Taylor, however, questions the conception of Hitler and his policy which is implied in this view. His responsibility for bringing on a European war in 1939 was therefore considered to be beyond question, and if blame was also cast on the leaders of the Western democracies, it was not for provoking Hitler, but for appeasing him and for failing to stop his career of treaty violation and conquest while it could still have been done without a mortal struggle. For the war of 1939, on the other hand, the captured minutes of Hitler’s secret conferences produced at the Nuremberg Trial, and particularly the so-called Hossbach Memorandum of November 1937, appeared to prove on the part of Hitler a definite plan for obtaining supremacy in Europe through a series of acts of military aggression. Taylor points out that there has always been controversy about the origins of the war of 1914 study of the documentary evidence which became so abundant after its close produced a picture of pre-war international politics substantially different from that of Allied wartime “innocentism,” and there was wide scope for differences of opinion about the responsibilities of the statesmen principally concerned. Taylor, however, we have in his newly published book, The Origins of the Second World War, an interpretation which frankly aims at challenging what he calls “the almost universal agreement among historians” that Hitler “planned the Second World War” and that “his will alone caused it.” Mr. This has now arrived, but not from Germany, where the aftermath of the Third Reich is still too painful for such a performance to be acceptable from any personage of academic standing. It was Inevitable that sooner or later some historian should produce a serious apologia for Hitler.
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