The Wartime Journals

by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Richard Davenport-Hines (Editor)

As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work. However, he confided a record of his thoughts in a series of slender notebooks inscribed OHMS (On His Majesty's Service). The Wartime Journals reveal the voice and experiences of Trevor-Roper, a war-time ""backroom boy"" who spent most of the war engaged in highly-confidential intelligence work in England - including breaking the cipher code of the German secret service, the Abwehr. He became an expert in German resistance plots and after the war, interrogated many of Hitler's immediate circle, investigated Hitler's death in the Berlin bunker, and personally retrieved Hitler's will from its secret hiding place. The posthumous discovery of Trevor-Roper's secret journals - unknown even to his family and closest confidants - is an exciting archival find and provides an unusual and privileged view of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. At the same time, they offer an engaging - sometimes mischievous - and reflective study of both the human comedy and personal tragedy of wartime.

Genres: History, World War II, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.
Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Philipps Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (2014): "The bulk of his publications is formidable ... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them ... have lastingly transformed their fields." On the other hand, his biographer Adam Sisman also writes that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed."
Trevor-Roper's most commercially successful book was titled The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler's bunker. From interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents, he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.
Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" in 1983 when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.

Reviews

[Shambhavi Pandey · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Stuart Presto said he wanted to write a self-revelation, but didn’t know how to begin. It’s quite simple, I said gaily; you take off all your clothes, you hesitate for a moment at the brink; and then you plunge headlong into the cool, deep waters of introspection. Of course it’s a bit frightening at first, for the water is cold and numbing, and when you open your eyes you find yourself in a strange world of darting, elusive fish, waving tentacles, seed and coral caves. And you can’t stay there long either, you just reach out and grab what you can, and then you rise, panting, to the surface, and scramble to the bank to recover your breath and see what you’ve managed to collect. Not that it looks so attractive out of water; the sea-anemones, the mermaid’s hair, the iridescent, shimmering water-weeds, they all look sad and bedraggled out of their element. Still, you have discovered a new world that you can revisit for longer and longer periods, a fascinating under-water pleasure garden (for of course I was carried away again by my metaphor), where you can swim, open-eyed, among submarine forests, and coralline labyrinths, and fronded caverns, and watch the bright, flickering fishes, the swaying polyps the quaint crustaceans, the barnacles and giant sponges; and there still lower there are dark and sinister regions to probe, regions of mystery and fear, where a ghostly, phosphorescent twilight now and then reveals hideous, Freudian monsters heaving and uncoiling in their ancient slime.”

Interspersed with poignant, moving, and deep journal entries ranging from disconcerted ramblings to factual historical details, “The Wartime Journals” has left a profound, permanent impression on me. And at Roper’s behest, I have dived into these calm, refreshing waters of his life snippets and forbidden entries that only makes me realize what it takes to be a British Intelligence Officer during WWII. I have spoken about this book in my last post and countless stories (how it has become the best book I have read in ‘22), and now I feel that anything I write won’t do justice to how it made me feel!