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Antony Beevor

Antony Beevor is a visiting professor at the University of Kent. His latest book is Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge.
 (March 2017)

IN THE REVIEW

The Very Drugged Nazis

Adolf Hitler presenting Theodor Morell, his personal physician, with the Knight’s Cross of the War Merit Cross at his headquarters, 1944

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

by Norman Ohler, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside
Nazi ideology demanded purity of body, blood, and mind. Adolf Hitler was portrayed as a vegetarian teetotaler who would allow nothing to corrupt him. Drugs were depicted as part of a Jewish plot to poison and weaken the nation—Jews were said to “play a supreme part” in the international drug trade—and yet nobody became more dependent on cocktails of drugs than Hitler, and no armed forces did more to enhance their troops’ performance than the Wehrmacht did by using a version of methamphetamine.

The Spooky Side of World War II

German soldiers in the field enciphering a message on the Enigma code machine, circa 1940

The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939–1945

by Max Hastings
Over the last twenty years, the huge differences between national accounts of World War II have at last started to diminish. This is largely due to the opening of archives, international conferences, and the hiring of foreign historians by most major universities. The secret war probably produced more misleading myths …

At Home With Hitler

Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, Berlin, 1940s

Eva Braun: Life with Hitler

by Heike B. Görtemaker, translated from the German by Damion Searls
Just after the end of World War II, Albert Speer complained to his American interrogators that “history always emphasizes terminal events.” He hated the idea that what he saw as the early successes of National Socialism would be obscured by the regime’s grotesque ending. Paradoxically, Eva Braun would have been …