The Wartime Journals

As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary. However, he confided a record of his thoughts and plans to a series of notebooks inscribed OHMS (“On His Majesty’s Service”). The Wartime Journals reveal the voice and experiences of a wartime codebreaker who spent most of the war engaged in highly-confidential intelligence work–including breaking the cipher code of the German secret service. He became an expert in German resistance plots and, after the war, interrogated many of Hitler’s circle, investigated Hitler’s death and personally retrieved Hitler’s will. The posthumous discovery of his journals provides an unusual and privileged view of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. The journals include some of the elegant, haunting notes made by Trevor-Roper during his work. The resulting book offers an engaging–sometimes mischievous–and reflective study of both the human comedy and personal tragedy of wartime.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was the author of the bestselling The Last Days of Hitler as well as an expert in the history of both early modern Britain and Nazi Germany.