Hugh Trevor-Roper

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian.

He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.

He got a first-class degree in Classical Moderations in 1934 and won the Craven, the Ireland, and the Hertford scholarships in Classics.

Initially, he intended to make his career in the Classics but became bored with what he regarded as the pedantic technical aspects of the classics course at Oxford and switched to history, where he obtained first-class honours in 1936.

Whilst at Oxford, he was a member of the exclusive Stubbs Society and was initiated as a Freemason in the Apollo University Lodge.

In 1937, he moved from Christ Church to Merton College, Oxford to become a research fellow.

On 28 February 1939, he was commissioned in the British Army as a second lieutenant with seniority in that rank from 1 October 1938, and attached to cavalry unit of the Oxford University Contingent of the OTC.

He formed a low opinion of most pre-war professional intelligence officers, but a higher one of some of the post-1939 recruits.

His first book was a 1940 biography of Archbishop William Laud, in which he challenged many of the prevailing perceptions surrounding Laud.

Trevor-Roper was a member of the University of Oxford's Officer Training Corps, reaching the rank of officer cadet corporal.

On 15 July 1940, he was promoted to war substantive lieutenant and transferred to the Intelligence Corps, Territorial Army.

During the Second World War, he served as an officer in the Radio Security Service of the Secret Intelligence Service, and then on the interception of messages from the German intelligence service, the Abwehr.

In early 1940, Trevor-Roper and E. W. B. Gill decrypted some of these intercepts, demonstrating the relevance of the material and spurring Bletchley Park efforts to decrypt the traffic.

Intelligence from Abwehr traffic later played an important part in many operations including the Double-Cross System.

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 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.

In November 1945, Trevor-Roper was ordered by Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin, to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler's death, and to rebut the Soviet propaganda that Hitler was alive and living in the West.

Using the alias of "Major Oughton", Trevor-Roper interviewed or prepared questions for several officials, high and low, who had been present in the Führerbunker with Hitler, and who had been able to escape to the West, including Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven.

For the most part Trevor-Roper relied on investigations and interviews by hundreds of British, American and Canadian intelligence officers.

He did not have access to Soviet materials.

Working rapidly, Trevor-Roper drafted his report, which served as the basis for his most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler, in which he described the last ten days of Hitler's life and the fates of some of the higher-ranking members of the inner circle, as well as those of key lesser figures.

Trevor-Roper transformed the evidence into a literary work, with sardonic humour and drama, and was much influenced by the prose styles of two of his favourite historians, Edward Gibbon and Lord Macaulay.

The book was cleared by British officials in 1946 for publication as soon as the war crimes trials ended.

Trevor-Roper's most commercially successful book was titled The Last Days of Hitler (1947).

It was published in English in 1947; six English editions and many foreign language editions followed.

According to American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Trevor-Roper received a letter from Lisbon written in Hebrew stating that the Stern Gang would assassinate him for The Last Days of Hitler, which, they believed, portrayed Hitler as a "demoniacal" figure but let ordinary Germans who followed Hitler off the hook, and that for this he deserved to die.

Rosenbaum reports that Trevor-Roper told him this was the most extreme response he had ever received for one of his books.

In June 1950, Trevor-Roper attended a conference in Berlin of anti-Communist intellectuals along with Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron and Franz Borkenau that resulted in the founding of the CIA front group Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazine Encounter.

In the 1950s and 1960s, he was a frequent contributor to Encounter, but had reservations about what he regarded as the over-didactic tone of some of its contributors, particularly Koestler and Borkenau.

Trevor-Roper was born at Glanton, Northumberland, England, the son of Kathleen Elizabeth Davidson (died 1964) and Bertie William Edward Trevor-Roper (1885–1978), a doctor, descended from Henry Roper, 8th Baron Teynham and second husband of Anne, 16th Baroness Dacre.

Trevor-Roper "enjoyed (but not too seriously)... that he was a collateral descendant of William Roper, the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Thomas More... as a boy he was aware that only a dozen lives (several of them those of elderly bachelors) separated him from inheriting the Teynham peerage."

Trevor-Roper's brother, Patrick, became a leading eye surgeon and gay rights activist.

Trevor-Roper was educated at Belhaven Hill School, Charterhouse, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied first Classics (Literae Humaniores) and then Modern History.

In The Philby Affair (1968) Trevor-Roper argues that the Soviet spy Kim Philby was never in a position to undermine efforts by the chief of the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, to overthrow the Nazi regime and negotiate with the British government.

Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" in 1983 when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.

This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (2014): "The bulk of his publications is formidable... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them... have lastingly transformed their fields."

On the other hand, his biographer Adam Sisman also writes that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed."

Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany.

In the view of John Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books".