Ian Kershaw quotes

Ian Kershaw is an English historian and a leading expert on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. His detailed studies have profoundly influenced our understanding of the Third Reich and the roots of the Holocaust. He is recognized internationally for his scholarly work and insightful analyses of twentieth-century European history. Here are 17 of his quotes:

Hitler frequently demonstrated diffidence and unease in dealings with individuals which contrasted diametrically with his self-confident mastery in exploiting the emotions of his listeners in the theatrical setting of a major speech.

Ian Kershaw

Hitler was unapproachable and impenetrable even for those in his close company.

Ian Kershaw

Hitler was highly secretive - not least about his personal life, his background, and his family.

Ian Kershaw

For Catholics-the other sub-culture which Nazism found greatest difficulty in penetrating, before and after 1933-Hitler was above all seen as the head of a ‘godless', anti-Christian movement.

Ian Kershaw

On the nationalist-conservative Right... Hitler was portrayed for the most part as intransigent and irresponsible, a wild and vulgar demagogue, not a statesman, an obstacle to political recovery, the head of an extreme movement with menacing socialistic tendencies.

Ian Kershaw

Hitler was no inexorable product of a German 'special path', no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology. Nor was he a mere 'accident' in the course of German history.

Ian Kershaw

Hitler was never a socialist.

Ian Kershaw

If indeed, as was later alleged, [Hitler] voiced support for the Social Democrats in preference to the Communists, it was presumably viewed as a choice of the lesser of two evils.

Ian Kershaw

Probably in April of 1919, with the Munich ruled by the Communist Councils, [Hitler] wore, along with almost all the soldiers of the Munich garrison, the revolutionary red armband. That Hitler stood back and took no part whatsoever in the ‘liberation' of Munich from the Räterepublik is said to have brought him later scornful reproaches from Ernst Röhm.

Ian Kershaw

In a pointed remark when defending Esser in 1921 against attacks from within the party, Hitler commented: ‘Everyone was at one time a Social Democrat.

Ian Kershaw

Not only, then, did Hitler do nothing to assist in the crushing of Munich's ‘Red Republic'; he was an elected representative of his battalion during this whole period of existence. How to interpret this evidence is, nevertheless, not altogether clear. Since the Munich garrison had firmly backed the revolution since November, and again in April supported the radical move to the Räterepublik, the obvious implication must be that Hitler, in order to have been elected as a soldiers' representative, voiced in these months the views of the socialist governments he later denounced with every fibre of his body as ‘criminal.

Ian Kershaw

Ernst Toller reported that a fellow-prisoner also interned for involvement in the Räterepublik had met Hitler in a Munich barracks during the first months after the revolution, and that the latter had then been calling himself a Social Democrat. Konrad Heiden remarked that, during the time of the Councils Republic, Hitler had, in heated discussions among his comrades, voiced support for the Social Democratic government against the of the Communists.

Ian Kershaw

I should like to think that had I been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight. However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about.

Ian Kershaw

A history of Hitler has to be a history of his power - how he came to get it, what its character was, how he exercised it, why he was allowed to expand it to break all institutional barriers, why resistance to that power was so feeble. But these are questions to be directed at German society, not just at Hitler.

Ian Kershaw

If Britain was solidly stable and France not much less so, Germany was more enigmatic. It fitted neatly into neither the model of relatively well-established democracies of the more economically advanced north-western Europe, nor the model of the newly created, fragile democracies of eastern Europe. In many ways, Germany was a hybrid. It looked both west and east.

Ian Kershaw