INTRODUCTION

a. About the book

The reader of this article must expect a critical review of Ian Kershaw's book Hitler. I shall be lavish with well-deserved praise. However, having read the whole book from cover to cover. I was disappointed. My critiscism does not refer to details; it concerns his treatment of the very subject of the book itself, the person of Adolf Hitler. The reader should understand, however, that my laudatio is seriously and honestly meant. I do not intend it as the backdrop against which my criticism will make a sharper contrast.

b. The author

Dr. Ian Kershaw, professor of modern history in the University of Sheffield (GB), is an expert on the history of Nazi Germany of which a number of important books, written by him, testify. I mention only one of these, because it played a great role in the preparation of the present book: The `Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Bavaria 1933-1945. (1987). Kershaw' s mastery of the German language is a great help in this respect, just as his obviously inexhaustible energy, which enabled him to bring this work about in ten years' time.

Sheer physically and mentally this book is an incredible feat of arms. Between them the two volumes contain LXXVI-1960 pages in all; of these eighty account for the two Indexes. The 369 pages of notes testify to Kershaw' s careful and conscientious method of working. Both volumes contain a useful Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations, and also a number of fine photographs, while Volume II has eight good maps. Inevitably, a number of duplications figure in the sixty-three pages of the two Bibliographies, but these also demonstrate how much spadework the autor did.

c. Kershaw's starting-points

The author hesitated when his publisher suggested that he should write a new biography of Adolf Hitler. There are already quite a number of good biographies, of which he finds those of Alan Bullock (Hitler. A Study in Tyranny. London (1952) and Joachim Fest (Hitler. Eine Biografie. Frankfurt a.M., 1973) the best. Nonetheless, he at last decided that there was room indeed for a new biography, written from a different point of view: not Hitler's personality would be the central theme, but the society that produced him. In several interviews Kershaw stated that his approach of Hitler and the Nazi era was `structuralist'. Structuralism is a reaction to a manner of writing history that focuses (and still does sometimes) on great historical figures, such as emperors, kings, and generals; in this perspective it was these who `made' history, as a sort of demi-gods towering high above the course of time and manipulating events at will.

Structuralism, as the term denotes, concentrates on structures, "such structures as can be held to underlie and generate the phenomena that come under observation" (Maurice Freedman s.v. `structuralism', The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. London, 19733 ). Examples of structures are: a state, a city, feudal society, an army, a war, a hospital; everybody can think up more of these. Structuralism may lead to extremes. I remember attending an hour long lecture by a professor from the then still existing GDR; in this lecture the name of Adolf Hitler was mentioned only once, and this only in passing. It was all about `the party', `the bureaucracy', `the people', etcetera. Kershaw, however, is avowedly no Marxist. His approach is "one which attempts to integrate the actions of the Dictator into the political structures and social forces which conditioned his acquisition and exercise of power."

The question is whether this approach does justice to both aspects: the historical person and the society of which he formed a part. The author adds, by way of explanation, that his is "an approach which looks to the expectations and motivations of German society ... more that to Hitler's personality in explaining the Dictator's immense impact." (Vol. I, Introduction XXIX). Reading this, we may well ask if there is not a measure of imbalance right from the start. A concrete example of this is what Kershaw stated in an interview with the Dutch periodical Spiegel Historiael (Vol. 36, no. 1, Jan.2001). "In the chapters I devoted to [the Holocaust] Hitler does not even play such a prominent role. My point at issue are the underlying forces. I did not try to lift Hitler out of history, but to treat him as a part of the whole story." Once again, the question arises: what is more important, the `part', i.e. Hitler, or `the whole story'? And what is `the whole story'? Was it not, to a very high degree, `made' by Adolf Hitler? Would there have been a `story' without him?

PRAISE

a. An accomplished writer

The reader of Kershaw's Hitler should not expect sensational new revelations about the Führer. People often think that there are, somehow, somewhere, archives with never published material - like the lady who, a short while ago, dead seriously told me that recently an archive containing details of Jesus' youth was discovered in Stockholm (of all places). Every scrap of paper about Hitler's life has been turned about over and over again. The strength of Kershaw's book lies not in his presenting new and unknown facts, but in the way he presents, combines, and explains them. In this respect this work doubtless is a progress compared to the biographies of Bullock and Fest, good and valuable as these are.

