'Hitler's Influence Was Fatal'
Can you believe that! This guy has won a number of awards and has been called the "dean of British historians" for coining empty phrases just like this.
Kershaw's books are utter trash. He is a distorian, a propagandist of the empire whose main contribution is to cast recent European history, particularly the WW2 era, in a light favorable to the British ruling class. His works are full of corrupt analyses employing pop psychology and credulously based on sources and testimony of dubious merit, which result in endless pages full of meaningless, anodyne prattle like the above.
Some career low-lights: He claims that the German people were "vaguely aware" of the Holocaust but were too worried about the outcome of the war to concern themselves with it. He is the author of the phrase "The road to Auschwitz was paved with indifference." To this day nobody has ever uncovered a single Nazi document ordering or even discussing the possibility of murdering ten million people, yet everybody was aware (albeit only vaguely) and didn't care.
In his survey of the historiography on the subject, The Nazi Dictatorship, he criticizes Marxist historians for seeing the Third Reich as capitalist. (Yes!) In so doing he buys into the Party's absurd claim that they represented the German working class in its opposition to plutocracy. This is a matter of no small delicacy, care must be taken when attacking a regime whose basic economic policies differ only slightly from those of Kershaw's patrons.
He also critiques Ernst Nolte's The Three Faces of Fascism. This book is quite controversial and, at the end of the day, I too disagree with its central theses, but it is groundbreaking, seminal, extremely well researched, amazingly so, and a unique perspective on the subject; on the whole a valuable contribution. Kershaw dismisses it as "apologist," which it patently isn't.
I could go on but why bother. Kershaw is a fraud. Hitler was a fatal influence eh? Brilliant, just brilliant. And there is talk he is to be knighted.
In the interview linked below Kershaw is asked when the Nazis should have realized they couldn't win the war. He says mid '44 with the landing at Normandy. One would be hard pressed to find another historian who would respond with anything but the defeat and capture of von Paulus' forces at Stalingrad. Germany lost most of its entire fighting force in that battle. Some of Hitler's military advisers urged him to sue for peace after the devastating loss. But Kershaw, ever the loyal servant, says it is when British forces arrived in Europe. Still irrelevant after all these years.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,798377,00.html
