ 839 Author’s Notes 842 Author’s notes and sources Introduction vii Introduction o historians is granted a talent that even the gods are denied – Tto 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 scrub- bing 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 nar- rows the field 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 worth the effort: after all, Hitler’s war left forty million dead and caused all of Europe and half of Asia to be wasted by fire and explosives; it destroyed Hitler’s ‘Third Reich,’ bankrupted Britain and lost her the Empire, and it brought lasting disorder to the world’s affairs; 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 histo- rian. I naïvely supposed that the same primary-sources technique could within five years be applied to a study of Hitler. In fact it would be thirteen years before the first volume, Hitler’s War , was published in and twenty years later I was still indexing and adding to my documentary files. I re- member, in , driving down to Tilbury Docks to collect a crate of microfilms 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 more and more future writers find themselves compelled to consult it for vii viii Introduction 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 Hit- ler’s War; at the universities of Wollongong and Canberra students are disciplined if they don’t. The biography was required reading for officers at military academies from Sandhurst to West Point, New York, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, until special-interest groups applied pressure to the com- manding officers 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 printers firebombed, and myself arrested and deported by tiny, democratic Austria – an illegal act, their courts decided, for which the ministerial cul- prits were punished; at the behest of disaffected academics and influential citizens, in subsequent years, I was deported from Canada (in ), and refused entry to Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, and other civi- lised countries around the world (in ). In my absence, internationally affiliated groups circulated letters to librarians, pleading for this book to be taken off 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 the clippings files on you. Until Hit- ler’s War you couldn’t put a foot wrong, you were the darling of the media; but after it...’ I offer 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 Washington Post noted in its review of the first edition in , ‘British historians have always been more objec- tive toward Hitler than either German or American writers.’ Introduction ix my conclusions on completing the manuscript startled even me.