Adolf Hitler

Christopher Ray argues that Hitler's high-profile plan for invading Britain was a blind: his main intention was to fool Stalin into believing he was safe.

Alan Steinweis considers how a Victorian historian's hero-worship became entangled with the propaganda visions of the Nazis a century later.

A fascinating speculation on what might have happened for the future of the world if Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union had been successful.

Why did Germany declare war on the US in December 1941? Nicholas Henderson considers motives and consequences in the days before and after Pearl Harbor.

Hitler's march into the demilitarised Rhineland heralded Churchill's 'gathering storm' – but could the Fuhrer's bluff have been called and the Second World War prevented? Sir Nicholas Hederson, who as Britain's ambassador in Washington during the Falklands crisis saw diplomatic poker eventually turn to war, offers a reassessment of the events of 1936.

W.A. Coupe argues that German cartoonists ridiculed Hitler as a Chaplinesque little man, so it was easy not to take him seriously – until it was too late.

Ian Kershaw on an English translation of a German history of Nazi government

Hitler's contribution to the history of the twentieth century has been one of destruction. The war he started in 1939, argues Jeremy Noakes, was to recast the pattern of our world irreparably.