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.

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

[10]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.

[18] In the 2015 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw, although he acknowledged plausible objections to the application of a common "totalitarianism" paradigm to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, agreed with those who have generally made these criticisms "that it is in itself a wholly legitimate exercise, whatever essential differences existed in ideology and socio-economic structures, to compare the forms and techniques of rule in Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin".

[20] In a 2008 interview, Kershaw lists as his major intellectual influences Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Alan Milward, Timothy Mason, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, William Carr, and Jeremy Noakes.

[25] Along the same lines, Kershaw criticised the 1946 statement by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke that Nazism was just a particularly unfortunate Betriebsunfall (industrial accident) of history.

[25] 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 white-wash the German past.

[26] With regard to the Nazi foreign policy debate between "globalists" such as Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, Jochen Thies, Gunter Moltman and Gerhard Weinberg, who argue that Germany aimed at world conquest, and the "continentalists" such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn, who argue that Germany aimed only at the conquest of Europe, Kershaw tends towards the "continental" position.

[27][28] Kershaw agrees with the thesis that Hitler did formulate a programme for foreign policy based on an alliance with Britain to achieve the destruction of the Soviet Union, but has argued that a British lack of interest doomed the project, thus leading to the situation in 1939, where Hitler went to war with Britain, the country he wanted as an ally, not as an enemy, and the country he wanted as an enemy, the Soviet Union, as his ally.

[36] Although Kershaw has argued that the Resistenz (immunity [against indoctrination]) concept has much merit, he concluded that the Nazi regime had a broad basis of support and it is correct to speak of "resistance without the people".

Kershaw subscribes to the view argued by Broszat and the German historian Hans Mommsen that Nazi Germany was a chaotic collection of rival bureaucracies in perpetual power struggles with each other.

[44] In his biography of Hitler, Kershaw presented him as the ultimate "unperson"; a boring, pedestrian man devoid of even the "negative greatness" attributed to him by Joachim Fest.

[45] 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.

[47] Kershaw has a low opinion of those who seek to provide "personalized" theories about the Holocaust and/or World War II as due to some defect, medical or otherwise, in Hitler.

[48] In his 2000 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw quoted with approval the dismissive remarks made by the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler in 1980 about such theories.

Despite his background in the functionalist historiography, Kershaw admits that his account of Hitler in World War II owes much to intentionalist historians like Gerhard Weinberg, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lucy Dawidowicz and Eberhard Jäckel.

[18] Kershaw accepts the picture of Hitler drawn by intentionalist historians as a fanatical ideologue who was obsessed with social Darwinism, völkisch antisemitism (in which the Jewish people were viewed as a "race" biologically different from the rest of humanity rather than a religion), militarism and the perceived need for Lebensraum.

[54] Kershaw views the Holocaust not as a plan, as argued by the intentionalists, but rather a process caused by the "cumulative radicalization" of the Nazi state as articulated by the functionalists.

[55] This view of the Holocaust as a process rather than a plan is the antithesis of the extreme intentionalist approach as advocated by Lucy Dawidowicz, who argues that Hitler had decided upon genocide as early as November 1918, and that everything he did was directed towards that goal.

Kershaw's way of explaining this paradox is his theory of "Working Towards the Führer", the phrase being taken from a 1934 speech by the Prussian civil servant Werner Willikens:[57] Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Fuhrer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realize sooner or later.

[63] 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.

[65] In this, Kershaw largely agrees with Mommsen's portrait of Hitler as a distant and remote leader standing in many ways above his system, whose charisma and ideas served to set the general tone of politics.

[66][67] As Kershaw notes, the different ways Forster and Greiser sought to "Germanize" their Gaue – with Forster simply having the local Polish population in his Gau signing forms saying they had "German blood", and Greiser carrying out a program of brutal ethnic cleansing of Poles in his Gau – showed both how Hitler set events in motion, and how his Gauleiters could use different methods in pursuit of what they believed to be Hitler's wishes.

[66][67] In Kershaw's opinion, Hitler's vision of a racially cleansed Volksgemeinschaft provided the impetus for German officials to carry out increasingly extreme measures to win his approval, which ended with the Holocaust.

[68] The Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka has praised the concept of "working towards the Führer" as the best way of understanding how the Holocaust occurred, combining the best features and avoiding the weaknesses of both the "functionalist" and "intentionalist" theories.

[69] For 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 Führer".