Over tea, amid the Victorian red brick and cast-iron splendour of the magnificently refurbished St Pancras Hotel, Kershaw recalls the trip that marked the beginning of his engagement with Germany's troubled modern history. A relaxed, good-humoured man in his late Sixties, he was, until his retirement in 2008, professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield. "It was the early Seventies," he recalls, "in the aftermath of the student demos. The Second World War was less than 30 years away. I was intrigued by the inexplicable phenomenon of a cultured country, close to our own, producing this monster that creates the Holocaust and leaves Europe in ruins."
He did not originally set out to become a modern historian. Born in Oldham, he studied at Liverpool University, and began his academic career as a medievalist, researching the 15th-century accounts of Bolton Priory. "In 1972, I went to Bavaria to take an intensive German course. The more it went on, and the better my German got, the more I became interested in the politics, culture, arts of Germany. There had been no real social history of the Third Reich up to then, even after 30 years. Material was becoming available for the first time, and that opened the door to 'history from below' – Alltagsgeschichte [history of the everyday], as they call it."
Kershaw joined Martin Broszat's research project on Bavaria in the Nazi years. His work, he says, focused on ordinary people's "mentalities, behaviour and attitudes towards the Nazi regime". The book that emerged was Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-45 (1983).
In the mid-1980s, a furious debate, known as the Historikerstreit, broke out among German historians, between the "functionists", including Broszat, who emphasised the structure of the regime and saw the Holocaust as the result of a sequence of ad hoc decisions, and the "intentionists", who focused on the character of Hitler himself and argued that the Holocaust was planned from the outset. Kershaw was fascinated by the differences of interpretation, and reviewed the debate in The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (1985).
"That took me into the realm of the nature, character and structures of the regime, and how it shaped its policies," he says. In a 1993 essay, he advanced the concept of "working towards the Führer", which has since found widespread acceptance as the idea that rival individuals and groups competed for Hitler's favour by attempting to anticipate his wishes. By reconciling the biographical and structural approaches, Kershaw moved beyond the Historikerstreit and paved the way for his magisterial two-volume biography Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (1998) and Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (2000). Despite the format, this work was not narrowly biographical, nor did it attempt to explain history in terms of one individual.
"I wanted to look at the social and political forces that made him possible," Kershaw tells me. He explains how those forces had their roots in the thwarting of Germany's aspirations to be a major power; the humiliation of its national pride and the destruction of its economy at the end of the First World War; and the persistent delusion that the German army could still have won the war had it not been "stabbed in the back" by politicians.
"You have to remember," he says, pouring another cup of Earl Grey, "democracy has no deep roots in Germany – it's a new flower in infertile terrain. For many people, democracy was something divisive and not in the national interest. Then along comes someone who says this system doesn't need refining, it needs complete revolution to restore German power and glory by force – force directed at those within Germany and without who threaten it. All this allows Hitler not only to take power, but to consolidate it very rapidly."
He draws my attention to Hitler's election speech at Eberswalde in July 1932, in which the Nazi leader turned his opponents' accusations of intolerance and unwillingness to work with other parties into a boast: "We are intolerant. I have set myself a goal, namely to sweep those 30 parties out of Germany."
After four decades spent researching the power structures of the Third Reich, Kershaw found that one question still intrigued him: why did the Nazis fight on to the bitter end, long after they knew the war was lost? It might seem a slightly odd question. The history of the last year of the war is so familiar that, with the benefit of hindsight, we take it for granted that this is what they would have done.
Yet, as Kershaw points out, this was anything but an obvious course. In almost every war, the rulers of the losing power have surrendered before their country was totally overrun – and when they have refused, they have been overthrown from within and replaced by a regime that is willing to negotiate, as happened in Russia in 1917; in Germany itself in 1918; and in Italy in 1943.