Furthermore, Kershaw is an accomplished writer. His style, smooth and forceful at the same time, makes for compelling reading. Although I am thoroughly acqainted with Hitler's life and with the Nazi era, I never had a dull moment. It is a good read also for the non-historian who does not shy back from the work's bulk. To me, who was eighteen when the war began and twenty-four when it ended, and who lived five years under Nazi domination, reading this book, especially Vol. II with the description of Hitler's aggressions and of World War II, was a gripping reliving of this period, particularly of the dark years after Stalingrad, when we were eagerly and anxiously expecting, first the invasion, and once this was a fact, our liberation.

b. Brilliant passages

There are many fine passages in this book, even brilliant ones. To quote only a few - without being exhaustive -, Kershaw explains, for the benefit of those who think that Hitler was a dictator who occupied himself with everything, even with the minutest details, how he exercized his power in an extremely loose, often offhand way; however, he was not interested in details at all. He stated which were his wishes, or he suggested them, and then left his subordinates to their own devices. The great exception was the conduct of the last stages of the war, often to the despair of his generals. A very good chapter is also that on Hitler's path to political power during the second half year of 1932 and January 1933. Really impressive, often even gripping, are the chapters on the course of the war after Stalingrad, when catastrophe followed catastrophe.

The reviewers who wrote that this is the ultimate biography of Hitler for the twenty-first century, are correct in this respect that chapters like these, and many others, cannot be surpassed. The course of events is so solidly documented , so well described, so clearly explained, that nobody will be able to better Kershaw.

CRITICISM

a. Not a biography

Everything is there in this book. Only one thing is failing: Adolf Hitler himself. If Kershaw had given his book a title like `Hitler's Third Reich' or `The History of Nazi Germany' I would have have been completely satisfied. But he presents it as a biography of Hitler; he says this explicitly in the first phrase of the Preface of Vol. I. And this is exactly what it is not: a biography. Having read the two volumes from cover to cover, as I did, the reader will probably ask himself, and not without reason: it is all very fine, but who was this man? Although the Führer is present on almost every page, he does not become a personality; his features remain pale. This is what I meant when I said that my criticism is of a fundamental nature.

b. Kershaw as the typical modern historian

Ian Kershaw is a typical representative of modern historiography, which means that he is a liberal, thoroughly secularized, bourgeois historian. Modern historiography has great advantages but also great failings. It is capable of doing great things; the model it uses produces remarkable results, which far surpass the historical works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet it imposes sharply delineated constraints on itself; it does not venture into the fields that lie beyond its frontiers. It is a positivist, rationalistic, and secularized business, mainly interested in progress and development.

The modern historian can fathom the subjects lying within its own frontiers much better than his predecessors, but he is powerless with regard to all that lies beyond its borders; he denigrates or neglects it. He is strong on power politics and social structures; he is weak on personalities. He is a stranger to philosophy, he is helpless with psychology, he abhors mythology, he neglects religion; mythology and religion are often the same thing to him. My conclusion is that this modern historian is not the right man to understand the Third Reich, Nazism, and above all, Adolf Hitler.

c. Kershaw the victim of structuralism

Kershaw is the victim of his own design, which is structuralist. His whole book is about power structures. "A history of Hitler has to be, therefore, a history of his power [Vol. I, XXVII] ..., a new biography, one which attempts to integrate the actions of the Dictator into the political structures and social forces, which conditioned his acquisition and exercise of power, and its extraordinary impact [Vol. I, XXIX]." Everything that is not the man of power is simply brushed away: he was an `unperson', who had `no private life' (Vol. I, XXV/XXVI). And since there does not exist such a thing as a `personality of Hitler', there is no other way out than to focus `squarely and directly upon the character of his power - the power of the Führer' (Kershaw's italics).

