Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
Richard J. Evans
Penguin Press (August 2024)

A thorough analysis of what was “morally wrong about Nazism and the Third Reich”

Richard J. Evans devotes Part I to an analysis of Adolph Hiter. Over the years I have read dozens of other books about the rise and fall of the  Third Reich but few of these books rigorously examine the background and personalities of Hitler’s closest associates. Specifically, those whom Evans characterizes as “The Paladins”: Herman Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm, Henrich Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Roizsesdnberg, and Albert Spear. Then, in Part II, he shifts his attention to seven “Enforcers” and in Part IV, he examines nine “Instruments.”

Of all of Evans’ many skills as a raconteur of non-fiction, I think the most important is anchoring his reader in a context of compelling details that collectively establish a sense of “you are there” in situations of historical significance. Here is a brief timeline of events during which  Hitler and his people arose, triumphed, stalled declined, and fell:

1919: September;  Hitler joins an obscure fringe group, the DAP (German Workers’ Party).
1923: November 8-9 Hitler leads the abortive “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich.
1923-1924:  While in prison for high treason, Hitler writes Mein Kampf (My Struggle).
1933: January 30:  President Hindenburg appoints Hitler as Chancellor.
1933: October:  Germany quits the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations.

1934: June 30: “Night of the Long Knives”
1938: September 30 Munich Conference: Britain and France grant Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Hitler to avoid war; Hitler gives Chamberlain his personal assurance of future cooperation.
1938: November 9-10 “Night of Broken Glass”:1939: 1923  August Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact is signed in Moscow.
1939: August 31  Hitler gives final orders for the invasion of Poland.
1941: July 31  The formal order for the planning of a coordinated Final Solution of the Jewish problem throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, already drafted by Eichmann, is signed by Göring.

1941: December 7  Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor and US is at war with both Japan and Germany.
1942: August to Jan. 31, 1943:  Battle of Stalingrad
1944: June 6  D-Day
1944: July 20  Failed attempt by German conservatives to overthrow the Nazi government and assassinate Hitler
1945: January 27  Red Army liberates Auschwitz, finds convincing evidence of SS atrocities and of the Holocaust.
1945: April 30:  Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide in the Berlin bunker.

1945: May 2:  German forces in Berlin surrender to the Red Army.
1945: May 8 Unconditional Surrender to Allies
1945 November 1 until October 1, 1946  “International Military Tribunal” trials in Nuremborg
1946 October 15 Göring commits suicide
1946 October 16 Ten of the convicted were executed by hanging: Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Julius Streicher.

In her brilliant review of Hitler’s People  for The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai observes: “What Hitler’s people had in common, Evans says, was the shared trauma of total defeat in World War I. For many Germans, the Weimar Republic that followed that loss represented a period of downward social mobility. This was especially pronounced for those who came from the privileged officer class. Hitler’s endorsement of the ‘stab in the back’ myth, which blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in the war, offered the easy lie of a noxious conspiracy theory in place of the hard truth, that Germany was incapable of defeating the Anglo-American coalition. Hitler created a ‘moral milieu’ that selected for the cruelest, vilest behavior. Writing about Göring, whom a prison psychologist deemed a psychopath, Evans points out that ‘it was only in the twisted moral universe of the Third Reich that such a man could rise almost to the very summit of power.’

“But Hitler would have gone nowhere if it weren’t for the conservative elites who invited him into power in the first place. Business leaders and the military may have had “misgivings” when it came to the brutal tactics of the Nazis, but they hated Weimar’s democracy even more. Evans includes a chapter on Franz von Papen, one of the establishment politicians who helped ensure Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor in 1933. The aristocratic von Papen later admitted to underestimating Hitler.”

Here are three of Evans’ observations that caught my eye:

o First, “There is no way of beginning this book except with a biog®aphical essay on Hitler. Without Hitler, there would have been no Third Reich, no World War II, and no Holocaust, or at least not in the form that these calamitous events took.”    (page 3)

o As for Hermann Göring, he “portrayed himself as an honourable soldier, but what his conduct and behavior portrayed was a cynical perversion of soldiery values and behaviour. His brutality, revealed in moments such as the the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, his self-aggrandizement, his ruthless ambition, his indifference to human suffering, his contempt for the normal decencies of human behavior — this and much more prompted some, like the prison psychologist Gustave Gilt to brand him a psychopath. But putting everything down to individual pathology is too simple. It was only in the twisted moral universe of the Third Reich that such a man could rise almost to the very summit of power.” (Page 131)

o Richard J. Evans concludes with these assertions: “Only by situating the biographies of the individual Nazi perpetrators., with all their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. in these larger contexts, can we begin to understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influence. By doing this, we can perhaps start to recognize the threats that democracy and the assertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter them.” (Page 170)

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the seminal volumes in Evans’ “Third Reich Trilogy”: The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), The Third Reich in Power (2005), and The Third Reich at War (2008).