David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Richard James Overy is a British historian who has published on the history of World War II and Nazi Germany. In 2007, as The Times editor of Complete History of the World, he chose the 50 key dates of world history.
Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, is an English political journalist, historian and academic, currently a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. A King's Scholar at Eton College, Malcolm read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and received his doctorate in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a Fellow and College Lecturer of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before becoming a political and foreign affairs journalist for The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph.
Sir Richard John Evans is a British historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe with a focus on Germany. He is the author of eighteen books, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy (2003–2008). Evans was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until his retirement in 2014, and President of Cambridge's Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017. He has been Provost of Gresham College in London since 2014. Evans was appointed Knight Bachelor for services to scholarship in the 2012 Birthday Honours.
Norman Stone was a British historian and author. At the time of his death, he was Professor of European History in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, having formerly been a professor at the University of Oxford, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and an adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was a board member of the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM).
Robert John Weston Evans is a British historian, whose speciality is the post-medieval history of Central and Eastern Europe. He was educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, and later at Jesus College, Cambridge. Evans was Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford from 1997 to 2011 and is a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He works on the post-medieval history of Central and Eastern Europe, especially concerning that of the Habsburg lands from 1526 to 1918.
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and dictator of Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political life, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards Christianity, but later totally rejected it. Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations. He also criticized atheism.
Roger Moorhouse is a British historian and author.
Sir Christopher Munro Clark is an Australian historian living in the United Kingdom and Germany. He is the twenty-second Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. In the 2015 Birthday Honours, he was knighted for his services to Anglo-German relations.
Timothy Charles William Blanning is an English historian who served as Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2009.
Like many other nations at the time, Germany suffered the economic effects of the Great Depression, with unemployment soaring after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he introduced policies aimed at improving the economy. The changes included privatization of state owned industries, import tariffs, and an attempt to achieve autarky. Weekly earnings increased by 19% in real terms from 1933 to 1939, but this was largely due to employees working longer hours, while the hourly wage rates remained close to the lowest levels reached during the Great Depression. In addition, reduced foreign trade meant rationing of consumer goods like poultry, fruit, and clothing for many Germans.
Berlin: The Downfall 1945 is a narrative history by Antony Beevor of the Battle of Berlin during World War II. It was published by Viking Press in 2002, then later by Penguin Books in 2003. The book achieved both critical and commercial success. It has been a number-one best seller in seven countries apart from Britain, and in the top five in another nine countries. Together this book and Beevor's Stalingrad, first published in 1998, have sold nearly three million copies.
Historians, political scientists and philosophers have studied Nazism with a specific focus on its religious and pseudo-religious aspects. It has been debated whether Nazism would constitute a political religion, and there has also been research on the millenarian, messianic, and occult or esoteric aspects of Nazism.
David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt is a case in English law against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher Penguin Books, filed in the High Court of Justice by the British author David Irving in 1996, asserting that Lipstadt had libelled him in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. The court ruled that Irving's claim of libel relating to Holocaust denial was not valid under English defamation law because Lipstadt's claim that he had deliberately distorted evidence had been shown to be substantially true. English libel law puts the burden of proof on the defence, meaning that it was up to Lipstadt and her publisher to prove that her claims of Irving's deliberate misrepresentation of evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoints were substantially true.
Michael George Andrew AxworthyFRSA, FRAS was a British academic, author, and commentator. He was the head of the Iran section at the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office between 1998 and 2000.
Nazism, the common name in English for National Socialism, is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism. The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War. Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates a dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-Slavism, scientific racism, white supremacy, Nordicism, social Darwinism and the use of eugenics into its creed. Its extreme nationalism originated in pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement which had been a prominent aspect of German ultranationalism since the late 19th century. Nazism was strongly influenced by the Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's underlying "cult of violence". It subscribed to pseudo-scientific theories of a racial hierarchy, identifying ethnic Germans as part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race. Nazism sought to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous German society based on racial purity which represented a people's community. The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those whom they deemed either Community Aliens or "inferior" races.
Robert Gerwarth is a German historian and author who specialises in European history, with an emphasis on German history. Since finishing a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships at Princeton, Harvard, the NIOD (Amsterdam) and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia. He teaches at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.
David Stahel is a historian, author and senior lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales. He specialises in German military history of World War II. Stahel has authored several books on the military operations of the first six months of the Eastern Front, including on the launching of Operation Barbarossa, the Battle of Kiev (1941) and the Battle for Moscow.
The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 is a 2014 book by the British historian Roger Moorhouse about the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