The reviewers praise him for this. He "bypasses the grand philosophical musings and explanatory muddle with a straightforward narrative of Hitler's rise," writes Richard Lowry (National Review, 3.VIII.1999). Yet, does Kershaw, does Lowry, do others, realize that this very much resembles a petitio principii? Once Hitler is categorically declared to be an `unperson', nothing remains but the man of power. But no semblance of proof is given for Hitler being an unperson, for having no personality. That everything concerning Hitler' s personality is left out is no proof, of course.

d. Kershaw belying his own statements

Already in the Preface of Vol. I Kershaw begins belying his own statements. "His power ... was `charismatic', not institutional." (Vol. I, XXVI). His putting the term `charismatic' between inverted commas demonstrates that he is somewhat nervous with it. He vitiates his own argument still more, when he describes how the Führer exercized his power. He had nothing of the modern politician who, late in the evening, goes home with two plumber's bags full of documents, to work on them until deep in the night. As a politician, Hitler was extremely lazy; most of the time (until Stalingrad) he was easygoing; he spent long weeks on the Berghof, where he was, even during the first years of the war, `on holidays'.

Kershaw also becomes untrue to himself, when he describes Hitler as 'an ideologue of unshakeable convictions', as a man with a `worldview' (inverted commas again): the fear of `grand philosophical musings is rearing its head again (Vol. I, XXVIII).

e. Hitler not a power politician

"Power was Hitler's aphrodisiac." (Vol. I, XXVII). It was not. True enough, he needed power, and he used it skilfully and unscrupulously for a long time. He needed it for leading Germany into the war, he needed the war for destroying the Jews and the Soviet Union (his ideological competitor), and once he had won the war, for realizing his plans (which were not of a political character). Yet Hitler did not conceive of himself as a power politician, as a man of power, but as an artist. "Ach, I have such an abhorrence of politics" ("Ach, Politik ekelt mich so an," he said shortly before his death.

f. Kershaw's hidden agenda

I feel that Kershaw wrote his book with a hidden agenda, of which he was not conscious himself. It is hard to avoid the impression that he was unconsciously afraid of Hitler. This is nothing to be ashamed of; almost everyone I know is afraid of him; people try to eliminate and demolish this incubus by calling him mad, stupid, petty bourgeois, simple, and, most significant of all, a monster. It is true that Kershaw does not use these terms. Yet, at the very end of his book, he too starts calling names: `an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national saviour'. (Vol. II, 841). It is extremely disappointing that the author, after having studied Hitler for so many years, has no more to say than this.

Kershaw obviously does not feel at ease with his biography. This is not only because it involved so much hard work or because there are already some fine Hitler biographies. This is understandable enough, but there is more to his hesitation to embark on this work. "Biography ... runs the natural risk of over-personalizing complex historical developments, over-emphasizing the role of the individual in shaping and determining events, ignoring and playing down the social and political context in which those actions took place." (Vol. I, XXI). In order to be able to begin his work with a good conscience, he does what everyone does who has an opinion about Hitler (and who has not?): he takes him down a peg or two; he should not be supposed to have dominated or engineered the events of his time. But once again, he contradicts himself by asking (Vol. I, XVIII): "Has this been Hitler's century?", and answering: "Certainly, no other individual has stamped a more profound impact on it than Adolf Hitler."

Further, "a feasibly inbuilt danger in any biographical approach is that it demands a level of empathy with the subject which can easily slide over into sympathy, perhaps even hidden or partial admiration. The pages which follow must stand witness to the avoidance of this risk." (ib.). Let the reader pay attention to the words `danger, risk, and sympathy'. What the author is afraid of is being accused of being a Hitler fan, and perhaps even more, of coming too close to this dangerous man.

g. Kershaw over-critical

1. about Kubizek

A consequence of this fearful attitude - a Hitler biographer should have more pluck - is that he brushes aside, without any ado, two documents which come very close to Hitler indeed. The first witness is Hitler's friend of his Linz and early Vienna days, August Kubizek; he describes the friendship of these two young fellows in his book Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (1953). Long ago, Kubizek had a deadly enemy in Franz Jetzinger, who believed hardly a word of what he had written (Hitlers Jugend, Vienna, 1956). Jetzinger found a successor in Kershaw, who is also a convinced debunker. He describes `Gustl' as `compliant, weak-willed, subordinate', and `highly impressionable'. (Vol. I, 21). This did not prevent him from finding his friend `unbalanced'. (Vol. I, 39). Kershaw is not as negative about this witness as Jetzinger. Although he finds Kubizek's memoirs `a lengthened and embellished versions of recollections ..., to be treated with care, and says that he `plainly invented a great deal', he admits that this book is `a more credible source on Hitler's youth than once was thought' (Vol. I, 21/22, this referring to Jetzinger).

