Hitler's War

Rating:
Summary: The Power of Primary Sources
Review: ...for serious students of WW2, as it provides (provided?) a seemingly day-by-day account of how the war was directed.

Irving so accurately brings the reader into the Nazi inner sanctum that the end of the book is depressing, not encouraging. One example of Irving's apparently detailed research that sticks in my mind is his quote of one of the HQ staff, during the final collapse: "well, at least now we can take a streetcar from the Western front to the Eastern Front".

Rating:
Summary: Taking a toothcomb to history
Review: ...While Irving's political and idealogical affiliations may questionable or distasteful, his research is beyond reproach. ... As a historian, a member of the jewish faith, and a consultant for a number of Holocaust-related organisations, I realize the need for what is popularly seen as historical fact to be continuously questioned and probed and that nothing, not even the Holocaust, can be held above examination. Irving himself has stated on more than one occassion that no-one in their right mind can possibly question the reality or the existence of the Holocaust - he is interested in examining the minutiae, the tiny details. His work on the period ranks with that of Trevor-Roper and Bullock in terms of research and substantiation. This book is a vital addition to the library of anyone seriously interested in in-depth examination of the period, ...

Rating:
Summary: What a waste of a brilliant mind....
Review: David Irving's books have always scared me and with good reason. I do not deny that he is a brilliant writer and he has obviously researched this book quite extensively but he has made a mistake that many historians make, he shows only half the picture, and in doing so gives a very one sided account of the Second World War. His overtly sympathetic portrayal of "Hitler's War" is a convincing manuscript. Irving genuinely believes Hitler was a puppet who did not know what was going on around him. May be he didn't know everything his Generals and advisors knew but Hitler certainly knew about the final solution despite what Irving says. If you do read this book, then try and read one in tandem with it that criticizes Irving's work so that you have a balanced understanding of Hitler and the Second World War, then make your decisions as to what you believe and what you don't.
I must add that I found this book very hard to stomach, mainly because it was so obviously biased in one direction. Perhaps if Irving himself had been a victim of the Holocaust that he so vehmently denies took place, or if his beloved daughter Jessica had been thrown into the gas chambers in Treblinka then perhaps he would look at history differently and write his books accordingly.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Historical Work of Journalism
Review: I have read this 2-volume series almost twice through now. It is an excellent work. Starting with September 1, 1939, Irving follows the events and people of the entire war through May, 1945. His analysis and scholarship are worthy of high praise. Let's look at the background of this author and his writings.

Irving taught himself the German language. He has spent years of research in both the United States and German archives. Frankly, I think the press has unfairly painted him as a denier of war crimes against humanity. Irving does nothing of the sort. His work is based on his own evidence, not quotes from other writers. And while I may not agree with everything that he says, his thesis is clearly this: there is yet a single conclusive piece of documentation that has substantively pointed to Hitler himself ordering the execution of millions of Jews.

While the atrocities in his books are clearly identified, he lays blame primarily on Himmler and Heydrich as the main instigators in the work to wipe out the Jews.

As everyone knows, the labor shortages from the war were horrendous in Germany. Hitler himself ranted about the lack of available armaments due to insufficient labor personnel. Why with such a huge shortfall in available manpower, would Hitler order the execution of millions of Jews that could have provided valuable factory workers? This makes no sense to me.

The Nazis, to their own downfall, documented everything! And while Hitler's own hatred for the Jews has never been an issue, there yet remains no single documented evidence which proves that Hitler personally and convincingly ordered the wholesale destruction of the Jews. That is the heart of this work. Frankly, after much reading on Hitler and WWII myself, I am inclined to agree with Irving's analysis, even after all these years.

This 2-volume set is an excellent and smoothly written expose of the details of Hitler and his war. I highly encourage you to find a copy of this 2-volume work and judge for yourself. Read it with an open mind and see what you think for yourself. I welcome your comments here!

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating view from the 'other side'.
Review: I've only been able to get hold of the second volume in this series, but from that volume alone one thing is clear: there should be a statue of Herman Goering in Trafalgar Square in London - we could never have done it without him! His incompetence, vanity and bad advice to Hitler helped to lose the war for Germany, and the consistent failure of his Luftwaffe to support and supply troops on the ground badly damaged their ability to wage war on the Allies. (With supplies and ammunition badly needed at the Front, Luftwaffe trucks were going up empty and coming back loaded with Luftwaffe officers' loot and women, until on at least one occasion senior Luftwaffe officers were fetched out of the trucks at gunpoint by military police and sent back to their units.)

