‘Hitler’s People’ by Richard Evans review

There is a deliberate echo in Richard Evans’ new study of actors and perpetrators in the Third Reich of the classic book written by the German journalist Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, now more than 60 years ago. Like Fest, Evans has chosen to focus on key figures from Hitler’s entourage alongside perpetrators of the regime’s crimes and a sample of other fellow-travellers from most walks of life. Evans has stated that he wishes to come back to a question that has eluded him in his earlier writing on the Hitler years: how did this cohort, largely of men, come to support and work for a criminal regime led by a dangerous narcissist?

Evans approaches the answer through the potted biographies of 18 men and five women. He argues that the focus in much of Third Reich literature on institutions and political structures has tended to obscure the individual contribution of the personalities at the top of the dictatorial tree, who had their own agendas, ambitions and initiatives. Hitler was certainly central – Evans rightly rejects the idea of a ‘weak dictator’ – but he could not have done what he did without the collaboration and support of those in the circles of power that rippled out from the centre. Adolf Eichmann, described here as one of the ‘enforcers’, is a good example. No one in the Gestapo apparatus played a more important part in planning and carrying out the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, but his modest office in the regime meant that he was a long way from the dictator. That did not matter. Eichmann wanted to exterminate the Jews and boasted of his success while in exile in Argentina years later.

A thread that runs through the book is Evans’ conviction that the Hitler entourage was not made up of madmen or psychopaths, but normal people whose lives were distorted by contact with Hitler and the movement. Some, of course, were not entirely normal: Julius Streicher, the ranting antisemite from Nuremberg; Rudolf Hess, whose hysteric amnesia shielded him from execution at the postwar trials; the soft-chinned, bespectacled Himmler, obsessed with the ideal Aryan man he could never be; and so on. The camp thugs, several of them explored here, including the gruesome Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, were ‘normal’ in only a relative sense. The absolute power enjoyed over the dishevelled and disorientated prisoners prompted a savage cruelty in some of those in charge, but not all. The sadism was not the behaviour of a normal person, but one literally depraved by the opportunities the terror system presented. ‘Normal’ returned if they managed to avoid capture and punishment, and were able to slip back into civilian life. A great many did.

Those who gravitated to the Nazi movement and gained power and status as a result made a conscious decision. Evans is at pains to emphasise that Germans did have a choice in whether to reject the regime, or what it asked them to do, and he cites at the end the story of a German woman from Hamburg who fled to Denmark in protest when her Jewish employer was arrested. At the same time, he rightly reminds us that this was a regime rooted, ultimately, in the exercise of terror. Under such circumstances, the room for choice is limited. Outright rejection of the regime meant a couple of SA thugs on the doorstep dragging you off for a beating, or worse; choosing to oppose risked the guillotine or the camp. The number of brave people who did reject was small. For most people, choice was circumscribed.

The key men who willingly followed Hitler – the ‘paladins’ as Evans calls them – were the team that helped him to achieve what he wanted. They are all well known: Hermann Goering, Hitler’s nominated successor, though often critical of some of Hitler’s key decisions was a Führer-in-waiting; Joseph Goebbels, whose devotion to his leader ended with his suicide hours after Hitler’s; Hans Frank, the Nazi lawyer who saw Hitler as a gift from God for the German people, and so on. It might have been useful to include Wilhelm Frick, the Interior Minister hanged at Nuremberg, who was a central figure in constructing the spurious legal framework for the terror state, or Hjalmar Schacht, Minister of Economics, whose ambiguous relationship with the dictatorship led him to be imprisoned first in Dachau, and then at the end of the war by the Allies. He died, in his nineties, in 1970.

It is also odd not to see a token industrialist or intellectual, important as many were to the regime. Among Germany’s distinguished thinkers, the philosophers Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger stand out as willing fellow-travellers who ought to have known better, but whose international reputations survived their flirtations with Hitler. The small-time industrialist Paul Pleiger is another interesting case, chosen by Goering to run the vast industrial corporation Reichswerke Hermann Göring and engross the resources of the conquered territories. Pleiger was tried after 1945, but a great many of Germany’s entrepreneurial elite managed to evade punishment despite their work for the regime. Other readers will no doubt have their preferences, but there are of course limits for any author. Evans gives as rich a sample as he needs to prove his case. Fest’s book is very successfully brought up to date.

Evans hopes that by understanding more fully what brings people to support and enable a cruel dictatorship we might learn lessons for the present. This is all the more urgent as the West stares at an arc of authoritarian states now stretched across the Middle East and Eurasia, and the growth of a radical right-wing nearer to home. It would be good to see Evans reflect more on whether the Hitler phenomenon was a one-off warning to the world, or rather an example of a generic style of dictatorship and following that might resurface when historical circumstances present the opportunity, as they did in 1933. The shadow of the Third Reich still hangs more heavily over the present than it deserves, but could it happen again?

• Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
  Richard Evans
  Allen Lane, 624pp, £35
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Richard Overy is Honorary Research Professor at the University of Exeter. His latest book is Why War? (Allen Lane, 2024).