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 antisemitism 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 antisemitism, and that though admitting that most of the "spontaneous" antisemitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme antisemitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above. Kulka argued that most Germans were more antisemitic than Kershaw portrayed them in Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, and that rather than "indifference" "passive complicity" would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people to the Shoah. The Nazi Dictatorship In 1985, Kershaw published a book on the historiography of Nazi Germany, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, in which he reflected on the problems in historiography of the Nazi era. Kershaw noted the huge disparity of often incompatible views about the Nazi era such as the debate between: those who see the Nazi period as the culmination of Deutschtum (Germanism) and Marxists who see Nazism as the culmination of capitalism those who argue for a Sonderweg (distinct path of German post-mediaeval development), and those who argue against the Sonderweg concept those who see Nazism as a type of totalitarianism, and those who see it as a type of fascism those historians who favour a "functionalist" interpretation with the emphasis on the German bureaucracy and the Holocaust as an ad hoc process, and those who favour an "intentionalist" interpretation with the focus on Hitler and the argument that the Holocaust had been something planned from early on in Hitler's political career. As Kershaw noted, these divergent interpretations such as the differences between the functionalist view of the Holocaust as caused by a process and the intentionalist view of the Holocaust as caused by a plan are not easily reconciled, and that there was