Himmler; Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century, War Leader Book, No. 14

New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Good. Richard Natkiel (Cartographer). 21 cm. 158, [2] pages. Wraps. Illustrations. Map. Some wear to covers. Introduction by Barrie Pitt. Alan Wykes was an author and journalist , Alan Wykes was a prolific storyteller with a prodigious memory for historical detail. Down the years much of his work was in collaboration with others, a few of them better known as biographers than he was himself. In Noel Barber's final work Daughter of the Prince, published two years ago, it was Wykes who managed to finish the last two- thirds of the book on his own when Barber fell tragically ill and died suddenly. Wykes had a sharp eye while 'looking at the field' and managed to hit upon titles with such lethal subjects as The Doctor and His Enemy (1964; about syphilis) and Lucrezia Borgia (1970), Hitler (1970), Goebbels (1971), Himmler (1972) and Heydrich (1972). Under the overall editorship of Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, Barrie Pitt was responsible for the first major part-work, Purnell's History of the Second World War, a 96-instalment mass circulation series which was launched in 1966 at the Imperial War Museum. After this success he proved a generous patron of younger historians as the editor of some 100 small volumes in Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War 2 and then Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century. Himmler, the obsessive gatherer and filer of information, eventually came to wield the most real power under Hitler. As head of the Gestapo and the concentration camps, he organized the extermination of more than ten million people. It is a great educational tool for anyone interested in of the leaders in the Third Reich that planned the holocaust. Wykes does a good job of examining Himmler's personality and relating it to his professional career in the Nazi Party culminating as Reichsfuhrer SS. An accurate portrayal.