the 2000 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw wrote a scathing criticism of Gerhard Ritter's claim that one "madman" (i.e. Hitler) "single-handedly" caused the Second World War in Europe, and added that he found the historical approach of Ritter's arch-enemy Fritz Fischer to be a far better way of understanding and recoiling German history. Along the same lines, Kershaw criticised the 1946 statement by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke that Nazism was just a particularly unfortunate Betriebsunfall (industrial accident) of history. Kershaw was later in a 2003 essay to criticise both Ritter and Meinecke, stating that by their promotion of the Betriebsunfall theory or by blaming everything upon Hitler, they were seeking to white-wash the German past. Writing of the work of the German historian Rainer Zitelmann, Kershaw has argued that Zitelmann has elevated what were merely secondary considerations in Hitler's remarks to the primary level, and that Zitelmann has not offered a clear definition of what he means by "modernization". With regard to the Nazi foreign policy debate between "globalists" such as Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, Jochen Thies, Gunter Moltman and Gerhard Weinberg, who argue that Germany aimed at world conquest, and the "continentalists" such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn, who argue that Germany aimed only at the conquest of Europe, Kershaw tends towards the "continental" position. Kershaw agrees with the thesis that Hitler did formulate a programme for foreign policy centering on an alliance with Britain to achieve the destruction of the Soviet Union, but has argued that a British lack of interest doomed the project, thus leading to the situation in 1939, where Hitler went to war with Britain, the country he wanted as an ally, not as an enemy, and the country he wanted as an enemy, the Soviet Union, as his ally. At the same time, Kershaw sees considerable merit in the work of such historians as Timothy Mason, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat and Wolfgang Schieder, who argue that Hitler had no "programme" in foreign policy, and instead contend that his foreign policy was simply a kneejerk reaction to domestic pressures in the economy and his need to maintain his popularity. Regarding the historical debates about Widerstand (resistance) in German society, Kershaw has argued that there are two approaches to the question, one of which he calls the fundamentalist (dealing with those committed to overthrowing the Nazi regime) and the other the