Customer Reviews

Hitler Warned Us

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If you are looking for a piece of work that breaks new ground, takes a fresh look at the political intricacies of National Socialism, examines the cultural roots of Nazi philosophy or examines the personalities of the Third Reich...this book is not for you! John Laffin has written (or should I say re-written) a piece of work that is both mundane and utterly unoriginal. It's amazing that Brassey's, the publishing house that released "Hitler Warned Us" let this one slip out the door. Brassey's is a small publishing house, but they are usually known for their quality work. The aim of "Hitler Warned Us" is to expose, through quotes and clever historical footnotes, the fact that the Nazis laid out their global plan of conquest for the whole world to see years before WWII started. Presumably pre-war Europe should not have been surprised in 1939 when Hitler dragged the world into war...but the scary part is, they were. The problem: this subject matter has been explored before. Exhaustive amounts of serious research have been done trying to discover exactly why and how the rest of the West could have made such a grave, unforgivable blunder. John Laffin does not even bother to hypothesize a reason in "Hitler Warned Us". Instead we are left with an endless string of quotes from Mein Kampf and an assortment of photographs of top nazis that surely the average WWII historical reader has seen many, many times before. What little research and writing the author did put into the book is an absolute re-hash of EVERYTHING you've ever read concerning this subject matter. Reading this book was an exercise in tedium.

This book was particularly disturbing to me (hence my long review) because it really degrades and cheapens the subject matter. This book has the look and feel of something thrown onto the market to capitalize on the genre. The book clocks in at 160 pages, and with the large text and multitude of pictures, you'll walk away feeling like you've read nothing at all. It's almost insulting.

Amazon offers quite a bit of other books on this subject matter that are worth looking into. Most notably by authors like Eleanor H. Ayer, Paul Madden, David Irving, etc.

The main theme in this book is that Hitler told everybody exactly what he was going to do prior to his selection as Chancellor. Therefore it is no surprise when he instigated his murderous policies of war and genocide. When the German people said they didn't know, Laffin states without hesitation that the majority of people knew exactly what Hitler was going to do. When the countries which eventually fought Hitler stated they didn't know, Laffin states they should have known because of all his stated goals in speeches and his book. If they didn't know, then they weren't listening.
Laffin's book takes photos from a 1936 German publication, and then explains the text. He also uses a chapter about a British soldier watching the rearming of Germany and explains the warning signals. There are a lot of pictures in this book, and they are quite interesting. The writing could be better, but the message is quite true. The German people and the Allies decived themselves about Hitler's intentions.