Perhaps no element of Butterfield's life and thought has provoked so much hostile response as his attitude to the Third Reich. He appears in jaundiced retrospect as a Nazi fellow traveller who admired Hitler and who regarded the British decision to fight Germany as a mistake. And, as always within blanket criticism of this kind, sufficient ‘evidence’ can be extracted from under the blanket to make the contention plausible. Butterfield did indeed make misjudgements about the nature and direction of the Nazi regime before 1939; he did indeed lend support to German historians, some of whom had Nazi sympathies; he did indeed – famously and disastrously for his later reputation – accept an invitation to lecture in Germany at the end of 1938, by which time all ‘decent’ people are supposed to have understood all too well the real character of Hitler's government; he did indeed make a number of risqué remarks before and during the war to some very risky people. Wanting always to act mischievously, subversively and amusingly, Butterfield sometimes acted in ways that went beyond mischief, subverted the wrong enemies and struck liberal contemporaries as far from funny. He doubtless deserves all the blame heaped on him by an outraged posterity for ‘getting Hitler wrong’ and nothing in this chapter will dent the moral superiority of a world that finds grey a boring colour and 20/20 vision a requirement in its heroes.