Martin Kitchen


Martin Kitchen is a British-Canadian historian, who has specialized in modern European history, with an emphasis on Germany. He is internationally regarded as a key author for the study of contemporary history.
Kitchen was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London.
Now Professor Emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University, Kitchen started teaching in 1966. He also taught at the Cambridge Group for Population Studies.
Throughout his career, Kitchen has served in several editorial boards such as the International History Review, the Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d'histoire and International Affairs. Kitchen's work has been translated into French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean and Chinese.

Fellowships and awards

Kitchen is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Historical Society. In 1978, he was awarded the Moncado Prize of The Society for Military History. In 1983-84, he received the Simon Fraser University Research Professor award.

Reviews

Kitchen received the following reviews for , a biography of the Nazi war criminal Albert Speer. Writing in 2016 Roger Moorhouse for History Today said "Kitchen is brilliant and brutal, exposing every aspect of his subject’s story to stern scrutiny. He begins at the very start, showing that even Speer’s tale of his birth was a lie." The Kirkus Review said "Kitchen sets the record straight on Albert Speer’s assertions of ignorance of the Final Solution and claims to being the good Nazi." Jonathan Meades writing in the London Review of Books said "Speer: Hitler’s Architect is not a biography. It is a 200,000-word charge sheet. Kitchen is steely, dogged and attentive to the small print. He shows Speer no mercy, nailing his every exculpatory ruse and demonstrating time and again how provisional the notion of truth was to him.

Books