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Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading experts on Nazi Germany, and the author of the definitive three-volume account of German history from 1918 to 1945. A professor emeritus of history at Cambridge, Evans has just released his latest book, “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich,” an examination of the lives of individual Nazis, from leaders, such as Himmler and Goebbels, to lower-level servants of the regime.
I read Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich in 2016, between Donald Trump’s election victory and his Inauguration, out of some combination of morbid anxiety and perhaps the need to be reminded that things could always be much worse than they seemed at the time. And indeed, in the introduction to this latest book, he asks, “How do we explain the rise and triumph of tyrants and charlatans?” and makes clear that the project was motivated by a desire to understand the rise of right-wing politicians across the world during the past decade.
I recently spoke by phone with Evans. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different ways in which historians have tried to make sense of Hitler’s personality, how changing trends in German history have altered our understanding of the Nazis, and why many of Hitler’s closest associates have been misunderstood.
You say in the book that the idea for it arose in part because of new scholarship on the Nazis that’s come out since you finished your trilogy. What was that new scholarship, and why did it make you think that you wanted to do this?
Well, there was some real resistance against biographies, especially among German historians, up to around the turn of the century. Obviously, the great-man theory of history, the cult of the individual under Nazism, all of that made the idea of taking a biographical approach rather unfashionable. After I’d written my three-volume narrative history of the Nazi movement and the Third Reich, I moved on to other subjects. But involvement in a couple of television series which took a biographical approach made me realize that, despite all my work, I didn’t actually know a lot of the leading figures, not to mention others further down the chain of command in the Nazi movement. And in the meantime, historians had got much less allergic to the idea of biography, so a whole raft of biographies had appeared.
Notably, of course, there was Ian Kershaw’s wonderful two-volume biography of Hitler. But also a terrific biography of Ernst Röhm by Eleanor Hancock, biographies of Goebbels and Himmler by Peter Longerich, and a whole series of others, concluding with Volker Ullrich’s big, German, two-volume biography of Hitler, which added more detail to Kershaw. And on top of that there were also a lot of new documents, amazingly actually. You’d think everything had been released, but that was not true at all. So, thirty-two volumes of Goebbels’s diaries. Himmler’s appointments book came out in two volumes, with the second volume only a couple of years ago, after it had been discovered in an obscure Russian archive. I wrote a biography of Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, just a few years ago, so that also made me interested in writing biographies, and in biographical approaches to Nazism.
You said there was some skepticism about the idea of biography and the great-man theory of history from Germans. I know there had been some German biographies of Hitler, like the famous one by Joachim Fest, in the early nineteen-seventies. But you’re saying that because of the experience of Nazism, there was some resistance to pursuing biographies within Germany of the leading Nazi figures?
That’s right. Joachim Fest was a conservative journalist, not an academic historian, and he produced this book which was one of the first general histories of Nazism, in 1970, called “The Face of the Third Reich,” which did actually base itself on biographical chapters of leading Nazis, and a few representative figures. And nothing like that had been done since. And so, in a way, my book is based on Fest’s book, which is why I subtitled it “The Faces of the Third Reich.” But of course we know vastly more now than Fest did. And as I said, the real turning point came at the turn of the century—so fairly recently.
The turning point of more people willing to engage with this in Germany, you mean?
That’s right. When I began working on modern German history, the leading historians in Germany at the time, people like Hans-Ulrich Wehler, had this wonderful phrase of condemnation for people who took the biographical approach, which was “personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung,” meaning “personalizing historiography.” And indeed, the great classic works of modern history produced in the eighties and nineties had hardly any people in them at all, and certainly did not use quotations from individuals. They took a much more lofty approach, and used social-science approaches, and functionalist sociology in particular. We’ve moved away from that.
This is interesting because it’s not obvious that that would be the German response to the crimes of the Third Reich. You could have easily said, “Well, if you’re a country that perpetrated this, you want to blame it on the personalities of a few deranged individuals rather than looking for broader approaches.”