A Second Look at Hitler

HITLER: A STUDY IN TYRANNY by Alan Bullock. (Revised edition.) 848 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

When Historian A.J.P. Taylor kicked alive the fires of controversy three years ago by asserting that Hitler's prewar diplomatic aims were only those that any reasonable German statesman would have held for his country, a bucket brigade of his British colleagues rushed to douse the blaze. A. L. Rowse snapped that Taylor's book, The Origins of the Second World War, "is a whitewashing of Hitler." Terrible-tempered H. R. Trevor-Roper charged that Taylor "suppresses and arranges evidence." But the man with perhaps the best claim to speak about Hitler's aims and methods--Historian Alan Bullock, Master of Oxford's St. Catherine's College and author of the definitive biography of Hitler--kept aloof from the dogfight and went back to the documents.

Not only controversy but new evidence about Hitler has developed in the dozen years since Bullock's biography first appeared. The record of the Fiihrer's wartime table talk--his ad-lib sermonizings noted down by awed subordinates--proves again that his convictions had altered not one fanatic whit from the days when he wrote Mein Kampf, 20 years before. A complete rereading of "the whole of the documentary evidence for Hitler's foreign policy" has led Bullock to modify some details of his account of the years 1933-39, but to "disagree with Mr. Taylor more than ever" in his overall view.

In Bullock's view, Hitler was the ultimate barbarian, a political genius without the scruples of a Caesar or the ideas of a Napoleon, who gave the world a megalomaniacal warning of his plan of conquest, then proceeded unswervingly to carry it out. Revised and reissued, Bullock's portrait today risks being taken for just another book about Hitler. In point of fact it is now, as it was originally, the standard against which the others are to be measured.

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