Friday, 14 June, 2002, 23:00 GMT 00:00 UK
Sir Ian Kershaw: Dissecting Hitler
THE knighthood awarded to Professor Ian Kershaw is just the latest in a long line of plaudits for the best-selling historian, explains Andrew Walker of the BBC’s News Profiles Unit.
Ian Kershaw, professor of modern history at Sheffield University, is widely regarded as the world’s leading expert on Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
His magisterial two-volume biography of the dictator, titled Hubris and Nemesis respectively, has redefined the way we look at that darkest of eras.
David Irving writes on Tuesday, July 16, 2002: Lawyers for the BBC, a corporation which has not hesitated to steal my videos and broadcast them, and to plagiarise and exploit many of my thirty books without according me any credit for my research, have forbidden me in a letter dated July 15, 2002, to reproduce the full article. The above sentences are posted as fair usage. There follows my summary of the rest:
The article continue by describing Kershaw as a sixty year old Lancashire born Catholic son of a Royal Air Force mechanic who had admitted that he never thought of himself as “academically able.” His history teacher, a Catholic priest, Father Burke, was “brilliant,” Sir Ian said. Later, at Liverpool University, he became an expert in medieval history and a “real-ale addict”. Visiting West Germany in 1972 he was surprised by an aging Nazi’s remark that “the Jew is a louse”. Kershaw claims to have worked for a decade on Hitler [David Irving: — in fact Kershaw sat with a copy of my Hitler’s War at his elbow throughout, plagiarising sections of it.] Kershaw disbelieved that the Nazis were a highly-organised party machine. He saw Hitler as a man without an inner life, and expressed jocular delight when that “bullet finally went through that bloke’s head.” 
