Why Nobody Talks About AJP Taylor the Way They Used To
Reading AJP Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War for the first time in the late 1980s, you get the distinct impression the entire postwar establishment had been running on a lie for forty years. Taylor claimed Hitler wasn't some calculating demonic genius planning world domination from page one of Mein Kampf. He was, according to Taylor, a conventional German politician who stumbled into war through a series of mistakes and accidents, much like Germany had stumbled into the First World War in 1914. The book dropped in October 1961 and immediately caused an absolute uproar. It was reviewed in every major paper. Churchill wrote a scathing rebuttal. Taylor's reputation was made overnight, then spent over the next decade having nearly every claim picked apart by professional historians. Taylor's central argument rested on two claims that still make people angry decades later. First, the Treaty of Versailles was not an excessive peace. It was harsh but reasonable, and Germany had signed it voluntarily. The reparations were never actually enforceable at the levels demanded, and the territorial losses were modest compared to what Germany gained from occupying Poland anyway. Second, Hitler was not unique in his goals. Every German leader since Bismarck had wanted to revise the treaty and expand eastward. Hitler merely accelerated policies his predecessors had already laid out. The Munich Agreement wasn't a catastrophic failure of courage, it was a rational settlement that solved the Czechoslovakia problem without firing a shot. I remember sitting in a dusty university library copy of the book, underlining passages where Taylor essentially said the British and French governments were just as culpable as Hitler for starting the war. He didn't exonerate Hitler of brutality, but he removed the moral asymmetry that had defined the entire postwar narrative. That was the part that got people genuinely upset. Not the revisionism itself, but the implication that the Allied position was less morally grounded than textbooks had taught.
The Structure of Taylor's Case
Taylor built his argument through a meticulous chronological breakdown of the diplomatic record from 1933 onward. His methodology was archival rather than theoretical. He didn't start with a thesis about totalitarianism or the nature of Nazi ideology. He started with documents. The Treaty of Versailles, the Locarno agreements, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, Munich, the collapse of Czechoslovakia, and finally September 1939. At each stage he presented the available evidence and let it sit there without particularly fancy interpretive scaffolding. One of the things that makes reading him difficult today is that he wrote as if his readers already understood the full diplomatic background. He assumes familiarity with the Treaty of Trianon, the plebiscite votes in Schleswig, the Memel crisis, the Danzig question. Modern students often don't have that background anymore. I've seen too many undergraduates nod along with Taylor's conclusions without realizing that several of his supporting claims depend on facts about Central European border disputes that most people under twenty-five have never encountered in any form.
What Taylor Got Right
After fifty years of criticism, the scholarly consensus has shifted closer to Taylor than most people realize. Not all the way there, but closer. The idea that Hitler was somewhat improvisational rather than meticulously planned comes through in a lot of the archive work that has come out since the 1990s. Ian Kershaw's biographies, for instance, while thoroughly rejecting Taylor's moral equivalence, acknowledge that Hitler's foreign policy was often reactive and driven more by opportunity than by a detailed blueprint. The notion that the Treaty of Versailles was harsh but not uniquely punitive also has more defenders now than it did in 1961. Taylor was right about the general direction even if some of his specific numbers were sloppy. The Munich analysis is where Taylor is most difficult to read without reservation. His claim that Chamberlain made the right call in 1938 because Czechoslovakia was indefensible and the Sudetenland issue was fundamentally about self-determination has been heavily contested. You can accept that the military situation favored Hitler without accepting that the political settlement at Munich was anything other than a surrender that weakened the one state in Central Europe capable of checking German expansion. That distinction matters.
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Where Taylor Was Plain Wrong
The most egregious error in the book concerns the scale of German rearmament before 1939. Taylor consistently underestimated the size and readiness of the Wehrmacht. He treated Germany as a semi-feudal state still recovering from Versailles when by 1938 it was one of the most heavily armed nations in Europe. This isn't a minor quibble. It goes to the heart of his argument that Hitler was simply taking normal steps to restore German power rather than planning aggressive war. If the army was already larger and better equipped than Taylor admitted, then the Munich settlement looks very different. His treatment of Soviet history is equally problematic. Taylor's chapter on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact reads more like an exercise in finding excuses than analyzing what actually happened. The idea that Stalin was the primary driver of the war's outbreak because he was maneuvering Germany toward conflict with Britain and France is a thin reed to hang an argument on. Recent archival work from Soviet sources has only made this position harder to sustain. I once tried to use Taylor's book as a primary source in a research paper about appeasement and ran into a specific problem: his chapter references are scattered throughout the text rather than collected in a conventional bibliography. The footnotes are embedded inline, often referring to documents by abbreviation or serial number that aren't explained until pages later in appendices that themselves cross-reference other appendices. It took me about forty-five minutes just to track down a single citation about the Hoare-Laval Pact that he mentioned in passing. My workaround was to use the 1977 Pelican edition, which reorganized the footnotes and added indexes that the original lacked. Still not ideal, but functional.
How to Read Taylor Without Losing Your Mind
Start with the introduction and the first three chapters. Get the framework. Then read the subsequent chapters in order but carry a good atlas and a basic reference on interwar diplomacy. When Taylor makes a factual claim about troop numbers or treaty terms, check it against a secondary source. Kershaw's Hitler biography and Richard Overy's Why the Allies Won are both excellent counterweights. Don't read Taylor as truth. Read him as a provocative argument that happens to contain more correct observations than most people give it credit for. The book is available in multiple editions. The original 1961 edition has the most complete argument but the worst organization. The 1977 Pelican revised edition is the standard academic choice. There's also a 2000 edition with a new introduction by Richard J. Evans that contextualizes the historiographical battles. If you're reading this for the first time, Evans' introduction is worth the price of admission on its own. It explains why Taylor's book still matters despite being wrong about so much.
The Real Takeaway
Taylor's Origins of the Second World War remains one of the most important history books ever written, not because it got everything right but because it forced every historian who came after to take its challenges seriously. The debate it sparked changed how the war's origins are understood. Even the historians who spent the next thirty years dismantling Taylor's specific conclusions accepted his central provocation: that the standard moral narrative was incomplete, that responsibility was shared, and that the causes of the war were more complicated than victory had allowed people to believe. You don't have to agree with Taylor to benefit from reading him. Most people who do agree with him change their minds within a few chapters. But the process of working through his arguments is genuinely educational. It teaches you something about how history gets written and how easily consensus can harden into dogma when the winning side controls the narrative.
