Books: Voice from the Fire Pit

HITLER DIRECTS His WAR (187 pp.)—translated and edited by Felix Gilbert —Oxford ($3.25).

On May 10, 1945, five days after the U.S. occupation of Berchtesgaden, a Counter-Intelligence Corps sergeant named George Allen loaded three German male stenographers into a car and drove five miles outside town to the wreckage of a Luftwaffe motor pool. There, after a search, Sergeant Allen found what he was looking for: a big hole in the ground, 20 feet wide and four feet deep, full of charred paper. He began poking around, soon plucked out a sheaf of papers that had escaped the flames. What he held...

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