History Forum / General / General Topics / November 2008

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Table-Talk-Adolf-Hitler/dp/1929631057

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 records the private, off the record,
informal conversations of a man who, more than anyone else, came close
to destroying the western world. On Martin Bormann's instructions, the
secret conversations at Hitler's headquarters from July 1941 to
November 1944 were all recorded. This is the real companion volume to
Hitler's Mein Kampf, whereby what had been a project suddenly was
reality, almost to the disbelief of its author.
Here is a startling account of Hitler freely talking about his
enemies, his friends, his ambitions, his failures, his secret dreams
voicing his thoughts to his intimate associates as the sun set at the
end of each day of the war. We see here a conversational Hitler
letting down his guard to his trusted henchmen. Miraculously, Martin
Bormann persuaded Hitler to let these talks be taken down by a team of
specially picked shorthand writers. Hitler had intended, after his
famous tyranny, to use these notes as source material for the books he
planned to write about the glory of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Now they have come to us, indisputably authentic, a raw, fascinating,
unretouched look at the inner recesses of the mind of Adolf Hitler.
Der Fuhrer's mind was crude and narrow; he had little education and,
as we see here, no humanity; but we can also see that he was (as he
himself knew) a political genius, a terrible simplifier, a man who,
with no equipment except his own will power, personality and ideas,
attempted to bring mankind into a terrible darkness.

As Trevor-Roper says in his brilliant introduction if we are to
discover the mind of Hitler, we must penetrate behind the thick
curtains of superficial evidence which conceal it the repellant
character which formed its expression, and for which no power of
thought can compensate, and the unreliable intermediaries who have
commented upon it. We must go directly to Hitler's personal
utterances: not indeed to his letters and speeches these, so valuable,
are too public, too formalized for such purposes to his secret
conversations, his table talk.