Hitler's Table Talk

Hitler's Table Talk (German: Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier) is the title given to a series of World War II monologues delivered by Adolf Hitler, which were transcribed from 1941 to 1944. Hitler's remarks were recorded by Heinrich Heim, Henry Picker, and Martin Bormann, and later published by different editors, under different titles, in three different languages.

Martin Bormann, who was serving as Hitler's private secretary, persuaded Hitler to allow a team of specially picked officers to record in shorthand his private conversations for posterity. The first notes were taken by the lawyer Heinrich Heim, starting from 5 July 1941 to mid-March 1942. Taking his place, Henry Picker took notes from 21 March 1942 until 2 August 1942, after which Heinrich Heim and Martin Bormann continued appending material off and on until 1944.

The talks were recorded at the Führer Headquarters in the company of Hitler's inner circle. The talks dwell on war and foreign affairs but also Hitler's attitudes on religion, culture, philosophy, his personal aspirations and feelings towards his enemies and friends.

The history of the document is relatively complex, as numerous individuals were involved, working at different times, collating different parts of the work. This effort spawned two distinct notebooks, which were translated into multiple languages, and covered, in some instances, non-overlapping time-frames due to ongoing legal and copyright issues.

All editions and translations are based on the two original German notebooks, one by Henry Picker, and another based on a more complete notebook by Martin Bormann (which is often called the Bormann-Vermerke). Henry Picker was the first to publish the table talk, doing so in 1951 in the original German. This was followed by the French translation in 1952 by François Genoud, a Swiss financier. The English edition came in 1953, which was translated by R. H. Stevens and Norman Cameron and published with an introduction by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Both the French and English translations were purportedly based on the Bormann-Vermerke manuscript, while Picker's volume was based on his original notes, as well as the notes he directly acquired from Heinrich Heim spanning from 5 July 1941 to March 1942. The original German content of the Bormann-Vermerke was not published until 1980 by historian Werner Jochmann. However Jochmann's edition is not complete, as it lacks the 100 entries made by Picker between 12 March and 1 September 1942. Both Heim's and Picker's original manuscripts seem to have been lost, and their whereabouts are unknown.

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