This book is the latest entry into the already crowded field asking “was Hitler a riddle?” and “why didn't someone stop the dictator before it was too late?” The author's answers to these questions is that Hitler was no riddle at all and that he was not stopped because the leaders of the democracies, notably Great Britain and France, failed to act in response to the information they received from their diplomats stationed in Germany.

Historiographically, this is a highly personalist account. The functionalist school of interpretation of the Third Reich is mentioned only when the author turns—briefly—to the historiography of the Holocaust. (In fact, the name of the leading proponent of functionalism, Hans Mommsen, appears neither in the bibliography nor the index.) The reason for this approach is that Abraham Ascher is convinced all significant decisions in the Third Reich were made by Hitler.

The author's personalist methodology also encompasses a fondness for psychological portraits of both the leading Nazis and the diplomats. Thus, Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels, the Nazi leaders with whom the diplomats had the most contact, were all pathological. In his psychograms of the diplomats, Ascher tends to portray the critics of Hitler as bright, intelligent, and analytically astute, while the appeasers exhibit character flaws. This sort of thing can be overdone. Is it really relevant that Mackensie King, the Canadian Prime Minister who had an initially favorable impression of Hitler, visited prostitutes in his youth?

The author is especially impressed by the analytical prowess of some of the British and American diplomats. Among the British ambassadors, Sir Horace Rumbold, Sir Eric Phipps, and Sir Neville Henderson, the first two get high marks for their prompt recognition of Hitler's evil ambitions, while the third, a leading opponent of appeasement, is described as a man of “many prejudices” (p. 66). The American ambassadors, William E. Dodd and Frederic Sackett, as well as the consul general in Munich, George Messersmith, get praised for recognizing the significance of the Nazi persecution of the Jews meant that Hitler had abandoned the path of civilization and the rule of law.

The western ambassador who probably had the best relationship to Hitler was the French envoy André François-Poncet. As Ascher mentions, Hitler appreciated the boxes of pralines that the French ambassador sent him from time to time. The author does not note this, but briefly François-Poncet's son even served in the Hitler Youth. Since the French ambassador had an ambivalent relationship to the Nazi regime, Ascher's assessment of him is rather negative. François-Poncet was an enigma and a man of “bewildering inconsistencies” (p. 139).

The central thesis of the book is straightforward: most of the diplomats who represented the three leading democracies in Germany recognized quite early that Hitler was not a riddle (the author says that this was clear three months after Hitler came to power), but that he was a man of unlimited ambitions, determined to destroy the international balance of power and establish a regime of racist terror. They also recognized that Hitler needed to be stopped by firm action, and they were in agreement that the best time to have done this was the Rhineland Crisis of 1936. According to the author, the diplomats reached their conclusions because they recognized a continuum between domestic terror and lawlessness in Germany and Hitler's ambitions on the international scene.

For a variety of reasons, these obviously correct conclusions were not acted upon by the diplomats' superiors. The author attributes the failure of the French and British foreign ministers and prime ministers to take action to a combination of wrongheaded abhorrence of military conflict, a misplaced fear of communism as the primary enemy of western civilization, and the prevalence of weak leaders. In the United States the leaders were not weak, but they were paralyzed by the prevailing strains of isolationism.

Ascher's central thesis is certainly correct: the diplomats in the field were right about the nature of Hitler's ambitions. There is also no doubt that especially in London and Paris their superiors drew the wrong conclusions. The book does have some shortcomings, however. As is perhaps inevitable in a work of this sort, Ascher at times falls victim to the fallacy of historicism. He quotes with approval an American diplomat in Munich who recognized Hitler's future significance in 1920, but this official's prescience is a little diminished when he also called Anton Drexler, the actual founder of the Nazi party, an excellent organizer. Drexler was anything but that. Similarly, there are numerous references to the rantings of Julius Streicher, the most vicious Jew-baiter in the Nazi party. With the benefit of hindsight, Streicher's outbursts are certainly ominous, but it should be remembered that at no point was he in a position to make policy decisions.

Especially the British and French diplomats were concerned about the storm troopers as a potential armed force designed to circumvent the restrictions in the Versailles Treaty on the German military. Hitler and the Nazis consistently denied that the storm troopers had any military value, and in this case they were actually right. After the Röhm Affair of June 1934 the storm troopers were reduced to a Sunday afternoon marching society.

The primary value of this book is the author's careful analysis of the diplomats' reports from the field. I wish he had done the same sort of analysis for what happened to the reports when they reached the desks of the officials in Paris, London, and Washington. Diplomatic reports from the field pass through a chain of bureaucrats and, typically, these officials annotate the field reports with comments, marginal notes, and reflections. This evaluative process is not well treated in the book, although there are tantalizing hints of what went on behind the scenes. Ascher notes that Sir Horace Rumbold's so-called “Mein Kampf dispatch” of April 26, 1933, was read by both the Prime Minister and Neville Chamberlain, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Additional information on what happened to other field reports in the capitals of the democracies would have given the book a greater sense of symmetry.

Still, this is an important book that sheds light on assessments of Hitler and his regime from sources that had not been fully analyzed previously. Finally, one factual error. The name of the German ambassador to Washington in 1933 was Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron, not Gaffen.