I'm currently working on reading through both Richard J. Evans Trilogy on the Third Reich while simultaneously reading Ian Kershaw's two volume Hitler biography. This is the second time that I've attempted to go through Kershaw's biography. I put it down after around five chapters or so due to what I perceived to be annoying moral evaluations polluting what is otherwise an engaging and well-sourced biography.

This perception hasn't changed and with the juxtaposition of Evans's work, Kershaw's emotional laziness and perfunctory neutrality has become even more grating. I understand that Kershaw's thesis is a reaction against Hitler as great man narrative, but I'm looking for something a little more detached from moral judgments and what strikes me as bad faith speculation.

To give a typical example of one aspect of what I'm talking about, here are two excerpts concerning Lanz von Liebenfels and Ostara:

Kershaw:

Whatever newspapers and periodicals he bought beyond those that he devoured so avidly in cafés, it was probably from this kiosk. Which exactly he read of the many cheap and trashy magazines in circulation at the time is uncertain. One of them was very likely a racist periodical called Ostara. The magazine, which first appeared in 1905, was the product of the extraordinary and warped imagination of an eccentric former Cistercian monk, who came to be known as Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (though his real name was plain Adolf Lanz).

Evans:

To be sure, for all the discussion and debate over these issues, the effect that such ideas had on government policies and their implementation before 1914 was not very great. Beyond the scientific establishment, propagandists for the breeding of a blond, Aryan super-race such as the self-styled Lanz von Liebenfels, editor of Ostara: Newspaper for Blond People, appealed only to an underworld of extremist politics and tiny, eccentric political sects. Nevertheless, despite all these qualifications, the emergence of these ideas, together with the increasing role they played in public debate, was a significant element in the origins of Nazi ideology. Several fundamental principles united virtually everyone in this motley crowd of scientists, doctors and propagandists for racial hygiene.

I get the distinct impression that Kershaw is subtly moralizing here, whereas Evans is expressly avoiding doing so. In fact, Evans in his preface says (and to which I agree entirely):

[I]t seems to me inappropriate for a work of history to indulge in the luxury of moral judgment. For one thing, it is unhistorical; for another, it is arrogant and presumptuous. I cannot know how I would have behaved if I had lived under the Third Reich, if only because, if I had lived then, I would have been a different person from the one I am now. Since the early 1990s, the historical study of Nazi Germany, and increasingly that of other subjects too, has been invaded by concepts and approaches derived from morality, religion and the law. These might be appropriate for reaching a judgment on whether or not some individual or group should be awarded compensation for sufferings endured under the Nazis, or on the other hand forced to make restitution in some form or other for sufferings inflicted on others, and in these contexts it is not only legitimate but also important to apply them. But they do not belong in a work of history.

Whereas Kershaw says tangentially in his preface:

A feasible inbuilt danger in any biographical approach is that it demands a level of empathy with the subject which can easily slide over into sympathy, perhaps even hidden or partial admiration. The pages which follow must stand witness to the avoidance of this risk.  Perhaps, in fact, it is even the case that comprehensive repulsion more than the possibility of sympathy poses the greater drawback to insight.

I feel that the second risk—that of repulsion—is still coloring Kershaw's interpretations. And frankly, when it comes to biographies of individuals and movements that already suffer overwhelmingly from “comprehensive repulsion,” I would prefer works on them that slide into sympathy rather than the opposite.

So with this, to those who specialize in this area, are there slightly less authoritative biographies of Hitler that are more in the vein of Evans's stylistic approach? Or should I just stick through it for the sake of Kershaw's comprehensive research?