What Do Historians Think? — Who Was Most to Blame for World War Two?

🔎 What Do Historians Think? — Who Was Most to Blame for World War Two?

Interpretation 1 — Hitler bears primary responsibility (Ian Kershaw): Kershaw argues in his biography of Hitler that the war was the product of Hitler's specific ideology and deliberate long-term planning. The conquest of Lebensraum in the east was not a vague aspiration but a fixed programme, embedded in Mein Kampf (1925) and pursued systematically. While Hitler was opportunistic about timing, the direction of his policy made a major European war inevitable once Germany had sufficient military strength. Without Hitler, there is no Second World War.

Interpretation 2 — Hitler was an opportunist enabled by others (A.J.P. Taylor): In The Origins of the Second World War (1961), Taylor controversially argued that Hitler was essentially a normal, if ruthless, statesman who exploited the mistakes of the Western powers. Appeasement, the failure of collective security, and the structural weaknesses created by Versailles were just as responsible as Hitler's ideology. Taylor's view was widely criticised for underplaying Nazi ideology, but it forced historians to examine how British and French policy contributed to the war.

Why do they disagree? Kershaw had access to post-war German archives and Nazi documents unavailable to Taylor, and writes from a tradition that emphasises the unique, ideologically driven nature of Nazism. Taylor, writing in 1961, was partly reacting against the wartime tendency to make Hitler an almost supernatural evil — he wanted to show how the international system had also failed. Both are right about different aspects: Hitler's aims were uniquely destructive, but appeasement and collective security failure gave him the space to pursue them.