This is a slightly longer version of a piece that appeared in the Financial Times two weeks ago. My thanks to the FT for permission to reprint it.
In Hitler’s People, Sir Richard Evans – late of Cambridge and now Provost of Gresham College, author of numerous studies of German history and of the Nazi era, including very substantial three volume The Third Reich Trilogy — is trying something new in not so much a packed field, as an expanding galaxy of works on the Nazis. There are big histories, such as Evans’ own; there are major sociological works on aspects of Nazism, there are huge and celebrated studies of Hitler himself including Sir Ian Kershaw’s brilliant two-part work and more recently another two-parter from the German historian Volker Ullrich, and there are plenty of biographies of Nazidom’s leading figures, notably the German journalist Joachim Fest’s first book The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership.
But what is unusual about Hitler’s People is that it represents a kind of synthesis, in which Evans uses the lives of 24 Germans – not just the top leaders - to, in his words, situate them “with all their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities” in the larger context of German history – by which Evans means the late 19th and early 20thcenturies, the better to “understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influence”. And thereby, naturally, to understand how threats to our democracy can even now develop from within.
The first 100 pages, representing a quarter of the book is a concise and well-judged distillation of the much biographised Fuhrer’s life. Then we have the main satraps — Himmler, Goering and the biggest of the Nazi bigwigs such as Hess, the Storm trooper leader Rohm and Goebbels. Part three, The Enforcers, introduces the reader to a more polyglot assortment of senior Third Reich figures and finally in part four we have what Evans calls The Instruments, the people who actually did the things that helped keep the Nazis in power.
Out of these 24 lives I think we do indeed see some patterns of background, behaviour and even psychology emerging. One obvious one is the brutishness that absolute power over other, ideologically despised human beings, can elicit. Two of Evans’ “instruments” are the notorious women concentration camp guards — Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. A third is a literate musical, mystical Hessian from a well-heeled family, Paul Zapp. Zapp found it in himself in September 1941 to command a group that shot all 5,000 Jewish inhabitants of the Ukrainian town of Mikolaiv. After the war Zapp was put on trial, convicted and served 16 years in prison, before he was released for “good behaviour”.
Interest in the occult such as Zapp’s is another theme running through these stories. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg and the Reich’s leading Jew-baiter, Julius Streicher, were all students of the esoteric and spiritual — which is to say, they were all woo-merchants. Streicher has been described as a “brown-green”, one of what Evans calls “a host of writers (who) celebrated the Germans supposed rootedness in the forested landscape of medieval times (to) contrast it with the imagined urban ruthlessness of the Jews.” Evans adds ominously, “These ideas had a particular appeal to German schoolteachers”. People wondering today at how some figures from the “wellness” industry have emerged first as anti-vaxxers and then moved to the far right might find some parallels here.
Then there were the chancers — the amoral, ambitious people who saw an opportunity to do well and even to exert Godlike powers in this new Nazi world. Evans has no time for the self-exculpations of the charming Albert Speer who passed himself off to the postwar world as an apolitical architect — and lied about what he knew concerning both the “Final Solution” and the slave labourers who worked and died on his grandiose projects and, later, on his attempts to supply the German armed forces with the weapons they needed to prolong the war.
Even more chilling is the evolution of the handsome young physician Karl Brandt from a man who tended the injuries of miners in the Ruhr, via becoming Hitler’s personal doctor, to the man most personally responsible for the enforced euthanasia programme – codenamed Aktion T4 after the Berlin address on Tiergarten from where it was run - that killed hundreds of thousands of disabled children and adults.
Evans notes the God syndrome not just in Brandt, but in German medicine at the time. The confidence of the profession, buoyed by its pioneering success in fighting diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis and anthrax, its discovery of germ theory and its international reputation, was immense. By the time war broke out Evans tells us, half the students in German universities were studying medicine and well over half the universities were led by medical professors. And, Evans writes, “Brandt’s crimes were not the product of some individual pathology on his part. Quite the contrary: the reflected attitudes and beliefs were common among the overwhelming majority of the medical profession in Germany.”
