Hitler biographer Bullock dead at 89

3 February 2004

LONDON – Alan Bullock, author of a highly regarded biography of Adolf Hitler, has died in a nursing home in the English county of Oxfordshire, where he spent most of his academic life, the Guardian reported Tuesday.

Lord Bullock was 89 when he died on Monday.

The only child of a gardener and a domestic servant, Bullock grew up in the Avon valley near Bath. He won a classical scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, where he took a first in classics in 1936 and a first in modern history two years later.

He worked briefly for Winston Churchill, on his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and during World War II for the European Service of the BBC, becoming the corporation’s diplomatic correspondent. Asthma prevented active war service.

After the war he worked and taught at New College, Oxford, influencing the generation of undergraduates returning from active service.

He wrote Hitler: a Study in Tyranny in 1952. It soon became a standard text on the German dictator.