Evans uses a biographical approach. The author not only focuses on Hitler but also provides concise biographies of 21 individuals in his circle, including key figures such as Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels; “enforcers” such as Heydrich and Eichmann; and those who served as “tools,” such as filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
Evans excuses no one, including Albert Speer, who “somehow persuaded the judges at ... Nuremberg after the war that he had been unaware of Nazism’s crimes.” Evans adds that Speer, who postured in his memoirs as an “apolitical architect,” supplied “a persuasive excuse for millions of Germans who had lived under the Third Reich.”
“To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him.”
The rogues’ gallery of individuals in “Hitler’s People” broke every “moral rule” to serve Hitler and behaved, in Hayek’s words, “completely unprincipled and literally capable of everything.”
“Evildoing,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “also has a threshold magnitude.” He continued:
“Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope.
“But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.”
In his historical research, Evans analyzes primary sources to reveal how the unthinkable occurred and what we can learn from the normalization of “perverted morality.”
Evans is clear about why we must learn: Hitler’s people “were not psychopaths; nor were they deranged, or perverted, or insane.”
Evans continues, “Apart from flying in the face of the evidence, thinking of them as depraved, deviant, or degenerate puts them outside the bounds of normal humanity and so serves as a form of exculpation for the rest of us, past, present and future.”
Hitler’s people were not those “who existed on the margins of society, or grew up beyond the social mainstream.”
“In most of their life, they were completely normal by the standards of the day,” he wrote. “[They] shared the conventional cultural attributes of the German bourgeoisie, were well-read, or played a musical instrument with some proficiency, or painted, or wrote fiction or poetry.”
If you want a historian who places all the blame on Hitler, you won’t find it in Evans.
“German institutions and traditions and, more generally, the German people themselves” are examined and found responsible. Hitler did not merely “seduce people into following him: it was his followers who inspired him to lead them.”
He observes, “Nearly all Germans had the opportunity to observe for themselves the murderous violence of the Nazis, or to learn about the mass shootings and gassings of the Jews at Auschwitz and elsewhere from reports sent home by soldiers from the Eastern Front, or brought back to Germany by soldiers on leave.”
That said, Evans’s views are nuanced. He does not claim “that exterminatory antisemitism, subservience to authority, lust for conquest, militarism and similar characteristics, were hard-wired into the Germans’ sense of national identity.”
He writes, “Surveillance and control ... was exercised not just by the Gestapo but, more importantly, by officials such as the ‘Block Wardens,’ more than two million of whom were supervising their respective street blocks.”
Importantly, Evans concludes, “The Nazi regime was not a dictatorship produced and sustained by popular endorsement.”
Evans writes that “overcoming seemingly unbridgeable political, economic and social divisions and antagonisms by creating a genuine, unitary people’s community” was Hitler’s promise. Of course, Jews were excluded, but the point is chilling. In times of crisis, when people are not united around constitutional principles that enable human flourishing, totalitarian demagogues will fill the void.
Hatred fueled the Nazis and destroyed Germany. Hatred will destroy any nation that doesn’t heed the lessons of history. “Hitler’s People” is highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn why.
