We understand Adolf Hitler and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany far better than we did 25 years ago, and that is due largely to the work of the British historian Richard J. Evans. His magisterial trilogy, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War, is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the forces that shaped the world between the end of World War I and 1945. Evans is a wonderful stylist as well as a keen analyst, and in his latest book, Hitler’s People, he deftly focuses on the personalities and temperaments of those who fell under the sway of Nazism and abetted the most evil regime in modern history. Any reader will come away wiser about the Third Reich, if still confounded that it existed at all.
Jim Kelly: For many decades, most historians of Nazi Germany have tended to focus on the country’s institutions and traditions and even German citizens themselves to explain what you call “this darkest of all chapters in modern history.” The biographical approach of examining Hitler and his lieutenants was downplayed lest it look like all blame was being placed on just a few. That has now changed. Why?
Richard J. Evans: Professional historians, especially in Germany, very much wanted to avoid the kind of “great man” approach that became so central under Nazism and before. They wanted an objective, impersonal kind of history based on social-science models, explaining Nazism in terms of broad trends and developments and avoiding what they called, in a term intended to be derogatory, “personalizing history-writing” (personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung). This also reflected the rise of social-science history more generally in the 1970s and 1980s. This trend delivered a lot of important work on Nazism, for example, in quantifying who voted for Hitler, who belonged to the Nazi Party, and the like, but it also had a distancing effect.
Toward the end of the 20th century, this approach began to reach its limits, and historians began to focus more on cultural and emotional history as tools of explanation, which pointed toward biography. The trend was strengthened by a growing distance in time from the Nazi period as well as an increase from the 1990s in prosecutions of former Nazis and, especially, restitution and compensation actions related to Nazi crimes, again pointing to issues of individual responsibility.
J.K.: You offer a brilliant survey of previous biographies of Hitler, each one emphasizing different factors in his rise to power. Some were criticized for humanizing Hitler, but, of course, he was human, which may mean we have to redefine what being human means. As you point out, Hitler was neither a political nor military genius, he benefited enormously from the ruinous toll of the Great Depression and by aligning himself with conservative and nationalist elites, and in the end was thus allowed to exercise what you call the core of his worldview: “a visceral race hatred of what he called the ‘Jewish world-enemy.’” So let me ask you this: could another German dictator who had all the attributes of Hitler absent the virulent anti-Semitism still have started World War II?
R.J.E.: Yes. The most likely alternative to Hitler in 1933 was a military dictatorship. While the German generals were not as obsessed with anti-Semitism as Hitler was, they were consumed with the desire to rerun World War I and conquer Europe again. They would also most likely have imposed some restrictions on the Jews.
J.K.: Hitler has often been depicted as a loner, with no personal life, a depressive in his younger days who had contemplated suicide, someone fearful of intimacy. Yet, as you point out, he was loyal to staff and depended on them to bolster his self-confidence, and so many of them stayed with him until the very end. You write about many of them in a section called “The Paladins,” and argue that to brand them as a criminal gang of psychopaths is too simplistic. Why so?
“While the German generals were not as obsessed with anti-Semitism as Hitler was, they were consumed with the desire to rerun World War I and conquer Europe again.”
R.J.E.: Because they were not psychopaths but normal people living in abnormal times. The leading Nazis came from the German middle class and had many features of middle-class culture, such as a good education, cultural strengths (a good number were fine amateur musicians or had a strong interest in visual art), a military background, and a comfortable childhood and upbringing.
At the same time, many experienced a drastic collapse in their social and economic position either before or at the end of World War I, to which Hitler offered a solution linked to his constantly repeated view of Germany itself collapsing as a viable and stable nation in 1918. Calling men like Goebbels or Eichmann psychopaths dehumanizes them and allows us all to put them outside the normal bounds of human society, thus saying that no normal human being could have committed the crimes they carried out. This is too easy an evasion of human responsibility.
J.K.: Is it fair to say that Nazism brought out in many people the sort of behavior that other societies routinely punish, in the sense that brutality and hatred were celebrated and encouraged? You seem to be saying that if many of these people had lived in, say, Switzerland, their violent and abusive desires would not have emerged the way they did under Nazism.
R.J.E.: Yes, I think this surmise is broadly correct. Nazism upended conventional morality, so that peace and peacefulness were despised, and violence, rudeness, and aggression were valorized.
J.K.: The seeds of Nazism were very much planted in the defeated soil of World War I, and Hitler tapped into both an anger and inferiority complex that propelled him to power. Today, there are strong leaders with deep authoritarian instincts that rely on resentment to fuel their careers, but your book is so detailed about what made Nazism unique that I came away both appalled by the past but pretty confident that a carbon copy of Hitler could not achieve that prominence today. Am I too optimistic?
R.J.E.: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain is said to have remarked. Nazism was very much a product of World War I, and it included a militaristic drive to foreign conquest and the regimentation of society that one can’t see in authoritarian leaders or would-be dictators in today’s world. They may be nationalistic, but populist politicians like Trump, Le Pen, or Orbán don’t seriously intend to invade other countries or put their followers into jackboots and military uniforms. They do flirt with anti-Semitism, but they don’t orchestrate the kind of anti-Semitic measures taken by Hitler.
“Many experienced a drastic collapse in their social and economic position either before or at the end of World War I, to which Hitler offered a solution.”
J.K.: You begin your book with the testimony given to the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal by a young French Resistance fighter about what she witnessed while imprisoned at Auschwitz. I have read a fair amount about the Holocaust, but every time I read a new account I am freshly appalled. I did not know, for example, that families in concentration camps were forced to send cheerful postcards to relatives urging them to visit them, and some did. You, of course, have spent decades researching the Holocaust. How much of an emotional toll did that take on you?
R.J.E.: I’ve always made sure to pursue more cheerful research as well—a history of 19th-century Europe, for example, or a biography of the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Also, historians have to detach themselves to a degree from the topics they study and not get too emotionally involved, while retaining qualities of empathy and insight. My wife and two sons have also kept me (more or less) sane while I’ve been writing about the Third Reich, and I’ve distracted myself by playing the piano, listening to music, gardening, and cooking.
J.K.: Do you remember the moment when you decided to become a historian, and what early influences led to that decision? And what led you to focus on Germany?
R.J.E.: I had no personal or family connections with Germany but grew up in the postwar years on the fringes of London’s East End and was struck and fascinated by seeing all the bomb sites, with gaps in rows of terraced houses, like missing teeth, where people’s houses had once been. Who had done this, I wondered, and why?
My parents and their friends all had stories of the war, and my mother took me to see war movies like Reach for the Sky as a child. Later, I arrived in Oxford as a student just when modern German history was opening up again after a couple of decades of amnesia, and I met German historians who were playing a part in this, such as the great Fritz Fischer. I was tutored by history dons who worked on wartime topics, notably Martin Gilbert, later the official biographer of Winston Churchill.
J.K.: Finally, have you had a chance to watch Babylon Berlin, the astonishingly popular series about the rise of Nazism that is now in its fourth season? If so, what do you think of its historical accuracy?
R.J.E.: Yes, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. By and large it’s pretty accurate, though there are some niggling errors—such as, for instance, the depiction of the execution of one of the female characters before the collapse of the Weimar Republic. In reality no women were executed in Germany between the end of World War I and the coming of the Nazis.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL
