Humanly Evil

Richard Evans's new book is useful touchpoint

“I’m only saying, the Jew has to go. I can’t help it if he is broken in the process, I only see one thing: absolute extermination.”

—Adolph Hitler, January 25, 1942

In recent years, my work has taken a biographical turn. Back in 2007, I made a rare foray into trade publishing with Imperfect Presidents, a set of profiles about American heads of state who made mistakes and recovered from them. But that was it until Bridge & Tunnel Boys, which looked at the careers of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen, was published last year. Of late I’ve been sketching biographical portraits for a couple of upcoming projects, and so have been on the lookout for such books as useful background reading. Which is how I came across Richard Evans’s Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich.

It's a choice that’s generated a fair amount of commentary. I was probably asked “A little light reading?” a half-dozen times while walking around with this book. Perhaps that’s unsurprising given not only the title but the fact that it’s a 600-page tome with a dramatic red, white, and black cover. But as someone who usually likes and admires his subjects, I was interested in portrayals of evil. Evans is a commanding portraitist.

Which is interesting, because it’s a role he’s resisted. Evans is the author of a magisterial three-volume history of the Nazi regime, and he—like much recent scholarship on the Third Reich—has moved away from leadership of the regime to focus more on the social, political, and ideological forces that made it possible. But as he notes in his preface, a trove of new material, as well as “the emergence in our own time of a class of unscrupulous populist politicians who do not care whether what they are saying is true, and the massive growth of the internet and social media, have fostered a much more widespread uncertainty about truth, coupled with a disdain for evidence-based arguments and the work of scholars and experts.” And so it is that he has returned to the role of personality in the Age of Trump.

The book is divided into four sections. The first, a 100-page sketch of the Führer himself, synthesizes existing scholarship. It’s followed by some two-dozen sketches of Nazis categorized as “Paladins,” “Enforcers” and “Instruments,” most of whom are men, but this last section is populated by a number of women. (As Evans notes, “The fact that the Third Reich was, at every level, even more male-supremacist than the society that gave rise to it did not mean that men were simply perpetrators and women simply victims.”) Each of the profiles, which run an average of 12-15 pages, traces their subjects’ backgrounds, roles in the regime, and postwar stance to it (when they survived).

Interpretively speaking, Hitler’s People does two things. The first is to challenge tendencies to caricature these figures—Gestapo founder Hermann Göring as a comically preening pseudo-aristocrat, for example, or propagandist Joseph Goebbels as a mindless toady. Evans challenges the common perception of Hitler as a sexless deviant by noting a series of heterosexual relationships in his lifetime and the fact that he regularly socialized with his associates. The second is to emphasize the degree to which most of these people had to exhibit uncommon intelligence and ambition to achieve the positions they did in a highly competitive regime. “Nazism was not the ideology of the uneducated or unsuccessful,” he notes.

Not that he’s an apologist for them. Evans exposes the longtime myth around Nazi architect Albert Speer, who portrayed himself—and was widely accepted as—oblivious to the genocide that surrounded him, which is belied by a recently discovered documentary record that proves he was a conscious and active agent of it. We also get revealing looks at figures like Labour Front leader Robert Ley, hardly known today but a key figure in the machinery of the German government, and General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, whose slide into collusion was dispiritingly typical. The collective picture one gets here is a preponderance of figures for whom antisemitism was an opportunistic means of attaining power rather than a deeply avowed hatred, important exceptions like Jules Streicher, editor of the Der Stürmer notwithstanding. But that hardly absolves them.

Evans states at the outset that this book was motivated by rising fascist tendencies in the contemporary West. That’s understandable and legitimate. But the disgusting stream of racist invective that was part of the everyday lexicon of these people is a reminder that Donald Trump’s language and previous behavior, however appalling, is still a very long way from the everyday realities of Germany between 1920 and 1945. “We must annihilate the Jews wherever we come across them, and wherever it’s in any way possible, in order to uphold the whole framework of the Reich,” wrote Hans Frank, for whom such a statement was a factual description of his behavior as head of the General Government of occupied Poland. By all means, we should remain vigilant. But we should also try to maintain a sense of perspective. In that regard, Hitler’s People may be a useful, if grim, instrument.