David Irving tries to portray Hitler as a bit of a 'poor old chap', doing his best whilst surrounded by evil and treacherous men. He perhaps goes over the top a bit with that, but it certainly appears that, far from the popular image of Hitler in the bunker in the last days ranting, accusing all around him of failing him, and deploying armies which existed only in his imagination, he was in fact a broken man, a physical and mental wreck, unable to speak in much more than a whisper and at times hardly able to see. He deployed army units which didn't exist because others had told him they did, and he accused his top military men of treachery because many of them really were treacherous.

As to the claim that Hitler didn't order the extermination of the Jews, it must be said that that is rather far-fetched, and undermines what is otherwise an excellent work. (Irving does NOT claim that the Holocaust didn't happen - for example, he says of SS General Reinhard Heydrich "As he was the brains behind the extermination camps he merits no sympathy".) Okay, maybe Irving is right, and no document exists in which Hitler explicitly says "I order the extermination of the Jews", but even so he must have known. The country which you lead cannot carry out a programme of genocide which kills six million people without you knowing about it, and to claim that he didn't know is to portray him as a fool, which he most certainly was not. At best he knew about it and failed to stop it, at worst he ordered it himself. Either way he's guilty.

It appears from the book that Irving may be a bit of an admirer of Hitler, though I wouldn't go so far as to claim that he's a Nazi sympathiser. The book, however, provides a fascinating insight into an era of history with which we're all familiar from the Allied side, but shows what was going on from the other side. I shall be reading it again, and as soon as I can get hold of a copy of volume 1 I shall read that as well.

Incidentally, I would recommend that as well as these two books detailing the war from the German side, one should also read 'The Struggle for Europe', by Chester Wilmot (still in print, and available from Amazon), which was written in the 1950's and details the same period from the Allied side.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Historical Work of Journalism
Review: Ok, there are no written orders hand-signed by Hitler ordering Jews to be murdered by the millions. So what? Hitler was not stupid (if he was, how could he have taken control of Germany), but knew pretty well (like all his advisers) that he could loose the War someday. Of course he would not put it into papers, but only talk about "THE FINAL SOLUTION". Other than this, the book is a good framework for WW II history.

Rating:
Summary: The Power of Primary Sources
Review: The once well-respected historian David Irving got himself into trouble with the establishment with his book Hitler's War. Mr. Irving thinks he is more clever than the average historian because he has examined primary sources from archives and has not, like some other historians, relied on other historians' books to write his own history of World War II. Getting his material from these primary sources, he has come up with a different sort of history than the standard version of World War II.

His detractors claim that he has an ideological pre-disposition sympathizing with Hitler and the Nazis and this bias has tainted his work and made it a propaganda piece to soften our view of the Nazis. I have seen a convincing show on PBS with such a viewpoint; a TV channel well-known for being left-wing much of the time.

From what I have gathered about Irving personally, he seemed to be a careful, hard-working historian more interested in getting the record straight than being politically correct, despite the costs to his career and personal life. He thinks that a hundred years from now he will be vindicated and his history will be the standard history given to college students.

At any rate, it has been an interesting controversy.

Hitler's War itself is a fairly interesting reading experience; mildly interesting in the first half covering mostly preparation for war and early conquests and very interesting when it covers Hitler's attack on Russia. It is also very LONG; at one time this book was split up into three books and I think that would be the way to read it. Battle after battle and strategy after strategy is dissected by Irving and one can get a little war weary just reading it after awhile. Battles and strategy from Hitler's viewpoint are the main emphasis of the book with a few interesting personal anecdotes about the Fuerer thrown in for good measure.

The most amusing anecdote involved his tart-tongued secretary Fraulein Schroeder about appointing Himmler to replace Hitler, if Hitler died, which was very possible since the allies were now closing in on Berlin. "The man has no artistic sense at all," Hitler protested against Schroeder's suggestion. "In our present straits artistic sense hardly matters!" replied his secretary.

Regarding the war itself, Hitler seemed to want to conquer the territories that Germany had lost in the Versailles treaty and territory which Germans predominated in. He also had plans to take over the Ukraine in the east for Germany and make the Ukrainians slaves to the new German Empire. When he took the Polish corridor, he made some serious attempts to seek peace with England, but England was not in the mood for peace. He invaded the west to strike first and gain strategic advantage in the coming war with England, an enemy which he always wished he could have made into an ally, especially against Russia. He claimed that it was impossible to make peace with England because its foreign policy was heavily influenced by "Jewish Bolsheviks" in Britain.

