To historians is granted a talent that even the gods are denied
–
to alter what has already happened! ’
I bore this scoful 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 conceed 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 F?hrer’s
desk, seeing each episode through his eyes. The technique necessarily narrows
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.
to alter what has already happened! ’
I bore this scoful 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 conceed 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 F?hrer’s
desk, seeing each episode through his eyes. The technique necessarily narrows
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.