The Wartime Journals

As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work. However, he confided a record of his thoughts in a series of slender notebooks inscribed OHMS (On His Majesty's Service). The Wartime Journals reveal the voice and experiences of Trevor-Roper, a war-time "backroom boy" who spent most of the war engaged in highly-confidential intelligence work in England - including breaking the cipher code of the German secret service, the Abwehr. He became an expert in German resistance plots and after the war, interrogated many of Hitler's immediate circle, investigated Hitler's death in the Berlin bunker, and personally retrieved Hitler's will from its secret hiding place. The posthumous discovery of Trevor-Roper's secret journals - unknown even to his family and closest confidants - is an exciting archival find and provides an unusual and privileged view of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. At the same time, they offer an engaging - sometimes mischievous - and reflective study of both the human comedy and personal tragedy of wartime.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was perhaps the most brilliant historian of his generation. An expert in the history of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany, he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and latterly Master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. He received a life peerage in 1979. He was the author of numerous books, including his famous investigation of Hitler's last days, The Last Days of Hitler. During World War II, Trevor-Roper served in the Secret Intelligence Service and this book contains his journals written during the war and in its immediate aftermath.



Richard Davenport-Hines is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature and a past winner of the Wolfson Prize for History. He is the author of many books, including A Night at the Majestic (2006) and The Pursuit of Oblivion (2001). He edited Hugh Trevor-Roper's Letters from Oxford (2006) and is a regular reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, History Today, and other publications.