33 Facts About Ian Kershaw

Ian Kershaw is regarded by many as one of the world's foremost experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.

Ian Kershaw was a follower of the German historian Martin Broszat, and until his retirement, he was a professor at the University of Sheffield.

Ian Kershaw served as historical adviser on numerous BBC documentaries, notably The Nazis: A Warning from History and War of the Century.

Ian Kershaw was born on 29 April 1943 in Oldham, Lancashire, England, to Joseph Kershaw, a musician, and Alice Kershaw.

Ian Kershaw was originally trained as a medievalist but turned to the study of modern German social history in the 1970s.

Ian Kershaw's wife, Dame Betty Kershaw, is a former professor of nursing and dean of the School of Nursing Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Ian Kershaw showed how ordinary people reacted to the Nazi dictatorship, looking at how people conformed to the regime and to the extent and limits of dissent.

Ian Kershaw concluded that there was a fundamental difference between the antisemitism of the majority of ordinary people, who disliked Jews and were much coloured by traditional Catholic prejudices, and the ideological and far more radical volkische antisemitism of the Nazi Party, who hated Jews.

Ian 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.

Kater contended that Ian 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 Ian 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.

In 1985, Ian Kershaw published a book on the historiography of Nazi Germany, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, in which he reflected on the problems in historiography of the Nazi era.

Ian Kershaw noted the huge disparity of often incompatible views about the Nazi era such as the debate between:.

Along the same lines, Kershaw criticised the 1946 statement by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke that Nazism was just a particularly unfortunate Betriebsunfall of history.

Ian Kershaw was later in a 2003 essay to criticise Ritter and Meinecke, stating that by their promotion of the Betriebsunfall theory or by blaming everything upon Hitler, they were seeking to whitewash the German past.

Ian Kershaw has argued that the term Widerstand should be used only for those working for the total overthrow of the Nazi system, and those engaging in behaviour that was counter to the regime's wishes without seeking to overthrow the regime should be included under the terms opposition and dissent, depending upon their motives and actions.

Ian Kershaw has used the Edelweiss Pirates as an example of a group whose behavior initially fell under dissent, and who advanced from there to opposition and finally to resistance.

The debate in the late 1980s between Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander over Broszat's call for the "historicization" of Nazism, Kershaw wrote that he agreed with Friedlander that the Nazi period could not be treated as a "normal" period of history, but he felt that historians should approach the Nazi period as they would any other period of history.

In support of Broszat, Ian Kershaw wrote that an Alltagsgeschichte approach to German history, provided that it did not lose sight of Nazi crimes, had much to offer as a way of understanding how those crimes occurred.

Ian Kershaw wrote that he agreed with Eberhard Jackel's assessment that Hitler's Willing Executioners was "simply a bad book".

Ian Kershaw rejects the great man theory of history and has criticised those who seek to explain everything that happened in Nazi Germany as the result of Hitler's will and intentions.

Ian Kershaw has argued that it is absurd to seek to explain German history in the Nazi era solely through Hitler, as Germany had sixty-eight million people and to seek to explain the fate of sixty-eight million people solely through the prism of one man is in Ian Kershaw's opinion a flawed position.

Ian Kershaw wrote about the problems of an excessive focus on Hitler that "even the best biographies have seemed at times in danger of elevating Hitler's personal power to a level where the history of Germany between 1933 and 1945 becomes reduced to little more than an expression of the dictator's will".

Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler is an examination of Hitler's power; how he obtained it and how he maintained it.

Ian Kershaw has argued in his two-volume biography of Hitler that Hitler did play a decisive role in the development of policies of genocide, but argued that many of the measures that led to the Holocaust were undertaken by many lower-ranking officials without direct orders from Hitler in the expectation that such steps would win them favour.

Ian Kershaw disagrees with Mommsen's "Weak Dictator" thesis: the idea that Hitler was a relatively unimportant player in Nazi Germany.

Ian Kershaw has agreed with his idea that Hitler did not play much of a role in the day-to-day administration of the government of Nazi Germany.

Ian Kershaw has argued that in Nazi Germany officials of the German state and Party bureaucracy usually took the initiative in initiating policy to meet Hitler's perceived wishes, or alternatively attempted to turn into policy Hitler's often loosely and indistinctly phrased wishes.

Ian Kershaw argued that Hitler was a very unbureaucratic leader who was highly averse to paperwork, in marked contrast to Joseph Stalin.

Ian Kershaw argued that Stalin was highly involved in the running of the Soviet Union, in contrast to Hitler whose involvement in day-to-day decision making was limited, infrequent and capricious.

Ian Kershaw argued that the Soviet regime, despite its extreme brutality and ruthlessness, was basically rational in its goal of seeking to modernise a backward country and had no equivalent of the "cumulative radicalization" towards increasingly irrational goals that Ian Kershaw sees as characteristic of Nazi Germany.

Ian Kershaw argues that by 1938 the German state had been reduced to a hopeless, polycratic shambles of rival agencies all competing with each other for Hitler's favour, which by that time had become the only source of political legitimacy.

For Ian Kershaw, Hitler held absolute power in Nazi Germany due to the "erosion of collective government in Germany", but his power over domestic politics became more challenging to exercise due to his preoccupation with military affairs, and the rival fiefdoms of the Nazi state fought each other and attempted to carry out Hitler's vaguely worded wishes and dimly defined orders by "Working Towards the Fuhrer".