On the day that I went to meet Sir Ian Kershaw, the sun actually peeked through the clouds -- not an everyday sight in Manchester. The bright sky over the pleasant suburb where Kershaw resides was a stark departure from the heavy clouds that hung over another European country that day: In Austria, extreme rightist Norbert Hofer stood a real chance of becoming the next president and setting a historical precedent. If he had won, he would have become the first extreme rightist to serve as a European leader since World War II. And in Austria, of all places. But that didn't happen. The extremely close vote, however, served to drive home the question: Has Europe not learned its lesson? Has the continent that failed to draw the proper conclusions from World War I -- the war that was supposed to end all wars -- and ended up fighting an even worse war only 20 years later, turned its back on history again? The rise of extreme right-wing parties has been taking the entire European continent by storm. In France, Britain, Hungary and even in Scandinavia, the Right has been gaining strength. Is it true, as Washington Post reporter Matt O'Brien recently wrote, that "a 1930s-style economy creates 1930s-style politics"? I can't think of anyone better suited to answer that question than Ian Kershaw. British historian and author Kershaw was born in Oldham in 1943, and was knighted by the Queen in 2002. He is considered one of the greatest historians alive. His works, among them two of the most authoritative volumes ever writing about Hitler, have made him an undisputed authority on the history of Germany in the second half of the 20th century, with an emphasis on Nazi Germany. And while Kershaw's works are scientific research studies in every respect, he somehow manages to make his texts accessible to the general public and not just to learned historians, making for compelling literary narrative. It is no wonder that Kershaw has become a popular international figure, an intellectual celebrity of sorts, who is invited to hundreds of events around the world every year. The turning point in Kershaw's life occurred in 1972, when he was visiting Bavaria. He was sitting at a cafe in Munich and began chatting with a local elderly man (Kershaw speaks fluent German). Kershaw says he will never forget what this man told him. "You British are so stupid," the man said. "If you had only fought with us, you could have defeated the Bolsheviks and ruled the world!" It goes without saying that the elderly didn't feel too much love for the "shitty" Jews, Kershaw recalls. Kershaw remembers being shocked by this man, and deciding right there and then to dedicate his time and effort to deciphering what it was that made the ordinary Germans fall under the spell of Nazism. Encouraged by fellow historian Martin Broszat, Kershaw set out to investigate the common man's relationship with Hitler, and in 1980 published his first book on the topic: "The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich." Fortunately for the world of historical research, this was only the first of many books in a long and glorious line of volumes on the topic, which have earned Kershaw international recognition. A matrix of recovery I met Kershaw upon the publication of the Hebrew translation of his latest book "To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949," at his home -- a typical English cottage with a well-nurtured garden in full bloom. This house perfectly embodies Kershaw's essence: modest and welcoming. The conversation with him is a journey of refreshing vantage points and original insights into the most tempestuous time in modern history. Q: Sir Ian Kershaw, considering the enormous volume of books that have been written on this subject, what new insights does your latest book offer regarding the history of Europe during the first half of the 20th century- "I haven't seen another book that brings together the four points that I use as my interpretive framework. I think the four points outlined in my introduction offer a new or different way of looking at Europe as a whole in that period and seeing how this crisis developed. The first point is, following the First World War, the explosion of ethnic nationalism and racism, with anti-Semitism as a major component part of that but going beyond anti-Semitism. The second point, which is connected with that, is the massive accentuation of border conflicts that occurred after the First World War. The third is class conflicts, which were now directed at the existence of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union. And the fourth, a new component altogether when compared with the pre-war period, is the lasting crisis -- a two-fold crisis -- of capitalism. An inflationary crisis in the 1920s followed by a deflationary crisis in the 1930s with only a very short interlude between the two, during which things appeared to be going much better. "These four components have, of course, individually been dealt with by numerous authors, but I don't think anybody's brought them together and said that it's the interaction between these four components that produced the mega-crisis, this 30-year crisis, of the early 20th century. The second part of my thesis, therefore, is that each of these four points has its most extreme expression in Germany. Therefore, it was not just by chance that Germany was the country that triggered the mega-catastrophe that arose from this mega-crisis. These four points come to their most dynamic and most excessive expression in Germany, with this crisis giving rise to Hitler himself, paving a sure path to the Second World War." Kershaw argues that another innovation in his book is what he calls the "matrix of catastrophe" -- the argument that "the massive destruction caused by the Second World War produced, unexpectedly, a way forward, leading to decades of peace and prosperity in Europe." "That is why the book is called to hell and back. The book doesn't end in 1945 but rather in 1949. The 'back' is this new matrix of recovery." Q: What does this matrix of recovery entail, after such a great atrocity? "First of