The Last Days of Hitler

"It’s not technically a Nazi hunting tale but Trevor-Roper was working for M16 after the war and he had to piece together exactly what happened to the senior Nazis, including Hitler . Nobody knew then exactly what had happened, and the Russians, Stalin, were trying to make out that he was still alive and being sheltered by us, the British, so it was mandatory for us to show that this wasn’t true. So, he was trudging through the ruins of Berlin and he was an Oxford historian, later Lord Dacre, and this is an amazing forensic detective book capturing Hitler’s last days. It was Trevor-Roper who went on to verify the Hitler diaries which was his downfall, really, but his reputation kind of survived even though he never did produce ‘the great book’. But this is a great detective book and it’s about hunting dead Nazis rather than live ones. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"

"Despite the appalling debacle of the Hitler diaries, I think that Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler is the most superb work of contemporary history. It’s one stage on from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia because Orwell is a reporter on the front line and Trevor-Roper is the historian who arrives the moment afterwards. He has a series of absolutely brilliant imaginative insights into what it was like to be in the court of Adolf Hitler . For example, the kind of institutional Darwinism between the different organisations and movements. Armies of boring German scholars have spent decades in the archives producing 2,000-page tomes to show that Trevor-Roper was right in this insight he got in a few months. He also had the dream situation for a contemporary historian, which is to have all your key witnesses locked up in prison, available for interrogation at any moment. Of course he did! He was sent by the British military occupation authorities to do this study, which was to try to establish that Hitler had died, and how he’d died, because we didn’t have the corpse. Actually, the Russians had removed some of the charred remains. But he had all these Nazis who were locked up. We would all give our bottom dollar to have all our key witnesses locked up. Absolutely brilliantly. His valedictory lecture at Oxford, I think it was called ‘History and Imagination’, was about how important imagination is to the historian. When you’ve got the facts straight and read all the documents, then you have to imagine yourself, almost like a novelist, into that world, and that’s what he does. I think the figure who intrigued him and on whom he is very interesting was Albert Speer. Speer was much the most cultured and educated and apparently civilised person close to Hitler, and he was very close to Hitler. I think Hugh was fascinated by this question, which also fascinates me, of how the genuinely cultured, educated person comes to be a servant of great evil. Well, I think that’s what I like about the book. It shows rather than tells. He doesn’t give you a sermon at the end; he just shows you how people were drawn in. You should. You’ll give yourself a treat."