One thing that is notable in these biographies, Evans points out, is that apart from one baker’s son all these figures “came overwhelmingly from a middle-class background; There was not a single manual labourer among them”. Even the gay street fighter Ernst Rohm, his face disfigured from wartime wounds, was the son of a railway inspector and had been educated at the one the best schools in Munich.
Nor is this orientation a product merely of Evans’ selection. There were, of course, working class Nazis, but of those of any prominence, he writes, “most of them grew up socialised into a bourgeois milieu of strong German nationalism and conservatism; Converts from socialism or communism or even conventional liberalism were rare in the extreme. The step from here to the more radical form of nationalism represented by the Nazis was only a short one.”
And because they had possessed before the cataclysm of the Great War they had also lost more, possessing in common, “the shattering emotional experience of a sharp and shocking loss of status and self-worth at an early point of their lives… (and) Hitler offered them a way out of their feelings of inferiority…”
Evans dispenses his judgements about how Nazism happened and developed in bite-sized, almost laconic, pieces attached to the short biographies themselves. This has the effect of inviting the readers to draw some of their own lessons from what they find in the book. Personally, my shelves stuffed with big, opinionated tomes on the subject, including Daniel Goldhagen’s famous indictment of the Germans, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I find this departure attractive. If Evans’ purpose is getting the reader to think about what is particular and what is universal about the descent of one of the world’s most “civilised” nations into genocidal barbarism, then I believe it succeeds.
To illustrate, I found two lives of particular resonance for very different reasons. One is that of Franz Von Papen, the conservative and devout Catholic politician who helped open the door to Hitler in 1933. Von Papen is a case study in the way the reactionary can enable the fascist. A man who disparaged liberalism and democracy, von Papen became Hitler’s vice-chancellor in the belief that he could convert the Fuhrer to monarchism. Evans deals with von Papen with a masterly and devastating precision. He was, says Evans, always “an enemy of democracy, a clerico fascist”, who was never there when the human bill was being paid.
The second pertinent life, who brings up the tail in Hitler’s People, is an ordinary Hamburg school teacher called Luise Solmitz, born in 1889, whose diary, Evans writes, “is one of the most voluminous and detailed sources we have for everyday life in Germany in the first half of the 20th century”.
Solmitz is enamoured of Hitler’s vision for Germany before he takes power, and afterwards by his “personal courage decisiveness and effectiveness”. So much so that she denounces her own brother to the authorities for his liberal tendencies.
But Solmitz has another problem: her husband is Jewish, albeit a convert. Soon Hitler’s race laws has the family facing a series of restrictions including those on Solmitz’s beloved daughter, a half-Jew.
Nevertheless Solmitz shares in the exultation over Hitler’s victories in 1940. Five years later, with Germany destroyed and on the brink of defeat the courageous and decisive Hitler has turned into “the shabbiest failure in world history”. A bloody failure, she seems not to recognise, that her determined cognitive dissonance had in some small way helped sustain. Right now, it seems to me, when I look at social media, it is awash with Solmitzes.
I have 2 books on the go at the moment: this one and Bystander Society by Mary Fulbrook. I look at Project 2025 and the fanatical loyalty of the MAGA movement to Trump, the Hamas attack on civilians and the Israeli response, but also the troubling strands in our own society, and I think it's important to try to understand how a (more or less) civilised people can degrade to the point where cruelty to a group becomes possible. There was a huge hoo ha when Gary Lineker commented on the use of language beginning to resemble the language used in 1930s Germany, but I think he was onto something.
Thanks for such a concise review. I will now read the book. Indeed, I had thought DG’s mighty and heavily referenced tome the last I would read on this specific topic - it can do that to you. I’m intrigued now though to see a current and knowledgeable treatment. All the best, John.