all, the destruction of Germany and its great power ambitions. Following the war, Germany was destroyed and prostrate, so that served to remove the main source of the problem that existed over the previous thirty years in one fell swoop. Secondly, it entails the reordering of Europe into two halves -- the massive ethnic cleansing in the eastern half of Europe and the conquest of that half by the Soviet Union brings about the end of the major border conflicts and the ethnic conflicts that had bedeviled Europe until that point. Thirdly, the Iron Curtain itself subordinated the nationalisms that had been so destructive in Europe before the Second World War to the interests of the two superpowers -- the U.S. in the west and the USSR in the east. Fourthly, unexpectedly almost, the Second World War gave rise to massive global economic growth, which, in Europe, started to take off hugely from about 1948 onwards." Q: How does your structuralist approach, which maintains that phenomena do not occur in an isolated manner but are a product of a wider structure, manifest itself in this latest research? "I see the significance of structural factors, which is why I begin the book by looking at these four component paths that produce a crisis. It is not the result of any one individual or even two or three individuals. It is a structural crisis. Within this structural crisis, individuals like Hitler and Stalin, but not just them, can play crucial roles. I've never, in all my writing, played down the role of the individual in history but I link the role of the individual to structural conditions." Kershaw argues that history is not just "the Great Man Theory -- that along come great men and they dictate the passage of history. You have to look at the conditions that allow certain individuals to achieve their status. I've never been a Marxist, but this is not far from Marx's assertion that 'men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.' It was the conditions that produced the ability of, in this case, a maverick politician, to take actions that ultimately had profound consequences. Conditions give rise to the possibility for certain individuals to have a disproportionate impact on the way in which things unfold." Q: So it was not by chance that individuals like Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini rose to power at around the same time- "They were products of crisis conditions, which enabled a particular individual to play a signally large role. Just to use a faint modern analogy -- in the 1970s, Britain experienced probably a worse economic crisis than any other Western European country. Was it just by chance that Britain produced Margaret Thatcher as the conservator, who then puts her own very strong personal imprint upon the government of this country in the 1980s? It was a much stronger imprint than you would see in Germany from Helmut Kohl for example, or in France from Francois Mitterrand." "It's a very faint analogy -- I'm not trying to compare Mrs. Thatcher to figures of the 1930s -- but there too, you have a particular constellation, a grave crisis that produces a yearning for strong leadership, and that provides the potential for that leader to exercise strong personal power and to place a particular imprint on developments. The crisis of the 1920s was far greater than anything we had in the 1970s, so the imprint of those individuals in those conditions was potentially also far greater, and so it turned out to be." Q: So under this line of thought, it is entirely possible that another Hitler will rise to power in modern day, or at some point in the future, given the right conditions. "I think the crisis now is much fainter than it was then, and the structural constraints are now far greater, so I can't see anything likely to produce another Hitler in Europe or in another country equivalent to Germany's position in the 1930s that could take Europe down the route to war. Things have moved forward an awful lot since then." Genocide as a central war effort In his previous books, as in the latest one, Kershaw asserts without hesitation that the extermination of the Jews was "an intrinsic war aim, it wasn't an incidental war aim." Having said that, however, one of his revolutionary arguments is that the Holocaust was not initially planned to play out the way that it did, but rather developed dynamically together with the development of the war. He argues further that had the Germans been more successful in invading the Soviet Union, the Holocaust would have looked radically different. "If the war had been more successful for Germany in 1941, there would have been a genocide of a different kind. The Jews would have been deported to the arctic waste of the Soviet Union and would have died there of malnutrition, overwork and being frozen to death. But the actual final solution as we know it in the death camps of Poland was a product of wartime conditions and policies being shaped by the war itself." Q: Historians disagree on whether Hitler planned the final solution in advance or whether it was a product of the war, only to be formulated at the Wannsee Conference in 1942. "I subscribe to the latter school of thought. But the latter is actually predicated upon this imperative, the 'removal of the Jews.' The very first written political statement that we have from Hitler -- from Sept. 1919 -- says that it must be the aim of any national government to bring about the removal of the Jews altogether. But did Hitler plan this? No. No one could have planned 20 or more years in advance what would transpire. It was beyond the worst imaginings even for Hitler to do that. So removal meant different things to different people at different times. "Everything points the fact that at these early stages, in fact right down to the later 1930s, Hitler was talking primarily about the removal of Jews from Germany. But, as had been intimated already, the removal of Jews from Germany can't stop there once you have a country that wants to expand to areas where there are even more Jews. So the removal of Jews becomes widened to trying to find areas on the planet