Stephen H. Roberts' The House That Hitler Built as a Source on Nazi Germany

This article is a critical evaluation of Stephen H. Roberts' The House that Hitler Built (1937) as a source on Nazi Germany. Roberts' book was one of the most successful contemporary accounts of Nazi Germany by an English-speaking visitor, at least as far as the number of printings and translations was concerned. The work is also of interest on account of Roberts' important position in the history of the historical profession in Australia. The present article proceeds by examining the evidence about Roberts' visits to Germany in 1936, and the context of the book's composition, relating it to other contemporary sources, in order to arrive at an assessment of the book's merits as a primary source and as a scholar's assessment of the "Third Reich". The article finds that while Roberts' work contains some shrewd insights and is persuasively written, the scholarship is sometimes flawed, with Roberts ultimately arriving at correct conclusions for the wrong reasons.