Richard Overy

Richard James Overy FRHistS FBA (born 23 December 1947) is a British historian who has published on the history of World War II and Nazi Germany. In 2007, as The Times editor of Complete History of the World, he chose the 50 key dates of world history.¹

Life and career

Overy, after being educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and becoming a research fellow at Churchill College, taught history at Cambridge from 1972 to 1979, as a fellow of Queens' College and from 1976 as a university assistant lecturer. He moved to King's College London, where he became professor of modern history in 1994. He was appointed to a professorship at the University of Exeter in 2004.²

In 2021, Overy helped to curate objects for displays in the Imperial War Museum's Second World War galleries.³ Some of these objects included flight goggles and a leather helmet once used by Billy Strachan.³

Dispute with Timothy Mason

In the late 1980s, Overy was involved in a historical dispute with Timothy Mason that mostly played out on the pages of Past & Present over the reasons for the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Mason had contended that a "flight into war" had been imposed on Adolf Hitler by a structural economic crisis, which confronted Hitler with the choice of making difficult economic decisions or aggression. Overy argued against Mason's thesis by maintaining that though Germany was faced with economic problems in 1939, their extent cannot explain aggression against Poland and the outbreak of war was caused by the Nazi leadership. For Overy, the problem with Mason's thesis was that it rested on assumptions that were not shown by records, information that was passed on to Hitler about Germany's economic problems.