Michael Burleigh (born 3 April 1955) is an English author and historian whose primary focus is on Nazi Germany and related subjects.
He was awarded a first class honours degree in medieval and modern history from University College London in 1977, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer Prizes.
He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Books of his have been translated into Czech, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Spanish.
David Cesarani praised the book's masterful synthesis in Literary Review, noting how Burleigh grafts a thorough command of relevant memoirs onto quantitative data and theories of totalitarianism, providing "one arresting anecdote after another to personalise the bigger argument.