Since the war, the general view of the causes of the Second World War (the "Nuremberg Thesis") was that Hitler had wanted war, planned in detail for war and had launched the war. He also was opposed to the idea that it was necessary for the Western powers to take a tough stand against the Soviet Union as failure to take a similar stand against Nazi Germany had led to war. In Taylor's view, if the Second World War could start by accident, so could a Third. Taylor supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, one of whose arguments was that an unintended war brought about by accident could cause a nuclear war and the end of human civilisation. However, according to Kathleen Burk's biography of Taylor, he did not read Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf until after writing the book. Since 1947, he had read fifteen volumes of British diplomatic documents, eight volumes of German diplomatic documents and one volume of Italian diplomatic documents, all of them covering the 1930s.
This extraordinary paucity, as it seems now, makes my book a period piece of limited value. At that time no original sources were available: no cabinet minutes or papers, no Chiefs of Staff records, only more or less formal documents from the Foreign Office with very occasional minutes. I had, I thought, done most of the research work needed by reviewing the various books of memoirs and the volumes of German and British diplomatic documents as they came out. I wanted to be writing something and decided that I could carry on my diplomatic history from the point where the Struggle for Mastery left off. Taylor had previously written The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918.
It was first published in 1961 by Hamish Hamilton. Taylor, examining the causes of World War II. The Origins of the Second World War is a non-fiction book by the English historian A.
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