Which brings our discussion back to The End. The culmination of a lifetime's work, it is Professor Kershaw's attempt to answer that question. It focuses on the last 10 months of the "thousand-year Reich", from the failure of Von Stauffenberg's plot to assassinate Hitler in his East Prussian "Wolf's Lair" in July 1944 to Keitel's surrender at Karlshorst on 8 May 1945. The Western allies are already advancing through northern France while, on the eastern front, the Soviets had pushed as far as the Vistula and brought about the catastrophic collapse of the Army Group Centre
The book begins with a small but chilling incident. On 18 April 1945, as US troops stood at the gates of the Bavarian town of Ansbach, its military commandant issued the order to fight to the bitter end. To prevent needless death and destruction, a 19-year-old student cut the telephone wires from the HQ. Spotted by two members of the Hitler Youth, he was hauled before a kangaroo court and hanged. Four hours later, the Americans entered the town unresisted, the commandant having fled on a requisitioned bike.
What, Kershaw asks, was the point? Even judged by the basest motives of self-preservation, it made no sense, as clemency might have helped the town's authorities to curry favour with the occupiers. But even as Allied troops pushed deep into the heartlands of the Reich, in its surviving outposts, the Nazi administration continued to function with brutal efficiency.
"[Hitler's] personal power doesn't entirely explain why people carried on obeying orders, why generals who no longer believed in his abilities continued to act on his orders." The July plot – which Kershaw examines in detail in The Luck of the Devil: The Story of Operation Valkyrie – was the turning- point. The attempted coup provoked a radical transformation of the state, which helps to explain how and why the Nazi machine kept fighting.
For Kershaw, the failure of the coup was "a catastrophe in human terms– 10 million people died in the last 10 months of the war – but in political terms it would have been harder to establish democracy in Germany after the war if Hitler had been removed and a non-Nazi but non-democratic government had been established".
In The End, he tellingly quotes the bugged remarks of a captured Luftwaffe pilot, Freiherr von Richthofen, who was glad the assassination attempt had failed because its success might have led to an armistice, followed by another "stab-in-the-back" legend. This time, the airman believed, it was "politically necessary for the nation to go down the road to the bitter end".
Kershaw paints a gripping picture of the clampdown that followed the coup attempt. "In the last months, the Party expands its influence into every sphere... The more the centre imploded, the more power passed to the periphery. The Gauleiter were completely beholden to Hitler. The level of dislocation was immense, making it impossible to organise another coup."
Nor was the Wehrmacht – source of the July plot – immune. Immediately after the attack, Hitler sacked the commander-in-chief, General Fromm, and replaced him with Himmler, who swiftly weeded out the hated Prussian officer class and replaced them with Party diehards.
"After 1944, only loyalists were left in key positions in the Wehrmacht – and everybody distrusted the next person," Kershaw reflects. "Few soldiers by the end were fighting for a belief in Hitler – but in every unit there were some. The rest were fighting to defend their homeland, their homes, their families. We don't need to underestimate the level of repression and terror – if you tried to desert you would almost certainly be executed."
Kershaw's explanation of these profound changes in the structure of the state clarifies what was for me one of the most nightmarish images in the book: the danse macabre of Hitler's four paladins, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels and Speer (Goering having fallen from favour as a result of his inability to defend German cities from saturation bombing) jockeying for power as Germany was collapsing around them.
Conscious, as we talk of Libyan rebel forces' advance on Tripoli, I ask Kershaw what he thinks we can learn from the history of the Third Reich. "I don't think history's there to teach us lessons that we put into immediate practice," he cautions,"but the whole of history since 1945 has been built on the lessons of the suicidal first half of the century. If you look at the way we think about race, minorities and justice, they are all determined by that experience."
The End, appropriately, is Kershaw's swansong to Nazi history. His next work will be to fulfil a long-postponed commission to write the 20th-century volume in the Penguin History of Europe. We can look forward to some stimulating perspectives as he pans out to encompass the whole of this continent's turbulent century.
Ian Kershaw will be speaking at the 'Independent'/Woodstock Literary Festival on Thursday 15 September: www.woodstockliteraryfestival.com
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