Robert Gellately

Robert Gellately (born 1943) is an American and Canadian historian specializing in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and secondarily the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. His research on the Gestapo argued that Nazi terror relied heavily on denunciations by ordinary German citizens rather than omnipresent state surveillance. His books include The Gestapo and German Society, Backing Hitler (2001), Lenin, Stalin and Hitler (2007), Stalin's Curse, (2013), and Hitler's True Believers (2020). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Education Gellately earned his B.A., B.Ed., and M.A. (1970) at Memorial University of Newfoundland and his Ph.D. (1974) at the London School of Economics. He retired in 2024.

Awards Senior Fellowships, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Grants, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Grants, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Bertelsmann Visiting Professor of Twentieth Century Jewish Politics and History, University of Oxford, 2004–2005 Honorary Doctor of Letters, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2006 This archival research formed the basis for The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1990), which argued that the Gestapo, a relatively small organization, functioned through denunciations by ordinary citizens rather than through omnipresent surveillance.

A 1996 article, "Denunciations in Twentieth-Century Germany: Aspects of Self-Policing in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic," extended this analysis to include East Germany.

Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2001) analyzed how the Nazi dictatorship maintained popular support. The book was selected by book clubs in North America and the United Kingdom and has been translated into German, Dutch, Spanish, Czech, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and French.

Comparative dictatorship Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) compared the three dictators. Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) traced Stalin's role in the Cold War and Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe.

Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis (Oxford University Press, 2020) analyzed paths to Nazi ideology among ordinary Germans.

Edited volumes Gellately co-edited Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (University of Chicago Press, 1997) with Sheila Fitzpatrick, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2001) with Nathan Stoltzfus, and The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2003) with Ben Kiernan.

He edited The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist's Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), presenting documents by psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn from the Nuremberg trials, and The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, 2018).