Hitler's War - Reactions and Criticism

Reactions and Criticism

Reaction to Hitler's War was mostly negative. Various historians such as Gitta Sereny, Martin Broszat, Lucy Dawidowicz, Gerard Fleming, Charles W. Sydnor and Eberhard Jäckel wrote either articles or books rebutting what they considered to be erroneous information in Hitler's War. Writing in the Sunday Times, Sereny called Irving's work "closer to theology or mythology" than history, while Broszat labeled Irving a "Hitler partisan wearing blinkers". Lance Morrow wrote in Time that Irving's picture of the "Führer as a somewhat harried business executive too preoccupied to know exactly what has happening in his branch offices at Auschwitz and Treblinka" was hard to accept. In an article published in the Sunday Times under the title "The £1,000 Question" on 10 July 1977, Sereny and the journalist Lewis Chester examined Irving's sources and found significant differences from what Irving published in Hitler's War. In particular, while interviewing one of Irving's primary informants, Otto Günsche, the latter stated that "one must assume that he did know" about the Holocaust.

Some historians, such as John Keegan and Hugh Trevor-Roper, praised the book as well-written and well-researched - although they disputed Irving's claim that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust, and Trevor-Roper was strongly critical of Irving's repeating the "stale and exploded libel" about Churchill ordering the "assassination" of General Sikorski). Keegan wrote that Hitler's War was "Irving's greatest achievement... indispensable to anyone seeking to the understand the war in the round".