As far as the war with Russia goes, Hitler gathered from intelligence reports that Stalin was planning to invade his neighbors on its western front to take out the bourgeois societies of the West and make them into enlightened communist states. Since Hitler knew that Russia was going to attack, he decided to attack first to gain the element of surprise and to wipe out what he claimed was "Jewish Bolshevism" in Russia. After his initial successes in Russia, he claimed that he had started out a nationalist, but now he had become an imperialist.

As far as the Holocaust goes, in this earlier version of Hitler's War, Himmler is said to have been in control of their liquidation and Hitler did not know. Hitler favored a plan to relocate the Jews out of Germany, either in Madagascar or Eastern Europe. I think Irving took out references to the Holocaust in the new edition because he is a firm believer in the Leuchter Report, a lab test of the cyanide levels at the concentration camp where the gassings allegedly took place. It comes to the conclusion that the Jews weren't really gassed or killed purposely on a large scale; the gas was used to kill lice instead.

Hitler is presented in the book as a leader who did not have total control over his often rebellious underlings and since they did not follow his strategy at key times during the war, Hitler claimed that that was the reason why they lost. For instance, he wanted to take over Stalingrad before Moscow, but this wasn't done and possibly caused Germany to lose in the eastern front.

Hitler never gave up in the direst of straits, hoping that there would be split between Russia and the rest of the allies and then he could join with the allies in defeating Russia. Many Germans supported him until the end and did not consider him a madman.

I still did not think that Irving is as controversial as A.J.P Taylor as a historian. In Taylor's Origins of the Second World War, he claims that Hitler was not even intending to fight a war and that he did not intend to conquer the Ukraine. --Wow, are these guys studying the same war? There are about as many versions of the war as there are historians, I suppose.

Rating:
Summary: An example of various propaganda techniques
Review: This book is essentially well-written propaganda that passes itself off as historical research. Anyone interested in how to write propaganda and the evolution of Holocaust denial should read it. There are many things to criticize about Irving's battle with the facts and his conviction for lying about the Holocaust, but I will just mention a few details of this book that stuck in my mind. He uses a smokescreen of references to hide unreferenced and unfounded statements. For example, let's say I wrote... 'Cats are felines (footnote), cats are under the control of Lucifer, and cats were first domesticated in Egypt (footnote)'... The consistent use of footnotes to support statements that are not contentious or likely to be challenged sandwiching statements in the middle of paragraphs that are controversial, implausible, and unfounded, suggests a pattern of deliberate deception, and not merely bad writing. Irving will make his greatest unfounded statements boldly and yet quietly. For example, he shows that Hitler wrote in a margin that Molotov's alleged son should have 'no special treatment,' to mean that Hitler was unaware of what the Nazis around him meant by 'special treatment,' i.e. shipping the person to a death camp to be gassed. He also dismisses all testimony from Hitler's friend and Armaments Minister Albert Speer on the grounds that Speer was disloyal to Hitler in the end--a common device used by Neo-Nazis today. Finally, he appears to have a bias against Slavs. If you read his book, examine his use of metaphors. Russian tanks are described as billowing monsters creeping out of the primeval forest, yet heavier and larger German tanks are described as products of efficient engineering, manned by real people. Also, Irving is the source of the myth promoting the idea that the Germans were particularly heroic in their defence in 1944 by having about five hundred tanks in working order at one time. Please note that the Germans produced tens of thousands of armored vehicles (tanks and sturmgeschutz) that year. Yes, it is possible that on one given day after a long campaign the Germans might have been reduced to a limited number of aircraft and tanks that were serviceable, but that was commonplace among all belligerents in World War II. After a battle, both sides would frequently stop to replenish their fuel and ammunition, and fix their vehicles. Irving appears to count any German tank as temporarily out of service for one day as absent from the war from that moment on. To truly understand this book, study the techniques of propaganda: the smokescreen of combining referenced material with the unreferenced, hiding deception in the middle of passages, surrounded by trivial or vivid details, the selective use of metaphors that promote bias through their imagery, and finally, confidently giving a term its opposite meaning without any justification. I have to say, I felt a deep sense of repugnance and disgust after reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: Unrivalled History
Review: This is quite simply the best book on the subject of the Second World War I have ever read. Although David Irving is an intellectual historian of the highest order, his prose style is eminently accessible to the layman.
The genius of the work is the position the author adopts; Irving takes away the tiresome moralising that many historians feel compelled to adopt and appraises (...) the man: the dictator, the Human, the Leader and the warlord. From such a position, Irving manages to assess the most fascinating and influential man of the century without the prejudices of other historians which inevitably impair historical judgement.

If you were to buy one book on WWII, buy this one.