Hugh Trevor-Roper

Trevor-Roper's most widely read and financially rewarding book was titled the The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler's bunker. From his interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries. Trevor-Roper's reputation was damaged in 1983, however, when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries and they were shown shortly afterwards to be forgeries.