Comments by "Alan Pennie" (@alanpennie8013) on "How Hitler’s “Table Talks” broke history" video.

@michaelharvey75 Steven Kotkin is very good. Not perfect but much better than any previous Anglophone biographer.
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@TheImperatorKnight I'm afraid Trevor - Roper was a rather unethical historian. Though I think The Last Days holds up. It was based on testimony gathered shortly after Hitler's death.
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I think there are two objections to The Table Talk, one major and one minor. The minor one is the obvious unreliability of anything touched by Genoud but this can be avoided by going back to the first German text. The major one is that that text is a reconstruction rather than a stenographic record and is designed (by Hitler and Bormann) to flatter Hitler. Still as a source it's not nearly as bad as memoirs and diaries published after the war.
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The so - called Memorandum is a very dubious source because again the text is compiled from Hossbach's notes and recollections and not from any stenographic record. As a document it is inferior to The Table Talk which, I believe, was approved by Hitler and so achieved "official" status.
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I think you are too negative in your comments about Nilsson, who seems to me to have performed a valuable service in drawing attention to the unwise behaviour of Anglophone historians in relying on so dubious a source as The Table Talk. Citing the "translation" of 1953 looks particularly inexcusable. He reminds me of Fritz Tobias, who made himself unpopular in the late 1950s and early 1960s by rebuking historians of that time for recycling nonsense about The Reichstag Fire
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@ars_gravitatis5858 It's a most dubious source and Anglophone historians have been much too ready to use it. I fear Trevor Roper led a great many people down the garden path after The Last Days established him as a Hitler expert. Have you read Ved Mehta, Fly and Fly Bottle? Very illuminating on this horrible man's role as an intellectual bully in the 1950s and 1960s.
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