Hitler's People by Richard Evans

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich

By Richard Evans 

Penguin Press 2024

Richard Evans, the dean of historians of Germany and the Third Reich, is represented in a million personal libraries with his superb “History of the Third Reich” trilogy. His big new book, Hitler’s People, acts as a biographical counterweight to that trilogy. Instead of concentrating on the broader, sweeping social and political forces that clawed the Nazis into power, into war, and into destruction, Hitler’s People tells the story of two dozen men and women who actually did much of the work those forces demanded. Imagine The Twelve Caesars of Suetonius, only every life is Nero. 

Evans breaks down his mini-biographies into broad categories: the Paladins, the Enforcers, and the Instruments, and naturally he precedes them all with a brief 100-page life of Hitler himself. But he starts the book with the kind of larger questions that always make this historian so invigorating to read. “How do we explain the rise and triumph of tyrants and charlatans?” he asks. “What causes someone to be gripped by a lust for power and domination? Why do such men – and they are almost always men – manage to gather round them disciples and supporters willing to carry out their commands?” At heart, this is the kind of “why, why did they do it” that lies at the heart of all perpetrator research (Täterforschung), especially that which surrounds Nazi Germany. 

That 100-page life of Hitler attests to no answers at the heart of the phenomenon, at least none beyond megalomaniacal evil. And the motivations of all gauleiters and other courtiers vary between vicarious viciousness and the need of fawning cringers for a hard master. Hitler, we’re told, chose Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister “because he would do as he was told.” Goebbels, we’re told, relished the cruelty of 1938’s Night of Broken Glass; “there is no doubt,” Evans writes, “while the idea might have originated with Goebbels, the order to unleash the violence came directly from Hitler himself, who was described by the Propaganda Minister in his diary as ‘totally radical’ on the action.” For Rudolf Hess, “it was above all [Hitler’s] iron determination to use any means necessary to bring Germany back to greatness.” 

“Nazism released people from the normal constraints that society imposes on the violent and abusive desires that exist to a degree among all of us, and actively encouraged people to act them out,” Evans writes, in one of the book’s many innumerable passages that will likely freeze the blood of 2024 readers. “Ideological and historical context in the end was more important than individual psychology.”

Denial was in many cases the key element in those individual psychologies. Evans notes that the postwar attitudes of many Nazi leaders like Himmler Göring, and especially Albert Speer “betrayed a continuing lack of comprehension of the depths of criminality to which they had all sunk,” and whether or not readers believe that (as at least one critic adamantly does not), these brief biographies make clear that some Hitler’s minions knew exactly how deep their depths were. In December of 1939, for instance, Karl Brandt very enthusiastically participated in the Aktion T-4 program that would result in thousand of prisoners being gassed with carbon monoxide while Brandt watched through a peephole. “Clearly,” Evans writes, “to the assembled functionaries the victims were not human at all, but mere insects or vermin.” 

It’s functionally impossible to read Hitler’s People without thinking about the openly fascist organization that currently controls one of the two major political parties of the United States, an organization whose leader demands fanatical loyalty but neither returns nor rewards it, who employs Nazi iconography in his campaign ads, threatens to eradicate the Constitution, implies that his return to power will end democratic elections, allows his followers to salute him with stiff extended arms, and promises to fill concentration camps with millions of people he calls “vermin.” The parallels on almost every page of this book are so exact that the reading almost feels voyeuristic, and maybe this was part of the author’s plan. “Only by situating the biographies of individual Nazi perpetrators, with all their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, in these larger contexts, can we begin to understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influence,” Evans writes. “By doing this, we can perhaps start to recognize the threats that democracy and the assertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter them.”

Whether or not such countering is any more possible now than it was in 1933, at least Hitler’s People a horrifying but intensely readable dramatis personae.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News