Ian Kershaw - Bavaria Project

Bavaria Project

In 1975, Kershaw joined Martin Broszat's "Bavaria Project". During his work, Broszat encouraged Kershaw to examine how ordinary people viewed Hitler. As a result of his work in the 1970s on Broszat's "Bavaria Project", Kershaw wrote his first book on the Third Reich, The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich which was first published in German in 1980 as Der Hitler-Mythos: Volksmeinung und Propaganda im Dritten Reich. This book examined the "Hitler cult" in Germany, how it was developed by Joseph Goebbels, what social groups the Hitler Myth appealed to and how it rose and fell.

Also arising from the "Bavaria Project" and Kershaw's work in the field of Alltagsgeschichte was Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. In this 1983 book, Kershaw examined the experience of the Third Reich at the grass-roots in Bavaria. Kershaw showed how ordinary people reacted to the Nazi dictatorship, looking at how people conformed to the regime and to the extent and limits of dissent. Kershaw described his subject as ordinary Bavarians, or as he referred to:

"the muddled majority, neither full-hearted Nazis nor outright opponents, whose attitudes at one and the same time betray signs of Nazi ideological penetration and yet show the clear limits of propaganda manipulation".

Kershaw went on to write in his preface:

"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".

Kershaw argued that Goebbels failed to create the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) of Nazi propaganda, and that most Bavarians were far more interested in their day to day lives than in politics during the Third Reich. Kershaw concluded that the majority of Bavarians were either anti-Semitic or more commonly simply did not care about what was happening to the Jews. Kershaw also concluded that there was a fundamental difference between the anti-Semitism of the majority of ordinary people, who disliked Jews and were much colored by traditional Catholic prejudices, and the ideological and far more radical völkische anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party, who hated Jews. Kershaw found that the majority of Bavarians disapproved of the violence of Kristallnacht pogrom, and that despite the efforts of the Nazis, continued to maintain social relations with the members of the Bavarian Jewish community. Kershaw documented numerous campaigns on the part of the Nazi Party to increase anti-Semitic hatred, and noted that the overwhelming majority of anti-Semitic activities in Bavaria were the work of a small number of committed Nazi Party members. Overall, Kershaw noted that the popular mood towards Jews was indifference to their fate. Kershaw argued that during World War II, most Bavarians were vaguely aware of the Holocaust, but were vastly more concerned about and interested in the war than about the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Kershaw made the notable claim that:

"the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".

By this, Kershaw meant the progress leading up to Auschwitz was motivated by anti-Semitism of the most vicious kind held by the Nazi elite, but it took place in a context where the majority of German public opinion was completely indifferent to what was happening.

Kershaw’s assessment that most Bavarians, and by implication Germans were “indifferent” to the Shoah faced criticism from the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka and the Canadian historian Michael Kater. Kater contended that Kershaw downplayed the extent of popular anti-Semitism, and that though admitting that most of the “spontaneous” anti-Semitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme anti-Semitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above. Kulka argued that most Germans were more anti-Semitic than Kershaw portrayed them in Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, and that rather than “indifference” argued that “passive complicity” would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people to the Shoah.