ABSTRACT
Here the publication of Hitler’s Table Talk in 1953 and the famous British history professor Hugh Trevor-Roper’s role in this process are scrutinized. Trevor-Roper conspired against his readers and refrained from telling them about central source-critical problems related to the texts he was authenticating. Trevor-Roper did this in order not to hurt his business relationship with Genoud. Because of Trevor-Roper’s refusal to deal honestly with the texts he authenticated, the problematic nature of Hitler’s Table Talk was only recently been discovered, and this book lays much more in the open. One of the major issues with the text is the fact that it was not, as Trevor-Roper stated in his introduction, translated from the German original, but from Genoud’s French version Libres propos. That fact was known to Trevor-Roper because it was specified by Genoud in the contract with the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This meant that the many changes to the text that Genoud had made slipped into the English version as well. The chapter also deals with the publication of the second edition of Hitler’s Table Talk in 1973. The conclusion is that Hitler’s Table Talk should not be used by scholars anymore, even when checked against the German version.
