Hitler's People

Reviews

[Richard J. Evans] argues persuasively that only by examining individual personalities can we understand ‘the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime… . His book is enriched by the findings of recent scholarship and his pen portraits have all the excitement of novelty. Even his depiction of Hitler feels fresh Evans has chronicled Nazi Germany before, but never with such urgency… His previous books, which include a masterful trilogy on the rise, rule, and destruction of the Nazi movement, are models of historical writing, a combination of narrative and exploration, scholarship for the sake of scholarship and yet volumes that are immensely readable, even novelistic in style… Hitler’s People is similar in its polish and power. But the motivation and purpose of this latest work, a sweeping examination of Adolf Hitler and his subalterns and subjects, is more utilitarian A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context... Evans has provided us with just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through Evans dispenses his judgments about how Nazism happened and developed in bite-sized, almost laconic, pieces attached to the short biographies. This has the effect of inviting the readers to draw some of their own lessons.... if Evans’s purpose is getting the reader to think about what is particular and what is universal about the descent of one of the world’s most “civilised” nations into genocidal barbarism, then I believe it succeeds A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition An important [and] 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. What drove Germany’s citizens and leaders to support a regime committed to war, genocide and dictatorship? Evans, a prominent historian of Nazism, tackles a question that remains even now a conundrum, seeking, through portraits of diverse Third Reich figures — including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Hitler himself as well as the architect Albert Speer and the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl — a common human denominator In his new book, Hitler’s People, Professor Richard Evans, leading Cambridge historian of modern Germany, complicates the picture. In a range of two dozen biographical portraits of prominent Nazis, drawn from his own deep learning and taking account of the latest research developments, Evans shows that the immediate post-war attempts to dismiss the Nazis as psychopaths and/or gangsters were comforting but wrong. Expand reviews