I must have added the testimony of the Historian, Ian Kershaw, too, he too agrees in this aspect.
Here is a passage from his Book "Hitler, 1936‑1945"
"In 1951, a further series of monologues, allegedly by Hitler, dictated to Bormann, …
I must have added the testimony of the Historian, Ian Kershaw, too, he too agrees in this aspect.
Here is a passage from his Book "Hitler, 1936‑1945"
"In 1951, a further series of monologues, allegedly by Hitler, dictated to Bormann, came to light (seventeen from February 1945, a last one on 2 April). [...]
<u><i><b>The monologues were not, as those from 1941–4 were</b></i></u>, the product of musings during meals<u><i><b> attended by others </b></i></u>in his entourage, or during the ‘tea hours’ with his <u><i><b>secretaries</b></i></u>. Neither a secretary nor anyone else mentioned them at the time, or apparently knew they were being compiled. <b>Gerda Christian (formerly Daranowski), writing to Christa Schroeder long after the war, did not regard them as authentic, though she accepted that they could be a compilation of Hitler’s thoughts in the last months</b>. She ruled out a possibility of Hitler summoning Bormann to dictate to him, pointing out from her own recollection how he hated verbatim accounts on paper of what he had said casually (Schroeder, 257). <u><i><b>The main problem with the authenticity of the text is that no reliable and certifiable German version exists. It is impossible, therefore, to be certain. A great deal has to be taken on trust; and even then no safe mechanism for checking is available.</b></i></u>
The original document containing the monologues was said to have been entrusted on 17 April 1945 by Martin Bormann to Walther Funk, Reich Minister for Economics, to remove from Berlin for safe keeping in a bank vault in Bad Gastein. While serving his term of imprisonment in Spandau after the Nuremberg Trials, fearing further incrimination should the document be discovered, Funk, it was claimed, commissioned a friend, Hans Rechenberg, with the destruction of the document. Rechenberg, the account continues, kept his promise in a literal sense; but he made a photocopy, and in 1951 handed it to François Genoud, a Swiss lawyer who had meanwhile acquired control over copyright matters pertaining to Bormann, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders. Funk, after release from Spandau, authorized Genoud to seek out Hugh Trevor-Roper with a view to arranging publication outside Germany of the document. After the meeting with Trevor-Roper, according to Genoud, the photocopy was handed back to Funk. It thereafter went missing. Remarkably, it seems, no copy of the copy had been made before returning it. Genoud had made a French translation (La testament politique de Hitler. Notes recueillies par Martin Bormann, Paris, 1959), and in 1958 had had a translation back into German made from the French version. According to Genoud, this was at Funk’s wish, since he wished to compare the texts. Funk then allegedly corrected the re-translation in accordance with the still existing copy of the original, ‘so that’, in Genoud’s words, ‘a practically authentic text, coming from this time, exists’. An English edition, with an introduction by Trevor-Roper, was published in 1961 (François Genoud (ed.), The Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler-Bormann Documents. February-April 1945, with an Introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper, London, 1961). This English version contains a very loose and untrustworthy translation of the German text – itself not guaranteed to be identical with any<i><u><b> long-lost original or the lost copy of that original </b></u></i>– which was eventually published only in 1981 (Hitlers politisches Testament. Die Bormann Diktate von Februar und April 1945, mit einem Essay von Hugh R. Trevor-Roper und einem Nachwort von André François-Poncet, Hamburg, 1981). Further examination of the text in the meantime-though this was not mentioned by the German publishers – by Professor Eduard Baumgarten had established that the translation <b>back into German from the French </b>(carried out by a Dutchman) contained between the lines a second German text, written in the hand of François Genoud. The available German text is, therefore, at best a construct; neither the original nor the copy of that original exists. Baumgarten tended, since the content was consonant with Hitler’s thinking and expression, to accept the authenticity of the text. There is, however, no proof and, therefore, no reliable German text whose authenticity can be placed beyond question. (Institut für Zeitgeschichte (ed.), Wissensch-aftsfreiheit und ihre rechtlichen Schranken. Ein Kolloquium, Munich/Vienna, 1978, 45–51 (comments of François Genoud, Eduard Baumgarten, and Martin Broszat).)
