Book Shelf.

As the new century begins, lawyers engage in courtroom debate about the technicalities of ballots: If it's partly pushed through, does that mean the candidate wins? This is the kind of history it might not be very exciting to read about, but it's certainly the kind a reasonable person would prefer to live through.

As if to prove this point, a new publishing company has been founded specializing in the history of that most unsavory of centuries, the just-concluded 20th. The charter of Enigma Books is to make available important works about the totalitarian century, when issues-and egos-were larger than life. Enigma's first release sets the tone: Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (788 pp., $32), an invaluable resource on one of the century's most repellent-yet representative-figures. Hitler's acolyte Martin Bormann had note-takers present at some of the Fuhrer's relaxed conversations, and as a result we can listen to the unguarded reflections of the dictator when he was at the height of his power.

Contemporaries puzzled over Hitler: Did private ideological obsessions drive his lust for power-or was he a gangster who cynically exploited those crank ideologies to win power? His private comments show him to have been quite committed to his crankery, which was of the village-atheist variety. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of this long book is how often Hitler would return to questions of religion, specifically to express his contempt for Christianity, most especially in its Catholic form. He repeatedly refers to priests as "shavelings" and mocks their rituals: "I would gladly have recourse to the shavelings, if they could help us to intercept English or Russian aircraft. But, for the present, the men who serve our anti-aircraft guns are more useful than the fellows who handle the sprinkler." More ominously, on July 4, 1942, he told his friends: "The fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like the Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing."

Another release from the fledgling Enigma is In Stalin's Secret Service, by W. G. Krivitsky (306 pp., $27)-a reprint of the 1939 memoir by one of the first major Soviet defectors. Walter Krivitsky was the chief of Soviet espionage in Western Europe in the late 1930s, and he was an eyewitness to Stalin's cynicism-his brutal Realpolitik approach in the Spanish Civil War; his execution of the old Bolsheviks and his general staff; and his fervent courting of Hitler, long before the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939.

In 1941, Krivitsky died under very suspicious circumstances in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. The police believed it was a suicide, but many of Krivitsky's friends thought he had been murdered. One of the most valuable parts of this book is a 36-page appendix containing a 1966 article by the Washington Post's Flora Lewis, which summarizes Krivitsky's life and the controversy surrounding his death; the reader would do well to read Lewis's article first, before tackling Krivitsky's text. Krivitsky gave credible testimony about the crimes of the Soviet regime before the Cold War even began, and he paid a great price for his witness. We should be grateful to have his work back in print. -Michael Potemra