Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris

complying with my innumerable requests. A good part of the writing was undertaken during a spell in 1994–5 away from my regular duties, thanks to support from a Leverhulme-British Academy Senior Scholarship and from the University of Sheffield. The Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung continued the generous support of my work which began in 1976–7 with the funding for a month in the summer of 1997 spent checking references in Munich. My son, David, kindly took a week’s holiday from his work to help me for part of this time.
    I have enjoyed great (and exceedingly patient) support from my publishers in Britain, Germany, and the USA while this book has been in preparation. At Penguin, Ravi Mirchandani (who commissioned the book in what seems an age ago) and Simon Winder (who adopted it and has skilfully overseen all stages of its completion) have been pillars of strength. Their encouragementhas been of great importance to me. I would also like to express my thanks to Thomas Weber for his work in drawing up the bibliography, to Diana LeCore for compiling the index, and, quite especially, to Annie Lee for her excellent copy-editing. At Norton, Donald Lamm’s meticulous and constructive suggestions for amending or improving points of the text were invariably perceptive, and I greatly appreciated his insights. At Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt I have benefited from the expertise of Ulrich Volz and Michael Neher, while Jörg W. Rademacher (who translated the bulk of the text) and Jürgen Peter Krause, assisted by Cristoforo Schweeger, performed heroics in the speed of their accomplished translation. And at Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Margit Ketterle and Andrea Wörle have taken the keenest interest in the project since its inception and have been unfailing in their good advice.
    Many friends and colleagues have helped enormously (at times unwittingly) over the years, through discussions or correspondence, through encouragement, and through their own published work, to shape my thinking on the Nazi era. I hope that a collective expression of my most sincere thanks will not appear like a diminution of my great indebtedness to each of them.
    My warmest thanks are also owing to Gerald Fleming, Brigitte Hamann, Ronald Hayman, Robert Mallett, Meir Michaelis, Stig Hornshøh-Møller, Fritz Redlich, Gitta Sereny, Michael Wildt, and Peter Witte, all of whom were generous in supplying me with documentary material, giving me insight into their work prior to publication, and engaging in extensive discussion or correspondence on some issues of interpretation. Eberhard Jäckel has kindly allowed me to exploit his great expertise on Hitler on a number of occasions. I am grateful, too to Richard Evans for suggesting in the first place that I should undertake the biography, and to Niall Ferguson for inspiration with the subtitles of the two volumes. I would also like to thank Neil Bermel (Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield) for translating for me an article on Hitler published in Czech.
    To Jeremy Noakes my debt is of a very special order. His exemplary regional study of Lower Saxony was one of the works, in the early 1970s, which inspired me to consider undertaking research on Nazi Germany. Since that time, he has remained a good friend as well as an outstanding scholar of modern German history. The documentary collection he has put together over many years (Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.),
Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader,
4 vols., Exeter,
1983–98
) is a gathering of primary sources in English (with superb commentary) on the Nazi regime which surpasses in range and quality any German collection. A good number of the sources referred to in the chapters which follow, which I have citedwherever possible from a specific German location, will be found in the collection. This applies to one document quite especially, quoted in Chapter 13 , which was first published in English translation in the second volume of Jeremy’s collection. This somewhat obscure document, citing a speech by a Nazi functionary which spoke of ‘Working towards the Führer along the lines he would wish’, immediately attracted my attention by its strikingly simple insight into how a dictatorship operated. Having adopted the idea, I developed it to inform my overall approach to Hitler. But I owe it to Jeremy’s collection that I was alerted to the document in the first place. I am also grateful to him for casting his