Hitler's People

"Hitler's People

By Richard J. Evans

Penguin Press, 624 pages, $35

Re-examining the Third Reich remains, even now, essential. Its lessons are too important to be deemed safely settled. But when Richard Evans argues that the task has "gained new urgency and importance" due to the emergence of "strongmen and would-be dictators" within the world's democracies "since shortly after the beginning of the twenty-first century," he risks trivializing past horrors by wielding them as a weapon in the current debate over populism.

"Hitler's People" is nonetheless a fascinating and instructive book. Mr. Evans, a distinguished historian best known for his works on Nazi Germany, revisits the topic, but from a fresh, "biographical" angle. The book comprises an elegantly written and perceptive series of "interlinked biographical essays and reflections on individual personalities" from the era, and Mr. Evans's portrait of Hitler doubles as an excellent, if necessarily brief, introduction to the Nazis' rise and fall.

There is nothing remotely exculpatory in Mr. Evans's accounts of any of the Nazis he describes, but they are humanized in a way that would have been, he acknowledges, "unfashionable" for many years. Too close a focus on the personalities of the regime's leaders risked, it was feared, reviving the idea of "great men" as shapers of history, an idea that under Hitler had led to catastrophe. Others worried that an overemphasis on the few would let the many off the hook.

But old caricatures of the leading Nazis as little more than madmen, psychopaths or degenerates are misleading, though they probably saved Albert Speer's life at Nuremberg, enabling a rehabilitation of sorts -- as the "good Nazi" -- after his release. He was, as Mr. Evans explains, wrongly regarded as too cultivated, too intelligent, too (seemingly) repentant to have been like the others. "Hitler's People" shows that there was more to the Nazi leaders, and those below them, than the caricatures suggest. Understanding who they were matters: "They were, after all, individuals, often with sharply delineated personalities, whose thoughts and actions had a material effect" with, all too often, hideous consequences.

Moreover, the belief (rejected by Mr. Evans) that those lower down the ranks, who went along or worse, were "automata deprived of the power of judgment and just doing what they were told" bears no resemblance to an infinitely more complicated and disturbing truth. Nor can such people be dismissed as outliers. There were far too many of them in Germany -- and in the countries that fell into the Reich's grasp -- for that to be plausible, which raises troubling questions about the nature of humanity itself, even before considering the last century's other totalitarian nightmares; there are warnings embedded within those times and places too.

Mr. Evans begins, naturally enough, with Hitler. A telling anecdote from early in his career illustrates how, although imprisoned (rather comfortably) after the failure of his beer-hall putsch in 1923, he was still burnishing his image as the man apart, in this case by not participating in any sports or games: "A leader . . . cannot afford to be beaten by members of his retinue." And yet he was no loner. "Behind the scenes," the author writes, "he craved human company."

Mr. Evans then turns to the Fuhrer's immediate circle of subordinates, Goring, Goebbels and so on -- the usual suspects. After that come "the enablers and executors of Nazi ideology," from Hans Frank, "the king of Poland" (to borrow Goebbels's jibe) presiding over his domain from Krakow's Wawel Castle, to Julius Streicher, the editor and publisher of the viciously antisemitic Der Sturmer. Bringing up the rear are "a variety of lower-level perpetrators and instruments of the regime," including the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who would not have appreciated such a modest ranking (at least prior to 1945); Karl Brandt, a doctor who did a great deal of harm; and most unexpectedly of all, Luise Solmitz, rescued from obscurity by her extensive diaries.

Solmitz was a Hamburg schoolteacher of conservative, nationalist sympathies. Never a Nazi Party member, she was caught up in the fervor at the beginning of Hitler's ascendancy, taking part in a torchlit parade "as if drunk with enthusiasm." Her husband, Friedrich, a retired major, shared her politics and her Protestantism but was of Jewish descent. The duo ignored the implications of this as much as they could and as long as they could. In 1935, Luise wrote enthusiastically about Hitler's reversal of the "disgrace of 1918."

Anger over Germany's defeat in World War I (and the terms of the peace treaty that formally concluded it) is one thread that connects the subjects Mr. Evans profiles. It was felt most fiercely by those who had fought and reinforced when they came home to an empire that had become a republic, soon to be shorn of territory and the vast majority of its armed forces. The conservative and militaristic values of the country for which they had gone to war appeared to be in the process of being consigned to the past. Inflation was accelerating. Meanwhile, communism -- another force out to destroy Weimar's democracy -- was on the march. Over time, the Communist Party helped undermine the republic both directly and, through the fear it aroused in the middle class, by becoming one of Hitler's most effective recruiting agents.

Another link between a good number of those portrayed in "Hitler's People" is the depth of their antisemitic obsession. Its origins lay in the widespread but relatively lowkey antisemitism of the Kaiser's day, but it took a more virulent form in response to the need for a scapegoat for Germany's defeat. This transformation was intensified still further by the belief that "world Jewry" was behind the Bolsheviks, a conspiracy theory spread by refugees from Russia's shattered empire. These included Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German who became a key Nazi ideologue. After 1945, the conventional wisdom was that Rosenberg's influence had been overstated, but Mr. Evans maintains this is incorrect, arguing that Rosenberg's writings provided a "systematic underpinning for the antisemitism of the Nazi Party." Ever more toxic, the poison spread.

---

Mr. Stuttaford is the editor of National Review's Capital Matters." [1]

1. Portraits Of the Reich. Stuttaford, Andrew.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Sep 2024: A.13.