Hugh Trevor-Roper - Investigating Hitler's Last Days

Investigating Hitler's Last Days

In November 1945, Trevor-Roper was ordered by Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin (and later head of MI5 and MI6 in succession) to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler's death and to rebut the propaganda of the Soviet government that Hitler was alive and living somewhere in the West. Using the alias of Major Oughton, Trevor-Roper interviewed politicians, military men, and supporting staff - which were present in the Führerbunker with Hitler, and who had been able to escape to the West, including Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven. The ensuing investigation resulted in Trevor-Roper's most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler (1947, with revised editions as late as 1995), in which he described the last ten days of Hitler's life, and the fates of some of the higher-ranking members of the inner circle as well of those lesser figures whose evidence was important for reconstructing this penultimate chapter of the war. Trevor-Roper transformed the evidence he gathered during his fact-finding mission, evidence that was often lurid, confused, and plain wrong, into a literary work, with sardonic humour and drama, that brings out incidentally how much he was influenced by the rhetorical prose styles of two of his favourite historians, Edward Gibbon and Thomas Babington Macaulay. In response to The Last Days of Hitler, Trevor-Roper received a death threat from the Stern Gang for his supposed over-emphasis on Hitler's charisma, which the authors of the death threat felt had exonerated the German people.