Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations

Adolf Hilter was born in Austria on April 20, 1889. As a young man, he wanted to become an artist, but was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. While in Vienna, he worked as a struggling painter copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists. He served in the Bavarian army during World War I and received two Iron Crosses for his service. He was discharged from the army in March 1920. On April 1, 1924, he was sentenced to five years in Landsberg prison for the crime of conspiracy to commit treason. While there, he dictated his political book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to his deputy Rudolf Hess. He was released in December 1924 because he was considered relatively harmless. He was the leader of the Nazi party and gained political power using oratory and propaganda, appealing to economic need, nationalism, and anti-Semitism during a time Germany was in crisis. He became a German citizen in 1932, the Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and the Fuhrer of Germany in 1934. He started World War II by invading other countries in order to expand Germany. He murdered millions of people considered undesirable to his view of an ideal race, which is now referred to as the Holocaust. This genocide lead to the deaths of approximately 11 million people including but not limited to Jews, communists, homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, and prisoners-of-war. Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945.

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper was born at Glanton, in Northumberland, England in 1914, the son of a country doctor. Trevor-Roper won scholarships, first to Charterhouse, then to Christ Church, Oxford, where he won the Craven, Hertford and Ireland prizes. He took a double-first at Oxford, and soon afterwards he published a study of Archbishop Laud. During the Second World War Trevor-Roper worked in British intelligence; in 1945 he was assigned by his superiors to write a report on the death of Hitler, which became The Last Days of Hitler. After the war, in 1946, Trevor-Roper returned to Oxford as a Student (fellow) of Christ Church, where he was a history tutor until 1957, and Censor (dean) from 1947 to 1952. In 1957 he was made Regius Professor of Modern History at the university from 1957 to 1980. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher created Trevor-Roper a life peer as Lord Dacre of Glanton. He was then Master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge from 1980 to 1987, and became an honorary fellow in 1987, when he retired Trevor-Roper was a prolific writer whose topics ranged from medieval to contemporary history. He died in January of 2003 at the age of 89.