Hitler's Letters and Notes

New York: Harper & Row, 1974. First U. S. Edition (stated). Presumed First Printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. ix, [1], 390 pages Illustrations. DJ has wear, tears, soiling, and small chips. Some edge soiling. Slightly cocked. Part I: Letters and Bequests. Part II Hitler's Political Philosophy. Appendix: Eva Braun's diary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Werner Maser (12 July 1922 - 5 April 2007) was a German historian, journalist and professor at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. Werner was the first historian to claim that the Hitler Diaries were forgeries. He was born in East Prussia to a farmer and horse breeder. During the Second World War he served in the German Army as an infantry officer. After Germany's defeat, Maser was interned by the Soviets in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After his release, he studied theology, philosophy and political science at Berlin, Munich and Erlangen. His doctoral thesis was titled The Organization of the Führer Legend.[2] Maser was appointed professor of history at the University of Munich and he was also a guest professor at universities in America, Japan and Finland. He discovered Hitler's medical records, which had been thought lost. During the late 1970s Werner claimed that Hitler had fathered a son (Jean-Marie Loret) with a French peasant dancer in 1918. He was a critic of the works of Alan Bullock and Sebastian Haffner. In his 1994 work Der Wortbruch: Hitler, Stalin und der Zweite Weltkrieg ("The Broken Agreement: Hitler, Stalin and the Second World War"), Maser argued that the Soviets were preparing to invade Germany and that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union pre-empted the planned Soviet invasion of Germany by two weeks. Hitler's Letters and Notes is a book by Werner Maser. It is a collection of Adolf Hitler's personal correspondence and private notations with comments by Maser. It reproduces photo-facsimiles of the handwritten original documents, with translations thereof, from the age of 17 until his death. Maser contends that the book casts new light onto the development of Hitler's political philosophy. It was first published in German as Hitlers Briefe und Notizen: sein Weltbild in handschriftlichen Dokumenten in 1973. Heinemann (London) published a slightly adapted translation (by Arnold Pomerans) as a 390-page hardcover in 1974, followed by Harper & Row in the United States.