In the decade since this book was published, kind readers have followed the request in the original Preface to send me corrections. I am most grateful to those who have taken the trouble to call to my attention errors that it has been possible to correct in subsequent printings. Reviewers of the book have been very kind to it. In the intervening decade, there have been important new materials made accessible to scholars and there has, in addition, been a continuous outpouring of scholarly works dealing with the greatest war of which we know. While there may be an opportunity to revise the book as a whole, in the meantime this is a good interval at which to point to some areas where either changes will be needed or new studies have reinforced the interpretation previously offered.

Certainly the original thesis that Germany deliberately initiated World War II on September I, 1939, by a procedure that drew on Adolf Hitler's “lesson” of Munich, namely that he would not be cheated of war again as had happened in 1938, has been confirmed by the detailed examination of the immediate origins of the war. An analysis of Soviet procedure in dealing with the German army in the 1939 Polish campaign by promptly and courteously returning all German prisoners of war captured by the Poles makes for an extraordinary contrast with the opposite handling of British and American prisoners held by the Germans in 1944-45.

The description of the German decision to attack the Soviet Union has been confirmed by the new materials that have surfaced from both German and Soviet archives as a result of the effort of some to convert the German invasion into a sort of preventive move designed to forestall a planned invasion by the Soviets invented by the advocates of this interpretation. From the German side we now have the project of the German army's chief of staff, General Franz Halder, for an invasion of the Soviet Union still in the fall of 1940 with orders and preparations starting on June 3, even before the armistice with France. When Hitler decided on July 31 that the fall of 1940 would not allow for enough time to prepare and carry through the invasion, but that preparations for an invasion in 1941 should start, the general staff was already working on that.