Richard Overy (born 23 December, 1947) is a
British
historian who has
published extensively on the
history of
World War II
and the
Third Reich. In 2007 as
The Times editor of
Complete
History of the World he chose the 50 key dates of world
history.
Biography
After
being educated at Caius
College
, Cambridge
and awarded a research
fellowship at Churchill College
, Overy taught history at Cambridge
from 1972 to 1979, as a fellow of Queens'
College
and from 1976 as a university assistant
lecturer. In 1980 he moved to King's College
London
, where he became professor
of modern history in 1994.
He was
appointed to a professorship in Exeter University
in 2004.
In the late 1980s, Overy was involved in a major historical dispute
with the
Marxist historian
Timothy Mason that mostly played out over the
pages of
Past and Present journal over the reasons for the
outbreak of World War Two in 1939. Mason had contended that a
"flight into war" had been imposed on
Adolf
Hitler by a structural economic crisis, which confronted Hitler
with the choice of making difficult economic choices or aggression.
Overy
argued against Mason's thesis, maintaining that though Germany was
faced with economic problems in 1939, the extent and scale of these
problems cannot explain aggression against Poland
, and the
reasons for the outbreak of war were due to the choices made by the
Nazi leadership. For Overy, a major problem with the Mason
thesis was that it rested on the assumption that in way unrecorded
by the records, that information was passed on to Hitler about the
Reich's economic problems. Overy argued that there was a
major difference between economic pressures inducted by the
problems of the
Four Year Plan, and
economic motives to seize raw materials, industry and foreign
reserve of neighboring states as a way of accelerating the Four
Year Plan. Moreover, Overy asserted that the repressive capacity of
the German state as a way of dealing with domestic unhappiness was
somewhat downplayed by Mason. Finally, Overy argued that there is
considerable evidence that the German state felt they could master
the economic problems of rearmament; as one civil servant put it in
January 1940 "we have already mastered so many difficulties in the
past, that here too, if one or other raw material became extremely
scarce, ways and means will always yet be found to get out of a
fix". Recently, another British historian,
Adam Tooze, has argued for a similar position as
Mason's in his book
The
Wages of Destruction.
His work on World War II has been praised as "highly effective (in)
the ruthless dispelling of myths" (
A. J.
P. Taylor), "original and important"
(
New York Review of
Books) and "at the cutting edge" (
Times Literary
Supplement).
Awards
- Fellow of the Royal
Historical Society (1977)
- Fellow of the British Academy
(2000)
- Fellow of King’s College (2003)
- Samuel Elliot Morrison Prize of the Society for Military
History (2001) - For his contribution to the history of
warfare.
- Wolfson History Prize
(2004) for his book The Dictators: Hitler's Germany; Stalin's
Russia
In media
Prof. Overy was featured in the 2006 BBC docudrama
Nuremberg: Nazis on
Trial.
Publications
- William Morris, Viscount Nuffield (1976), ISBN
0-900362-84-7
- The Air War, 1939-1945 (1980; paperback ed. 2005),
ISBN 1-57488-716-5
- All Our Working Lives (with Peter Pagnamenta, 1984),
ISBN 0-563-20117-7
- Goering: The "Iron Man" (1984; paperback ed. 2000),
ISBN 1-84212-048-4
- The Origins of the Second World War (1987; 2nd ed.
1998), ISBN 0-582-29085-6.
- co-written with Timothy Mason "Debate: Germany, “Domestic
Crisis” and War in 1939" pages 200-240 from Past and
Present, Number 122, February 1989 reprinted as “Debate:
Germany, `domestic crisis’ and the War in 1939” from The
Origins of The Second World War edited by Patrick Finney,
Edward Arnold: London, United Kingdom, 1997, ISBN
0-34-067640-X.
- The Road To War (with Andrew Wheatcroft, 1989; 2nd ed.
1999), ISBN 0-14-028530-X
- The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932-1938 (1982; 2nd ed.
1996), ISBN 0-521-55286-9
- The Inter-War Crisis, 1919-1939 (1994), ISBN
0-582-35379-3
- War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994), ISBN
0-19-820290-3
- Why the Allies Won (1995), ISBN 0-224-04172-X
- The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich
(1996), ISBN 0-14-051330-2
- The Times Atlas of the Twentieth Century (ed., 1996),
ISBN 0-7230-0766-7
- Bomber Command, 1939-45 (1997), ISBN
0-00-472014-8
- Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997), ISBN
1-57500-051-2
- The Times History of the 20th Century (ed., 1999; new
ed. 2003), ISBN 0-00-716637-0
- The Battle (2000), ISBN 0-14-029419-8 (republished as
The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality)
- Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945
(2001), ISBN 0-7139-9350-2 (republished as Interrogations:
Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite)
- Germany: A New Social and Economic History.
Vol. 3: Since 1800 (ed. with Sheilagh Ogilvie,
2003), ISBN 0-340-65215-2
- The Times Complete History of the World (6th ed.,
2004), ISBN 0-00-718129-9
- The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia
(2004), ISBN 0-7139-9309-X
- Collins Atlas of Twentieth Century History (2005),
ISBN 0-00-720170-2
- Imperial War Museum's Second World War Experience Volume 1:
Blitzkrieg (2008), ISBN 978-1-84442-014-8
- Imperial War Museum's Second World War Experience Volume 2:
Axis Ascendant (2008), ISBN 978-1-84442-008-7
- The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (2009), ISBN
978-0-71399-563-3
External links
References