Discover the Best Books Written by Ian Kershaw

Sir Ian Kershaw FRHistS FBA (born 29 April 1943) is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler. He was the leading disciple of the German historian Martin Broszat, and until his retirement, he was a professor at the University of Sheffield. Kershaw has called Broszat an "inspirational mentor" who did much to shape his understanding of Nazi Germany. 

Kershaw was a historical adviser on numerous BBC documentaries, notably The Nazis: A Warning from History and War of the Century. He taught a module titled "Germans against Hitler." Kershaw was born on 29 April 1943 in Oldham, Lancashire, England, to Joseph Kershaw and Alice Robinson. He was educated at Counthill Grammar School, St Bede's College, Manchester, the University of Liverpool (BA), and Merton College, Oxford (DPhil). 

He was originally trained as a medievalist but turned to study modern German social history in the 1970s. At first, he was mainly concerned with the economic history of Bolton Abbey. As a lecturer in medieval history at Manchester, Kershaw learned German to study the German peasantry in the Middle Ages. In 1972, he visited Bavaria and was shocked to hear the views of an old man he met in a Munich café who told him: "You English were so foolish. If only you had sided with us. 

Together we could have defeated Bolshevism and ruled the earth!"—adding in for good measure that "The Jew is a louse!" As a result of this incident, Kershaw became keen to learn how and why ordinary people in Germany could support Nazism. His wife, Dame Betty Kershaw, is a former professor of nursing and dean of the School of Nursing Studies at the University of Sheffield.

In 1975, Kershaw joined Martin Broszat's "Bavaria Project." During his work, Broszat encouraged Kershaw to examine how ordinary people viewed Hitler. As a result of his work in the 1970s on Broszat's "Bavaria Project," Kershaw wrote his first book on Nazi Germany, The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich, which was first published in German in 1980 as Der Hitler-Mythos: Volksmeinung und Propaganda im Dritten Reich. This book examined the "Hitler cult" in Germany, how Joseph Goebbels developed it, what social groups the Hitler Myth appealed to, and how it rose and fell.

Kershaw argued that Goebbels failed to create the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) of Nazi propaganda and that most Bavarians were far more interested in their day-to-day lives than in politics during the Third Reich. Kershaw concluded that the majority of Bavarians were either antisemitic or, more commonly, simply did not care about what was happening to the Jews. 

Kershaw also concluded that there was a fundamental difference between the antisemitism of the majority of ordinary people, who disliked Jews and were much colored by traditional Catholic prejudices, and the ideological and far more radical völkische antisemitism of the Nazi Party, who hated Jews. Kershaw found that most Bavarians disapproved of the violence of the Kristallnacht pogrom and that, despite the efforts of the Nazis, they continued to maintain social relations with members of the Bavarian Jewish community.

Kershaw documented numerous campaigns on the part of the Nazi Party to increase antisemitic hatred and noted that the overwhelming majority of antisemitic activities in Bavaria were the work of a small number of committed Nazi Party members. Kershaw noted that the popular mood towards Jews was indifference to their fate. Kershaw argued that during World War II, most Bavarians were vaguely aware of the Holocaust but were vastly more concerned about and interested in the war than about the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question."

Kershaw made the notable claim that "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference." By this, Kershaw meant the progress leading up to Auschwitz was motivated by the antisemitism of the most vicious kind held by the Nazi elite. Still, it occurred in a context where most German public opinion was completely indifferent to what was happening.

Kershaw's assessment that most Bavarians, and by implication Germans, were "indifferent" to the Shoah faced criticism from the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka and the Canadian historian Michael Kater. Kater contended that Kershaw downplayed the extent of popular antisemitism and that though admitting that most of the "spontaneous" antisemitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme antisemitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above.

Kulka argued that most Germans were more antisemitic than Kershaw portrayed them in Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich and that rather than "indifference," "passive complicity" would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people to the Shoah.