What was Kershaw's criterion for distinguishing fact and fiction in Kubizek's relation? In my opinion, he is operating rather arbitrarily. What does not fit into Kershaw's idea of Hitler is rejected as fantasy, mostly without any form of argument. A case in point is the so-called Freinberg Erlebnis, related by Kubizek on pp.127-130. On an evening in November 1906, Adolf and Gustl visited the Linz opera house, where they saw Wagner's early opera Rienzi. Rienzi is actually the Roman demagogue Cola di Rienzo, who for a time dominates Rome but finally fails and is burned in his own house (1347-1354). After the last curtain the friends walked on through the deserted streets, Hitler with his hands deep in his pockets and silent (which was not his habit); he was very excited. They went to the top of the Freinberg, a hill just outside the town. Hitler spoke about Rienzi and about `a special mission' he himself had to fulfil. When they were walking back to the town, he returned to the hill, saying: "I want to be alone". In 1939, when Hitler met his old friend in Bayreuth for the first time since 1908, Kubizek heard him tell this story to Winifred Wagner, concluding it with the words: "In that hour it began." They stood, writes Kubizek, at Wagner's tomb in the garden of his villa Wahnfried.

One would say that this occurrence is a very important element in Hitler's mental development. But no so to Kershaw! He calls Kubizek's relation `highly fanciful, reading in mystical fashion back into the episode an early prophetic vision of Hitler's own future ... [and a] post-war, highly imaginary depiction, with the melodramatically absurd claim at the forefront of his [Kubizek's] mind'. (Vol. I, 610, note 128). What Kershaw's terms prove is not Kubizek was fantasizing but his own helplessness with his subject: `highly fanciful, mystical fashion, highly imaginary, melodramatically absurd', all these words demonstrate a conspicuous lack of empathy. Perhaps a little sympathy with the sensitive puber Adolf Hitler would have been helpful for once. Why should the Freinberg experience be a product of Kubizek's fantasy? When I was a sensitive puber of sixteen, I heard in August 1937 in our holiday home Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps for the first time in my life. I was simply swept off my feet, stormed out of the house, and dwelled for hours over the heath, before I was sufficiently `normal' again to return to the family circle.

I feel that Kershaw was a little rash here. On a later occasion Winifred confirmed what she had heard from Hitler and Kubizek. Albert Speer, who was intimate with Hitler for a long time, heard the story from the Führer (and not from Kubizek) in 1938 during the Bayreuther Festspiele; Speer even remembers where he had heard it exactly: in the hall of the Führerbau (Spandauer Tagebücher 136, Berlin, 1975). Hitler referred to it again in 1942 during one of the Tischgespräche in the Wolfsschanze, the army headquarters (Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944, 95. Bonn, 1963). I am not the only one to believe in the reliability of Kubizek's report. According to Köhler, it is `basically correct' (Joachim Köhler, Wagners Hitler. Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker, 34. München, 1997²).

2. about Rauschning

Another author with whom Kershaw profoundly disagrees is Hermann Rauschning. His Gespräche mit Hitler (Zürich/New York, 1940) is `a work with so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether'. (Vol. I, Preface XIV). As a critic of Rauschning, Kershaw has a predecessor, Theodor Schieder, who called the Gespräche `a propganda pamphlet of the psychological warfare', and also in Eberhard Jäckel in his Hitlers Weltanschauung. Entwurf einer Herrschaft (Stuttgart, 1981), and most of all in Wolfgang Hänel, Hermann Rauschnings "Gespräche mit Hitler" - eine Geschichtsfälschung (Ingolstadt, 1984, publication no. 7 of the Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt). What Kershaw did not mention, but what he should have done, is that other historians find Rauschning reliable (although to be handled with some prudence), for instance, Karl-Dietrich Bracher in his Die deutsche Diktatur, and still more Joachim Fest, Hitler. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt a.M., 1973, a book that Kershaw `devoured', (Vol. I Preface XI), who quotes Rauschning forty-one times.

