Taylor was a prominent British diplomatic historian and public intellectual, he became particularly famous for his history lectures on the BBC and his involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Taylor's 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War staked out a number of controversial claims about the war's origins. Rather than portraying Hitler as the sole catalyst for war, Taylor contended that all the powers had a role in the war's origins. More controversially, Taylor argued that the Munich Agreement was in fact a sane and rational policy decision. For the British and the French, the Munich agreements bought not only time, but also made the outbreak of war politically palatable as it maneuvered Hitler into a position where the onus for starting a war post-Munich would fall squarely upon his shoulders. Moreover, Taylor also argued that Appeasement spared Czechoslovakia from a war it could not win and the country emerged from the Second World War relatively unscathed (notably, and perhaps not surprisingly for a work of the early 1960s when Holocaust historiography was relatively new, Taylor omits the fate of Czechoslovakian Jews). This defense of Munich was quite controversial in its time and opened Taylor up to a number of attacks. For narratives like Shirer's, Taylor's thesis undercut notions that Hitler engaged in a consistent plan for war and the Western Allies should have recognized this and not appeased him. Some critics charged that Taylor's books was cover for his activities in the CND, as at the height of the Cold War, many invoked Munich as the rationale not to deal with the Soviets, whose leader Khrushchev was often quite erratic in public.

Ironically, pace Rosenbaum's introduction, Shirer and Taylor do share a degree of overlap. One of Taylor's favorite canards was to say "the only thing wrong with Hitler was that he was German." Taylor felt that there was a distinction between Hitler's domestic and foreign policy, and that while in the former, Hitler and the NSDAP were quite radical, Hitler was instead following a very traditional German approach to world affairs. The Oxford historian mistrusted Germany and felt that her geographic position in the center of Europe fostered an expansionist foreign policy and that the weight of German history inculcated an anti-democratic mentality. Shirer for his part in his bestselling book popularized the notion of a Sonderweg, or Germany's special path, in which a unique constellation of historical events pushed Germany towards a movement like Hitler.

Historians of modern Germany have really questioned and thoroughly undermined these ideas. Research on the Third Reich's genocidal policies has often shown that Taylor's schematic division of foreign and domestic policies as quite untenable as they often mixed together. The Sonderweg model is now an old chestnut that only a few historians of modern Germany take up. In their seminal work The Peculiarities of German History, both David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley argued that the Sonderweg relies upon a highly selective use of evidence and ignores similiar analogs of antidemocratic tendencies in the allegedly normal West.