Editing Hugh Trevor-Roper (section)

===World War II and Hitler===
Trevor-Roper attacked the philosophies of history advanced by [[Arnold J. Toynbee]] and [[E. H. Carr]], as well as his colleague [[A. J. P. Taylor]]'s account of the origins of [[World War II]]. Another dispute was with Taylor and [[Alan Bullock]] over the question of whether [[Adolf Hitler]] had fixed aims. In the 1950s, Trevor-Roper was ferocious in his criticism of Bullock for his portrayal of Hitler as a "[[charlatan|mountebank]]" instead of the ideologue Trevor-Roper believed him to be.<ref>{{cite book|author=Ron Rosenbaum|title=Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=f6MmCEzVs6oC&pg=PT118|year=2011|publisher=Faber and Faber|pages=118–19|isbn=9780571276868}}</ref> When Taylor offered a picture of Hitler similar to Bullock's, in his 1961 book ''[[The Origins of the Second World War]]'', the debate continued. Another feud was with the novelist and Catholic convert [[Evelyn Waugh]], who was angered by Trevor-Roper's repeated harsh attacks on the Catholic Church.<ref>Sisman, (2010) pp. 178, 261, 291</ref>

In the [[Nazi Foreign Policy (debate)|globalist–continentalist debate]] between those who argued that Hitler aimed to conquer the world and those who argued that he sought only the conquest of Europe, Trevor-Roper was one of the leading continentalists. He argued that the globalist case sought to turn a scattering of Hitler's remarks made over decades into a plan. In his analysis, the only consistent objective Hitler sought was the domination of Europe, as laid out in ''[[Mein Kampf]].''<ref>{{cite book|first=Stephen J. |last=Lee|title=European Dictatorships 1918–1945|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gLXkGLDxSkAC&pg=PA242|year=2012|publisher=Routledge|page=242|isbn=9781135690113}}</ref>

The American historian [[Lucy Dawidowicz]] in ''The Holocaust and Historians'' (1981) delivered what the British historian [[David Cesarani]] called an "''ad hominem'' attack", writing that Trevor-Roper in his writings on Nazi Germany was indifferent to Nazi antisemitism, because she believed that he was a snobbish antisemite, who was apathetic about the murder of six million Jews.<ref name="Cesarani 2008">{{cite book |last=Cesarani |first=David |chapter=From Bullock to Kershaw: Some Peculiarities of British Historical Writing About the Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder of the Jews |pages=339–54 |title=Holocaust Historiography In Context |editor1-first=David |editor1-last=Bankier |editor2-first=Dan |editor2-last=Michman |location=Jerusalem |publisher=Yad Vashem |year=2008}}</ref>{{rp|341}} Cesarani wrote that Dawidowicz was wrong to accuse Trevor-Roper of antisemitism but argued that there was an element of truth to her critique in that the ''Shoah'' was a blind-spot for Trevor-Roper.<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|342–43}}

Trevor-Roper was a very firm "intentionalist" who treated Hitler as a serious, if slightly deranged thinker who, from 1924 until his death in 1945, was obsessed with "the conquest of Russia, the extermination of the Slavs, and the colonization of the English".<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|345}} In his 1962 essay "The Mind of Adolf Hitler", Trevor-Roper again criticized Bullock, writing "Even Mr. Bullock seems content to regard him as a diabolical adventurer animated solely by an unlimited lust for personal power{{nbsp}}... Hitler was a systematic thinker and his mind is, to the historian, as important as the mind of Bismarck or Lenin".<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|346}} Trevor-Roper maintained that Hitler, on the basis of a wide range of antisemitic literature, from the writings of [[Houston Stewart Chamberlain]] to ''[[The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion]]'', had constructed a racist ideology that called for making Germany the world's greatest power and the extermination of perceived enemies such as the Jews and Slavs.<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|346}}

Trevor-Roper wrote that the mind of Hitler was "a terrible phenomenon, imposing indeed in its granite harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber, like some huge barbarian monolith; the expression of giant strength and savage genius; surrounded by a festering heap of refuse, old tins and vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure, the intellectual detritus of centuries".<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|346}} Cesarani wrote that Trevor-Roper regarded Hitler, in marked contrast to Bullock, as a man who was serious about what he said but at the same time, Trevor-Roper's picture of Hitler as a somewhat insane leader, fanatically pursuing lunatic policies, meant paradoxically that it was hard to take Hitler seriously, at least on the basis of Trevor-Roper's writings.<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|345–46}}

Cesarani stated that Trevor-Roper was sincere in his hatred and contempt for the Nazis and everything they stood for but he had considerable difficulty when it came to writing about the complicity and involvement of traditional German elites in National Socialism, because the traditional elites in Germany were so similar in many ways to the British establishment, which Trevor-Roper identified with so strongly.

In this respect, Cesarani argued that it was very revealing that Trevor-Roper in ''The Last Days of Hitler'' was especially damning in his picture of the German Finance Minister, Count [[Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk|Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk]], who Trevor-Roper noted "had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, but he had acquired none of its values".<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|352}} Cesarani wrote "Thus, to Trevor-Roper the values of Oxford University stood at the opposite pole to those of Hitler's Reich, and one reason for the ghastly character of Nazism was that it did not share them".<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|352}} Cesarani noted that while Trevor-Roper supported the [[Conservative Party (UK)|Conservatives]] and ended his days as a Tory life-peer, he was broadly speaking a liberal and believed that Britain was a great nation because of its liberalism.<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|352–53}}

Because of this background, Cesarani wrote that Trevor-Roper naturally saw the liberal democracy Britain as anathema to Nazi Germany.<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|352–53}} Cesarani concluded that "to maintain the illusion of virtuous British liberalism, Hitler had to be depicted as either a statesman like any other or a monster without equal, and those who did business with him as, respectively, pragmatists or dupes. Every current of Nazi society that made it distinctive could be charted, while the anti-Jewish racism that it shared with Britain was discreetly avoided".<ref name="Cesarani 2008"/>{{rp|354}}