Tackling the last question first, Kershaw is one of the current giants in this particular era of German history. He wrote a monumental two-volume biography of Hitler in the late 1990s/early 2000s that has since become one of the standard biographies of the dictator. Kershaw began as a specialist in what could be termed "Hitler's popularity," and initially made a name for himself with specialized books on German public opinion during the Third Reich. Kershaw has avoided some of the traps that commonly occur when historians manage to achieve a readership outside of academic circles and his later books like The End and Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941 are considered well-written and -argued pieces of popular scholarship despite being published by a non-academic press. In short, Kershaw is a very well respected historian.

As for working towards the Fuhrer, this is a very elegant historical paradigm that did not so much end end the weak/strong dichotomy (more commonly called functionalist/intentionalist), but redefine the historical debate so that this Manicheanism became irrelevant. This has been something of a relief for scholars because the functionalist/intentionalist debate frequently devolved into a tiresome chicken or the egg argument that generates more heat than light. Kershaw's paradigm also has the advantage of dovetailing extremely well into the type of history historians were writing about in the 1990s and 2000 which focuses upon issues like how organizations and individuals function within a society. In short, this paradigm of Kershaw has enough flexibility to fit into different cases far better than either of the shop-worn functionalist/intentionalist interpretations.