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Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
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“Kaleidoscopic . . . A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context . . . Just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.” —The New York Times
Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?
Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler’s People, he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members.
Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist’s eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies—like Goebbels, the regime’s propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust’s chief architect—to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten—like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler’s People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions.
Nearly a century after Hitler’s rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility—and even between pathological evil and rational choice—are never easily drawn.
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Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
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Original price was: $35.00.$28.40Current price is: $28.40.
matt 55 –
Richard Evans deservedly has the status of one of the most eminent British historians. I admire his books on the 19th and 20th century, as well as his analysis of Nazi Germany. I was looking forward to this book, hoping it would add to my desire to understand what drove the architects and implementers of Nazi Germany. Why did they become involved, what were their motivations? The marketing suggests that this book will add detail to the much misused term ‘banality of evil’. The book only partially delivers on this. It clearly has delved deeply in primary sources and earlier publications. However, it is demonstrably written by a historian, not a psychologist. It offers a series of excellent brief biographies of all the main personalities, providing much interesting personal background in a historical context. Occasionally it touches on psychological drivers, but it is mainly a retelling of history. The summary of the period 1920-1945 in the chapter on Hitler is superb. Much of the individual biographies are very interesting. A problem of serial biographies is that all cover the same period, and inevitably many events are repeatedly told. This book offered me many insights in the development of Nazi Germany and the role played by many of the leading characters and their relationships, but less about their psychology. I can strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about the internal functioning of leaders of the Nazi machinery and their interactions, less so for those who want to understand the psychology and pathology of those people. If one is in search of the personality of some of those, I can recommend the book by the prison psychologist G.W Gilbert: Nuremberg Diary. But in fairness to Richard Evans, I suspect that is not the book he tried to write.
W.Robinson –
Reading about senior Nazis is a bit like lowering yourself into a vat of effluent. What makes the experience so disgusting is the realisation that we all have this sort of filth in us somewhere. All these monsters thought of themselves as entirely ‘normal’, and perhaps only one or two (the loathsome Streicher, say) were the sort of people you would instinctively run a mile from. By and large, at least on my reading of this book, the bullies who ruled Germany from 1933-45 would not even make you look twice if you saw them on a train or in the street. And yet, they were responsible for the most appalling crimes imaginable.
Many people might think that they’ve already read enough about the Nazis, but Professor Evans’ new book is better than all other works of this kind. I am thinking particularly of Joachim Fest’s ‘Face of the Third Reich’, which – until now – I thought to be the last word on the Nazi leadership. It really isn’t. Try, for instance, reading Fest on Speer and then Evans on Speer. Fest’s chapter gives the impression that Speer was the ‘good Nazi’, saving cities from destruction at the end and in total ignorance of all the horrors going on right under his nose. Evans hacks away at this notorious myth (largely created by Fest, who ghosted Speer’s self-serving memoir, ‘Inside the Third Reich’), and gives a pithy and fascinating portrait of the monster who calmly cleared ‘non-Aryans’ from their homes and sent countless other human beings to their deaths in hellish camps and factories.
Professor Evans modestly does not claim to have covered new ground in this book (and one of its great advantages is it gives you a distillation of the latest historiography), but his reflections and asides are genuinely original and thought-provoking. If, like me, you are yet to get through all three volumes of the author’s history of Nazi Germany, then this book will also give you a good summary of what he has to say in those massive works. I recommend dipping in and out of the chapters of this book – marvelling at the quality of the writing and despairing at the depths to which human beings are capable of sinking.
G. Spore –
If you want to know more about the NAZI leadership and what motivated them you should read this book. Easy to read and follow each Biography helps you to understand the NAZI party.
Grant –
I will not indulge in a demonstration of intellectual vanity.
It is good book to read but i learnt nothing new on the subject.
Robert B. Lamm –
I understand that Mr. Evans is a renowned historian who has written, among other things, a highly regarded trilogy about the Third Reich. I have not read any of his previous works, and this book makes it highly unlikely that I ever will.
The book is “too much.” It is nearly 500 pages long (in a rather small font). I read plenty of books that are just as long or longer, so it’s not just about the length. But the first 20% of the book is a mini-biography of Hitler and the rise and fall of the Third Reich, including what factors led to the rise of the Nazis. That portion is, in itself, too much and not enough. Too much, because the discussion of Hitler’s rise to and use of power isn’t really new, and this 100-page recap isn’t necessary in a book that is already very long. And yet it’s not enough, because it doesn’t explain why or how so many people followed him into the abyss.
That’s arguably the job of the rest of the book, but that 80% consists of mini-bios of 20 of “Hitler’s people.” That’s another “too much.” It’s difficult to provide anything but a cursory and conclusory overview of those people in the 20 pages, on average, for each. Consequently, the mini-bios are not enough.
So much for “too much and not enough.” Since the first 459 pages of the book really can’t provide an explanation of why these people did what they did, Mr. Evans adds a “Conclusion,” which starts out by stating that “the perpetrators…recounted in this book were not psychopaths… deranged, or perverted, or insane.” Huh? Mr. Evans seems to be saying that such characterizations provide too easy an excuse for their behavior – an unwarranted “exculpation.” I understand his point, but surely there was some degree of perversion (or whatever) involved. How can you justify the cruelty of Ilse Koch? The rapacity of Herman Goering? The viciousness of Reinhard Heydrich? And so on. I can accept that Mr. Evans is a great historian, but he’s no more a psychologist than I am.
His explanation of why they followed HItler is that they all suffered from the trauma of what happened to Germany in the wake of WWI, the global depression, and other things that shook up their generally comfortable lives profoundly enough to make them look for a solution. I get it, but how does that explain the virulent anti-Semitism exhibited by some of these people before those events? And isn’t this an even more cynical form of exculpation?
It’s rare that I find a book offensive, but that’s my take for the reasons noted above.