Historian Research

V R Berghan

• Volker is a German American, who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1938 during the Nazi regime. 
• He has published widely on modern German and European history as well as on trans-Atlantic economic and cultural relations during the Cold War.

Detlev Peukert

• Peukert was a German historian, who is noted for his research on the Holocaust, social history and in the Weimar Republic.
• He worked at the University of Essen, where he was the chief researcher in the Nazi period. 
• He was also a member of the German Communist Party until 1978, when he joined the SDP of Germany. 
• His work often examined the effect of Nazi social policies on ordinary Germans and on persecuted groups such as Jews and Roman. In particular, he looks at how in everyday life within Nazi Germany, including aspects of both normality and criminality which co-existed with one another in the Third Reich. 
• Peukert was on of the first historians to talk about the persecution of the Romani within Germany.

Daniel Goldhagen

• Goldhagen is an American historian who was born in Boston in June 1959. His father was a Holocaust survivor following their experience in a ghetto in Ukraine. He states that his "understanding of "Nazism and the Holocaust is indebted" to his father.
• Once at Harvard he had a 'lightbulb moment' where he discovered that the functionalism vs intentionalism argument doesn't cover why people executed the order. He therefore investigated who the men and women were who did the killing and the reasoning behind it. 
• In the book from the source, he is stating that the vast majority of the Germans believed in "annihilation antisemitism" which had proceeded through centuries, where most of the people were willing to kill the Jews. 
• He believes in intentionalism, as he sees that Hitler and the Nazi Party had clear views to kill the Jews and that people were willing to do it anyways due to their antisemitic ways.   

Ian Kershaw

• Born in 1943, he is an British Historian who is highly regarded for his work on Adolf Hitler and the biographies he has created about him. He helped create the BBC documentary 'The Nazis: A Warning From History'. 
• He was originally trained as a medievalist, but changed to Nazi Germany in the late 70's. 
• When he visited Bavaria in 1972, he met an old man who told him that "the Jew is a louse!", making him become keen to learn more about Nazi Germany and why ordinary people became supportive of the Nazi ideology. 
•  Kershaw is a structuralist like his mentor, Broszat, who belives that the structure of the Nazis was more important than Hitler in their development. He sees that to base the history and success of the Third Reich through one man is obsurd, due to the 68 million people who were in Germany at the time. He argues that Hitler did play a pivotal role in the decision of genocide, but the build up to it and majority of it was planned by lower ranked officials despite no order from Hitler. 
• Kershaw views the holocaust not as a plan, but a process caused by the 'culminative radicalization' of the Nazi state, as articulated by the funtionalists.