"Hitler's Willing Executioners" marked a revisionist challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy surrounding the question of German public opinion and the Final Solution.The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, a leading expert in the social history of the Third Reich, wrote, "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference," that is, that the progress leading up to Auschwitz was motivated by a vicious form of antisemitism on the part of the Nazi elite, but that it took place in a context where the majority of German public opinion was indifferent to what was happening.