My argument is that what Rauschning says to have heard from Hitler himself is perfectly consistent with Hitler's utterances in other sources. There also things in the Gespräche, for instance about Parsifal, which he can only have heard from the Führer himself. The point is that, once one conceives of Hitler purely as a power politician, all that Rauschning has to say of other possibilities becomes automatically unreliable.

h. Lacunae

There are many important aspects of Hitler's life about which Kershaw has little to report, or even nothing at all. In the autumn of 1909 Hitler was penniless; when he died, he was a millionaire. How did he come to all this money? Why did Hitler become a vegetarian? And how did he become a killer? Why was he fundamentally a killer? Kershaw does not explain either why Hitler adopted the swastika as the emblem of the NSDAP. He says only (Vol. I, 320) that it is part of the Nazi image, as if not everybody knows this. And what about the term the `Third Reich'? It is used quite often, but not explained. On these points we come with Kershaw not further than with Fest, who is also silent about them.

Since Hitler is only a fake ideologue to Kershaw, a man solely interested in power, the author has nothing to say of the programme of the Führer for the time he would have won the war. Naturally, he found it safer not to speak of this in public, but much can be gleaned toghether from his obiter dicta. First of all, all mentally and physically handicapped persons would be destroyed; there would be only the survival of the fittest and the right of the strongest. Along the Ural frontier a permanent war would be waged against the `Asiatic hordes'. Smoking would be forbidden; the vegetarian diet would become obligatory. Children would not be raised within the family, but in special institutes, where they would be trained to become the young blonde brutes Hitler needed.

Hitler realized that this programme could not be executed as long as the Churches had any influence. They would, therefore, be eliminated, with their hierarchy and clergy; all monasteries and other religious institutes would be closed. The Pope would be deposed and probably executed. The New Europe would have a new capital, Germania.

j. Hitler's religion

It is a significant lacuna in Kershaw's book that he has nothing to report on Hitler' s religion or on his special brand of religiosity. As a thoroughly secularized scholar, Kershaw is not interested in religion. But Hitler himself was. He was born into a Roman Catholic family (mother pious and a regular church-goer, father not practising), was baptized as a baby, did his First Communion at the age of twelve, and was confirmed by the bishop of Linz, when he was sixteen. It is true that he then broke with the Roman Catholic Church and never set a foot again in a church, for whatever reason. Yet, this does not mean that he became totally irreligious. He remained a member of this Church, paying the church tax until the end of his life.

For a long time he maintained a special relationship with Jesus Christ, even to the point of identification. His mentor Eckart spoke of his `Messiah complex'. Friedrich Heer called him a prêtre malgré lui (in his Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler, München, 1968, a book that is significanly never mentioned by Kershaw). He so often concluded his pre-1933 speeches with doxologies that the opposition press scathingly called him the nazi Feldprediger. It lasted until 1937 before he left the last vestiges of the Christian religion definitely behind him.

He was then already constructing a religion of his own, his `Parsifal religion'. On p. 589 of Vol. I Kershaw reports that in March 1936 the Führer returned by train from the reoccupied Rhineland to Berlin, `looking out on the furnaces of the steellmills, lighting up the night sky'. He does not tell - but he should have done this - what happened then. Hitler ordered to play the Vorspiel of Wagner's Parsifal on the portable grammophone. Listening to the indescribably beautiful opening bars in the horns, he musingly said `Aus Parsifal baue ich meine Religion', followed by `Nur im Heldengewand kann man Gott dienen'. This proves three things: 1. Hitler believed in God; 2. he had a religion of his own; 3. Parsifal was the quarry where he found the stones for his new temple. He indeed identified himself with Parsifal as the redeemer and the new Messiah. Kershaw speaks (Vol. II, 695) somewhat denigratingly about this. "Such sentiments were redolent, through a distorting mirror, of the Wagnerian redeemer-figure, a hero who alone could save the holders of the Grail, indeed the world itself, from disaster - a latter-day Parsifal." Kershaw has as little feeling for Wagner as he has for the real Hitler. If anything demonstrates that the Führer was not a power politician, it is his identifiction with Parsifal.

