Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich

By Richard J. Evans

Allen Lane, £30

Why did so many hitherto responsible citizens become fellow travellers in Hitler’s Germany? Why were ordinary people in their millions sucked into a whirlpool of deception? These are the questions that have been repeatedly asked since 1945. Sir Richard Evans, a renowned scholar of the Third Reich, attempts to provide answers in this important book.

This work of remembrance is fuelled by Evans’s desire to unmask “a class of unscrupulous politicians” today whereby truth has become relative, experts are transformed into elitists and facts can be described as “alternative”. Evans builds on new research and the opening of Soviet archives in 1991. He sees through the whitewashing of Nazi atrocities in the post-war West Germany. German doctors who used Jews to conduct “experiments” protected their own after 1945 and their professional association was dominated by former Nazis right up to the 1990s. A critical summary of the evidence presented at the trials of doctors in the immediate post-war years was pulped instead of being distributed to its 10,000 members.

Most Germans believed that the ordinary German soldier was chivalrous, noble and professional. Yet a travelling exhibition in Germany in the 1990s indicated that the Wehrmacht had participated in the extermination of Jews. Evans notes that German soldiers had a long record of massacres going back to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. He argues that even in the closing months of the war, many German soldiers expressed their admiration for Hitler – and that a third held the Jews responsible for this global conflagration.

Evans structures his book in four parts: Hitler the leader; his immediate circle of subordinates; the enablers of Nazi ideology and low-level perpetrators.

Hitler declared that he was a believer in “total victory” at the very outset of the First World War. He even refused to take part in the famed football match with British Tommies during Christmas 1914. He looked instead a decade later to Mussolini and Ataturk as models for national renaissance.

Evans devotes an incisive chapter to each of the rogues’ gallery of Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, von Ribbentrop and to notorious antisemites such as Ley, Streicher and Heydrich. It is, however, even more interesting to read about lesser figures who portrayed themselves after 1945 as honourable, principled and patriotic and far from being deranged and perverted.

Many of these “ordinary people” were conservative nationalists, emanating from the German middle class who were well-read, enjoyed art and wrote poetry. The defeat of 1918 and the disintegration of the Kaiser’s Germany shattered their sense of stability. Hitler offered them a way out of humiliation and a sense
of inferiority.

Evans's book

Franz von Papen, a conservative monarchist and one-time Reich chancellor, together with President Hindenburg believed that the appointment of Hitler in January 1933 would be a temporary measure. Hitler would be pushed into “a corner so hard he’ll be squeaking”. Evans comments that von Papen’s snobbery and sheer arrogance blinded him to the possibility that “a socially inferior individual” such as Hitler could outmanoeuvre him. Von Papen survived the Nazis and the war by maintaining a low profile but after 1945 rewrote his own history.

There was no mention in his memoirs that he did not oppose the boycott of Jews and their dismissal from government service or that he was an enthusiastic supporter of the destruction of democracy. He died aged 89 in 1969 in the comfort of his bed on his family estate.

This is a sobering book that depicts the duplicity of manipulators, opportunists and psychopaths to convince gullible multitudes into becoming mass murderers. Professor Evans has produced an incisive commentary on the continuing fragile nature of the human condition.