ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the publication of Henry Picker’s Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führer-hauptquartier 1941–1942. The chapter shows that far from the text being a stenographic record of Hitler’s statements, Picker’s notes were made from memory after the event. The many problems with the publication, and the famous German historian Gerhard Ritter’s role in editing the text, are detailed here. The scandal that the book caused in Germany is also covered. The reader is presented with examples of the problematic nature of Picker’s text, which shows that it cannot be cited as an ad verbatim record of Hitler’s words as he spoke them in the FHQ. Picker made frequent changes to the text, even after he had reconstructed Hitler’s words from memory. The role of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) in Munich in this publication is also dealt with in this chapter. In addition, it includes the first study of the manuscript that the second edition of Tischgespräche from 1963 was based on. The editor, Percy Ernst Schramm, completely uncritically accepted Picker’s version of events and refrained from commenting upon the many differences between the texts in the second and the first editions.