k. Eva Braun and Hitler's end

In Vol. II, 756, Kershaw writes that (in April 1945) "a Wagnerian end implicitly beckoned". There would be no capitulation at any cost - even if this meant bringing down Valhalla. But he did not want to bring down Valhalla, he wanted to enter it. In 1934 he concluded his funeral speech for President von Hindenburg with these words: "Toter Feldherr, geh' nun ein in Walhall"; he had replaced the Christian heaven with the Germanic Valhalla, the supraterrestrial realm where the gods and the divinized mortals live. This is where Hitler wanted to go, leaving this world and mankind, which he had always hated, behind him. It also explains his curious marriage with Eva Braun, whom he married only twenty-eight hours before they both committed suicide. There was no ordinary necessity for marrying her. But there was another necessity: he would enter Valhalla together with Eva as his paredra, his divinized bride. Naturally, this does not tally with the idea Kershaw has of Hitler.

l. Kershaw and the Endlösung

By far the weakest spot in this book is the treatment of the Endlösung der Judenfrage, now commonly called the Holocaust. It is a consequence of his structuralist approach that Kershaw nowhere explicitly states that it was Hitler who ordered the destruction of the Jews; this approach necessitates that Hitler, in this respect also, must be embedded in a `structure'. It was the Führer's wish that the Jews should be eliminated, and in consequence his underlings were `working towards the Führer'. One gets the impression - although I do not believe that the author wanted us to have this impression - that the underlings, vaguely sensing what Hitler wanted, began the devilish work of their own accord. It is true that we do not have a written order by Hitler; he had given such an order in 1940 for the Gnadentod, the physical destruction of the handicapped, and he would not repeat this mistake. Yet this does not mean that there was no order at all. It is inconceivable that the enormous operation the Holocaust was, involving so much personnel and means of transport, could have been started and executed without an order from the top. Without any doubt there has been an oral order, given in all probability to the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, in the autumn of 1941. Himmler regularly spoke with Hitler about the Endlösung; I have seen his notes in the SS-archives in the Document Centre in Berlin. The line of command was the following: Himmler passed the order on to Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) and Sicherheitsdienst (SD). The next one to receive the order was Heinrich Müller, chief of the Geheime Staatspolizei (the Gestapo) in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the RSHA). Heydrich instructed Adolf Eichmann, Abteilungsleiter Amt IV, Referat IVB4, Judenangelegenheiten und Räumung in the RSHA (the so-called Judenreferat). Eichmann, a good organisator, would be the brains of the operation. This line of command is sketched by Eichmann in his memoirs. He also notes that he was surprised when he heard what the term Endlösung would mean henceforward; he had always thought that it signified the deportation of the Jews, not that they would be killed; nobody had thought of this possibility, he states. This throws a curious light on that `working towards the Führer'.

Kershaw nowhere explains why Hitler wanted to destroy the Jews. In this respect he is a victim of an ailment that is common to historians, namely, that relating events is the same as explaining them. Hitler was no ordinary anti-Semite. In the history of anti-Semitism to great mutations took place. The first period was that of anti-Judaism; this was a brand of anti-Jewishness, which was not racist. Christians accused the Jews of not accepting Jesus Christ as the Messiah. The first great mutation occurred during the eighteenth century, when anti-Judaism became racist. Jews were condemned, not for their lack of faith, but for being what they are. Thus began the period of anti-Semitism. The second great mutation was Hitler's anti-Semitism, which was rather a special form of anti-Judaism.

Although Nazi propaganda, and Hitler himself also, made superabundantly use of racist argument in their anti-Jewish campaigns, he was, with regard to the Jews, basically no racist. In this respect Rauschning has understood Hitler better than Kershaw; he writes that the Führer "on the basis of his secret doctrine must foster an absolutely metaphysical hatred against the Jew, against Israel, the people of the spiritual God." After the war a new race of men would originate, a new chosen people whose God would be Adolf Hitler. To make this possible, the Roman Catholic Church, the Church that adores the God of the Jews, would have to be totally destroyed. This programme had already been started with the destruction of the Jews, the necessary preliminary for its elimination, because the Church originated from and is based on Judaism. The liberal and secularized bourgeois historian Ian Kerschaw is blind for this.

CONCLUSION

I laid this book aside with a feeling of deep disappointment. I repeat, would the author have given his book another title, one in which not Hitler but the power structures of Nazi Germany would have had pride of place, I would have been satisfied with it and have enthusiastically admired it. However, as a Hitler biography Kershaw's work is totally deficient. The book has been applauded by critics all over the world as the ultimate Hitler biography of the twenty-first century. In my opinion, this biography has still to be written.