La Grande Illusion: Belgian and Dutch Strategy Facing Germany, 1919–May 1940 (Part I)

Following the defeat of Germany in 1918, the dissolution of the Allied coalition and the gradual liberation of Germany from restrictions on its armed might, placed the neighboring Benelux countries before the dilemma of how to defend themselves against resurgent German aggression. The Netherlands and Luxemburg chose to rely on neutrality; Belgium at first flirted with the idea of joint defense with France, but from 1936, influenced among other things by the growing mechanization of warfare, embraced la grande illusion: that it could deter its neighbors from using its territory in case of a new war. Pursuance of this illusion until Germany actually attacked, together with the failure of the Netherlands and Belgium to create a joint defense, played a decisive role in the catastrophic Allied defeat of May 1940.

Sarah K. Douglas, “The Search for Hitler: Hugh Trevor-Roper, Humphrey Searle, and the Last Days of Adolf Hitler,” featuring a prologue by Geoffrey Parker, The Journal of Military History, 78:1 (January 2014): 159-210.

In September 1945, British intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper was asked to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Adolf Hitler. Two years later, he published his conclusions in The Last Days of Hitler, still recognized as the standard work. But, despite some delving into the subject in a recent biography of the author by Adam Sisman, it has remained unclear until now how Trevor-Roper managed to so rapidly gather the evidence on which his book is based. The account below, rooted in heretofore unseen or underused archival sources, highlights the crucial but unacknowledged support Trevor-Roper received from Allied intelligence services and from a timeline drafted by intelligence officer Captain Humphrey Searle, later a well-known composer, that combined all of the data assembled into a single record of events of the last days in the Führerbunker.