Just before Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and ruler of Bohemia, was, as the Irish put it, shot off, Walter Frentz made a colour portrait photograph. Hitler, anticipating further staff losses from one cause or another, ordered Frentz to do the same for the Reich’s top two thousand. Irving’s remarkable contacts with Hitler’s people enable him now to give us fifty full colour and seventy black and white photographs of Hitler, his dogs, his Berchtesgaden mountain retreat, Eva Braun, generals, Goebbels, SS men etc. This book is a condensation with some revision of Irving’s Hitler’s War (1977) and its predecessor The War Path (1978). The new vivid and macabre photographs are worth the money alone, and the Introduction is a masterpiece.

Many of Irving’s opinions are grotesque and appalling – Hitler was not an incorrigible anti-Semite! – but he has done more research into original Nazi documents than anyone and you have to read him. A down side is that his written English has become infected with Germanisms – ‘Scottish terrier’,