where you can deport Jews to, where you can remove them to physically, without still thinking of the gas chambers of Treblinka or Auschwitz. Only at a late stage do we actually come to that last crucial transposition of these policies into complete liquidation, which comes about in wartime conditions and conditions where the war is no longer going to be won by Germany." Kershaw adds, however, that "we have books that deal with the Second World War and we have books that deal with the Holocaust, but it is not that frequent to blend the Holocaust in as a real central war aim of the Germans -- but that's what it was. Genocide was actually central to the German war effort. Of course horrible things happened to the Jews in the First World War as well, but there was no genocidal project. There was no centrality of anti-Semitism to the policies of any of the major war powers, despite the fact that Russians did some terrible things to Jews in Eastern Europe in the first world war as well. There's a big difference there." Q: The Germans really tried to cover up their actions toward the end of the war. Is it possible that some of Hitler's overly enthusiastic supporters interpreted what he said about Jews into the reality of the death camps, or do you think they were following his precise orders? "Nobody has ever come up with a precise order and it was certainly never written down or we would have discovered it. Later on, many people, second ranks of the SS etc., said it was 'the wish of the Fuhrer.' We know the way in which that system operated: Hitler must have authorized what went on but what form that authorization took is unclear. There would have been verbal authorization, in many cases the proposals would have come to him from other people, we know that there was a massive escalation of initiatives taken toward removal of Jews in particular areas, meaning transportation of Jews. When that didn't work, it meant killing them, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union. "One classic example was in Poznan, in western Poland, in 1941, where local SS chief Rolf-Heinz Hoeppner said it was going to be impossible to feed the Jews over the next winter so 'we should think of some faster working preparation that will kill them.' So these initiatives were starting to come from particular groupings of the Nazi leadership. All these plans were swirling around and the Germans had gotten themselves into a logistical problem. More and more people were saying 'we need to solve the Jewish question.' This was a local initiative, but similar initiatives were cropping up elsewhere in Europe." Not like lambs to the slaughter "To Hell and Back" highlights the structural processes that led to the Holocaust. "Once Hitler rose to power in 1933, the twisted road was still twisted, but nonetheless there was a set of imperatives that drove the policy, culminating in what happened in the 1940s during the war. And Hitler's role in that was absolutely central, it was not peripheral. "And just to show Hitler's centrality, if you look at big decisions like the deportation of German Jews to the east in the autumn of 1941, that had to be approved by Hitler. They went back to Hitler and asked 'can we do this-' I remember once, many many years ago when I was working in the archives in Berlin, I came across an issue that had nothing to do with Jews, directly. It was actually a question of what to do about all these Poles who were found to have tuberculosis. There was a big debate there in the Nazi leadership in Poland and they wanted of course to liquidate them, but they couldn't do that without Hitler's approval. So they took it right back to Hitler and he said, 'We don't want Poles up in arms about this so tread carefully' and they were ultimately not liquidated. "Therefore, just as in the T4 action [a postwar designation for a program of forced euthanasia in wartime Nazi Germany] of 1939, when something crucial was at stake, Hitler's authorization was required. In the case of the euthanasia action, he'd actually written down the authorization. He probably learned from this experience that it wasn't a good idea, so these were verbal authorizations that were given to initiatives that were often taken by others." Q: Did the Germans realize what was happening right under their noses during the war? "Auschwitz was a big camp, and knowledge of Auschwitz was unquestionably much wider, among the German ruling elites at any rate, than was acknowledged later. Whether someone living in Stuttgart would have heard of Auschwitz is a moot point. Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, these were much smaller camps. They existed only for one purpose which was to kill the people who were delivered there as quickly as possible. So there was no concentration camp element at those. It might have been feasible for Germans to say after the war that they had never heard of those camps. They very well may not have. "However, knowledge that terrible things were happening in the east, that Jews were being killed in very large numbers by the Germans, was far more widespread than people were prepared to admit after the war. We have that from German documentation too. Diary accounts and so on. People were aware that horrible things were happening, that Germans were slaughtering Jews in the thousands." Q: What about Jewish resistance at the start of the war- "You know better than I do that there was Jewish resistance. It was actually a hopeless case because the extent of the powers that were arranged against the Jews was so great that the Jewish resistance, as in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, never really stood a chance of success. But the Jews did resist, very bravely in many cases, it wasn't a case of sheep going to the slaughter at all. "They were faced with impossible situations and in some cases they responded by active resistance, in other cases they trusted their leaders, the Jewish councils and Jewish organization that were themselves faced with impossible situations -- there was no way in which the Jews could actually do anything to prevent the horror that