CHACRCRITIQUE
JANUARY 2025 #15
TITLE
Published by Allen Lane, Hardback, £35
ISBN: 9780241471500
Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
AUTHOR Richard J. Evans
REVIEWER
Professor
Matthias
Strohn,
Head of Historical Analysis, CHACR
INVESTIGATION OF THE MOTIVES OF THE USUAL (AND UNUSUAL) NAZI SUSPECTS
How could a civilised people such as the Germans commit the crimes and atrocities of the Nazi regime? How and why did they follow Hitler all the way to the end and to total destruction of Germany? These questions have kept generations of people occupied. Hannah Arendt famously spoke of the ‘banality of evil’ when she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organisers of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem in 1961. Were the followers of Hitler and the Nazi regime all psychopaths and criminals or was there more to it that turned ordinary men and women into followers of this ideology? This is the main question that Richard J. Evans sets out to answer in his book.
In order to achieve this, the author provides biographical portraits of 22 individuals, grouped into four different categories. The first is reserved for Hitler himself. Part two, called ‘The Paladins’, and part three, entitled ‘The Enforcers’, offer overviews of the Führer’s principal followers. The list here includes the usual suspects, such as Göring, Goebbels and Hess. In many ways, the last part, ‘The Instruments’, is the most fascinating, because it moves away from the ‘Nazi A-list’ and provides insights into lesser-known individuals. The seven people portrayed here came from all sorts of different backgrounds and had very
different roles in the Third Reich. The list includes, amongst others, the Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb; Hitler’s medic (and mass murderer) Karl Brandt; the film director Leni Riefenstahl; and the ‘Denunciator’ Luise Solmitz, a ‘silent supporter’ – as Evans describes her – of the regime.
Much ink has been spilt about most of these subjects (with the exception of some in the concluding part of the book), and so the reader will not find a lot of groundbreaking new stories or evidence. Having said this, the wider and deeper knowledge of the individuals portrayed is usually kept within the walls of the academic ivory tower or between the covers of dense academic writing. Hitler’s People chooses a different path: adhering to academic principles (including a wealth of references), the vignettes are long enough to paint vivid pictures of the eponymous ‘people’ and to explain their roles and behaviour in the Third Reich, but they are short enough to make them accessible for the general reader. In addition, the text is written in an engaging manner, which makes it easy to follow the author’s arguments and to bring to life the personal stories of the individuals discussed.
Some of the more general points that Evans makes can be debated, for example, his elaborations on the German Army’s view on ‘Total War’ and the annihilation of not only the enemy forces, but ‘the enemy nation as well’. Also, German geography does not seem to be the author’s strong point. For instance, he confuses the major city of Nuremberg with a small town more than 400 kilometres away, and the Buchenwald concentration camp was not close to Dresden as Evans states, but to the city of Weimar.
Despite these glitches, this is a book worth reading. It is recommended to anybody with an interest in human behaviour, the Third Reich, and the role that individuals played in it, be they the paladins of the regime or ‘ordinary people’.