was befalling them. The stance of the Western powers was that ending the war would end the calvary of the Jews. They were certain it was the only way." Q: That is the reason given by the allies when asked why they didn't bomb Auschwitz. "The prime objective of the war against Hitler was to defeat Hitler and Nazism. Not to save the Jews. The Jews would be saved once that was accomplished. The rationale was also hinged on the fact that it was possible to repair railway lines and things. So you could bomb Auschwitz, but what would it bring about, really-" Q: And what is your personal opinion on the matter? "It is a historical question. We view it today from a moral standpoint, not surprisingly. At the time, they viewed it from a military standpoint. So the key consideration was bringing the war to an end. By the time that the bombing of Auschwitz was militarily feasible, I think we're now talking about a period when the Holocaust was more or less over. Only Hungarian Jews had not yet been sent to Auschwitz. It sounds so awful now, from our present point of view, to say that the fate of the Hungarian Jews was actually not important to the Western powers. I'm sure that in a blanket sense, it was of some significance, but it not nearly as important to them as the military necessity. "But I've given you the answer that I think is the historical answer from the point of view of the leaders. I'm not saying that I share that viewpoint -- morally, we're now horrified by this and quite rightfully so -- but I think the military imperatives, at the time, were very understandable." Q: In your book you write about the fall of democracies. Why didn't they survive between the two world wars- "One of the statistics I was most surprised, and in a way shocked by, when writing the book, was actually when I discovered that by 1939, before the Second World War, about two thirds of Europeans lived under one or another form of dictatorship or an authoritative state. If you look at it, democracy survived only in northwestern Europe in the areas where it had been longest in existence and relatively secure when this wave of crises swept over the continent after the First World War. "The countries that retained democracies were either victorious or neutral in the First World War. It's an interesting pattern. Where countries were new countries with brand new democracies. planted in completely infertile soil as happened across a whole swathe of Eastern Europe after 1919, it was asking a lot for these democracies to survive and they needed fair weather, they needed success and they needed good economic conditions -- precisely that they didn't get. So within only a matter of 10 or fifteen years, these democracies were tumbling. "The internal pressures were too great. When you look at the internal pressures and you see how divided these countries were, and everywhere they introduced proportional representation forms of government, you understand the divisions within the countries. The military almost always sided with the Right. So you had great sections of the population who didn't accept democracy, and you had very powerful elites and the aristocracy and big business and the military, above all, that didn't accept democracy, so it was not a very good combination on which to try to set up these democracies." As he should, Kershaw also describes the situation between the two world wars in modern terms as well: "Today, whatever flavor the democracy is, we accept that, by and large, democracy is the best form of government. Here's another modern, very loose analogy to what's going on there: On the eve of the so-called Arab Spring, the Americans, as they did before in Iraq, immediately tried to translate the liberal policies of the West into democracies that would flourish in the Middle East. That was, of course, hopeless." Q: One phenomenon that you link to the weakening of democracy is that at times of crisis, countries, or people, tend to shift rightward, rather than pivoting to the left. Why do you think that is? "I suppose that most people look for order in crisis. Order is brought about by authority. So there is almost a natural tendency for people to look for political leaders who will promise or say they will guarantee the restoration of order and these are nearly always to be found on the political Right. And the political Right, leaving aside for a second the fascist Right, is backed up almost invariably by the military. The military are key players in the internal politics of practically every country in this period. So where you don't have fascist movements, you have the military that dictates the politics and it is always the politics of the Right -- restoration of order. People will, by and large, want to see that order restored. "Now why don't they move to the left? Well, leaving aside the Soviet Union, or Russia before the Soviet Union, you could say that they did move leftward in that early 1920s period. But generally speaking, what was happening in the Soviet Union cast its own shadow over the Left in Europe -- it split the Left, for one thing, into communists and the rest -- and people were reading these horror stories about what was going on in the Soviet Union, and were therefore not only increasingly alienated from Marxism but actually went over to the most anti-Marxist movements, which were the fascist parties. "But in a wider sense, class politics is by definition divisive, whereas the politics of the Right are uniting. Whether they actualize it or not, the rhetoric of the Right offers national unity, and what the others are offering is division." Europe is strong enough In her book "A Distant Mirror," historian Barbara Tuchman draws parallels between the tempestuous 14th century and modern times. She argues that the root causes of the First World War were evident then, 600 years before it erupted. That century ended with the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, when a Muslim Ottoman force defeated a massive allied crusader army of Hungarian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Wallachian, French, Burgundian, German and assorted other troops. It is impossible not to make historical comparisons. Is Europe about to capitulate to radical Islam once again? Does the current influx of Muslim immigration pose a threat to Europe's liberal identity? Kershaw, for one, is rather optimistic. "That is what is happening now but Europe is strong enough, it is wealthy enough, it has enough space to cope with the influx of people." Kershaw maintains, however, that the media's representation of the wave of immigration could be dangerous. "Well, the danger is that through the exaggeration of fear, you run the risk of turning a minor problem into a grave problem, which then starts to eat away at the entire fabric of the society. That potential is there, I don't deny it, but I think we can control it." According to him, multiculturalism is "the only game in town," but he adds that "where it becomes incisive, and where it unnecessarily starts to irritate people, to my mind, is where inroads are made into the behavior of Christians in this country and Christian symbols. I actually don't go to church, I'm a secular, liberal individual, but I don't like it very much when there are interventions that say that people can't do things that they've always done for generations because it might offend Muslims. There's a sort of sensitivity toward a minority population then that, if you're not careful, might end up offending the majority, unnecessarily. So you can have multiculturalism, which perfectly well accepts these things, but actually, at the same time, it has to accept that there is a majority, at least nominally, Christian population in this country, so why go around trying to offend them- "In any case, we're not going back to the dark ages of the 1930s, no. If you're looking for, as I tend to do of course, structural reasons, at least three come to mind. One is that Europe is now a continent of democracies, and that is quite different than what we had in the 1930s. Secondly, nowhere in Europe these days does the military play a central role in the domestic politics. The third thing is that with all its imperfections, the European Union has now created a network of institutions and of interactions that militate against one power becoming a dominant political force or a threatening political force." The modern anti-Semites When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kershaw has been saying for years that he supports the two-state solution. However, he clarifies, that "admittedly, we have gone increasingly away from that two-state solution. Military power alone is insufficient. Israel is of course the strongest military power in the region, it can intervene militarily to do this that or the other, and it has done so. It can strike back very forcefully when it gets pin pricks from outside, but striking back very forcefully is not a recipe for creating long-term peaceful conditions. "So I think the problem now is that we've moved so far away from that two-state solution, we've gone so far down the route of exacerbating the problems that are there, that what might have been possible 15 or 20 years ago is now less possible, or it is difficult to foresee how it's possible. "It might be politically misleading for me to say this from a long way away, and it might be misguided, but I can't see how there can be a solution through military force, and that problem will linger. Policies of settlements are guaranteed to lose Israel some of its friends in the West and guaranteed to create antagonisms in its neighbors in that region. I can't see that this is a route to anything like stability, let alone peace in that region. "I'm a defender of Israel's right to exist, and I make it known to some of my left-wing friends in all sorts of ways. I am a supporter of Israel but I do think Israel has made it very hard for its friends in the nature of the politics that is has carried out. I've been very hopeful for a long time for a different set of policies." Q: We, in Israel, are sensing a dramatic rise recently in anti-Semitic sentiments across Europe, including Britain. Only recently we heard the anti-Semitic remarks issued by Labour MPs. Some people are calling it anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Israel sentiments. For the sake of comparison, no one is questioning Syria's legitimacy or right to exist as a state, even as its leader, President Bashar Assad, murders tens of thousands of citizens. Meanwhile, the anti-Israel BDS movement is thriving. "I absolutely take your point. There are groups probably in every European country, especially in Britain, that reject Israel's right to exist. I would call them modern day anti-Semites. They certainly exist, but they are politically insignificant at the present time in every European country, maybe with the exception of France and perhaps Hungary. I think it's very easy to exaggerate the significance of these groups. "The Labour Party was in the headlines recently because certain extreme left sections within the party that have always had this element of anti-Semitism built into them. What they're doing now is to combine that with the politics of the Middle East in order to justify their anti-Semitism." Kershaw warns that "while I accept that anti-Semitism exists, I think we have to be careful not to exaggerate its political or even social significance. The anti-Semitism now is vastly different than the anti-Semitism of the 1930s. It is linked in one way or another very closely to the politics of the Middle East and the influence of Islam. But I think that if you looked at anti-Semitic incidents, like say the desecration of Jewish cemeteries or things of that sort, some of it might be neo-Nazi or neo-fascist idiots in whichever of these countries, including this one. "I think it is actually truthfully the case that you hardly see anti-Semitism now, the old kind, at all in this country. And when you do, it's a very sectarian type of thing that exists in certain sections of the Left or certain sections of the extreme Right. Mainstream politics -- Conservative, Labour -- not at all. The mainstream absolutely condemns anti-Semitism of any kind."
