Nonfiction Corner: His Trilogy Explored the Nazi Era. Now He Looks at the People Behind It

Jennifer Szalai

“Who Goes Nazi?” is an old essay by Dorothy Thompson that has been making the rounds over the last several years. Writing for Harper’s Magazine in 1941, Thompson suggested playing a “macabre parlor game” to figure out who would sign on to fascism “in a showdown.” (This was before the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, where Hitler’s underlings planned the “final solution.”) Decades later, Thompson’s proposal resonated with Americans who were seeking any glimmer of insight into how far-right extremism — once the marginal purview of dedicated fanatics — had gathered startling levels of popular support.

For Thompson (one of the first American journalists to be kicked out of Germany, in 1934), the crucial factor distinguishing potential fascists from those who would “never go Nazi” was not “race, color, creed or social condition.” Rather, she argued, it was “something in them.”

Such a fixation on individual character would probably irritate the eminent historian Richard J. Evans, but the question he poses in his kaleidoscopic new book, “Hitler’s People,” isn’t so different from the one that preoccupied Thompson. “Who were the Nazis?” he asks in the first sentence of his preface. Were they criminals? Psychopaths? Ordinary Germans? How did seemingly respectable citizens go from rejecting the democracy of the Weimar Republic to countenancing genocide?

Evans, whose trilogy on the Third Reich has been justifiably lauded for its elegance and its scope, previously shied away from a biographical approach to his subject. For a half-century after World War II, focusing on individual personalities was deemed “unfashionable,” he writes, an unseemly reprise of Nazi Germany’s cult of personality, which pinned so much on Hitler that it risked letting “the great mass of Germans” off the hook. But the availability of new documents, as well as the “emergence in our own time of a class of unscrupulous populist politicians,” prompted Evans to revisit a history he already knew well.

The result is a fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context. “Hitler’s People” is divided into four parts, beginning with a long section on Hitler himself, before turning to his immediate circle (the “Paladins”), the “enablers and executors” they relied on (the “Enforcers”) and, finally, the “lower-level perpetrators,” or “Instruments,” who served the regime.

Given the number of excellent biographies that have inspected every crevice of Hitler’s personality, Evans’s portrait of the Führer turns out to be the least surprising part of this book. Hitler, he says, was undeniably a singular figure — an opportunist and also an ideologue, a committed antisemite who nevertheless knew how to dial down the antisemitic ranting when it wouldn’t play well with an audience. His speeches were a form of theater, mixing frenzied declamations with long pauses that captivated a room. The other people featured in Evans’s book would swoon over Hitler’s energy and charisma.

But Hitler was “neither a political nor a military genius,” Evans writes. “He had the good fortune to enter politics at a time when public speaking, live and before vast crowds, enjoyed its greatest potency.” Hitler also benefited from the suffering caused by World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, which was later compounded by the economic calamity of the Depression. For some Germans, he was “merely the vehicle” for their fantasies of social order and national greatness. Hitler was a hateful demagogue who happened to arrive at the right place and the right time to seize power.

Larger questions of time and place come up for Evans again and again, even as he hews closely to the specific personalities and experiences of the people he writes about. There are obvious differences among them. Some, like Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, and the Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg, were already vicious, “visceral” antisemites when they joined the movement; others, like Hermann Göring, initially exhibited the kind of antisemitism that Evans calls “perfunctory and conventional.” Heinrich Himmler “did not have a lifelong obsession with the imaginary threat posed to the ‘Aryan’ race by the Jews,” but he was virulently homophobic. As one of the architects of the final solution, Himmler kept pushing Hitler to expand the scope of the Holocaust.

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.

Von Papen’s “snobbery and social arrogance, in other words, self-confessedly blinded him to the possibility that a socially inferior individual such as Hitler could outmaneuver him,” Evans writes. After the Holocaust, von Papen insisted he had nobly acted as the sober adult in the room, making the preposterous claim that he had worked hard “to keep the anti-Jewish excesses of the Nazis within bounds.”

“Hitler’s People” is an unexpected book for Evans, and not only because of its biographical focus. In January 2021, not long after the rampage on the Capitol, in which Donald Trump’s supporters tried to overturn the election, Evans wrote an article criticizing those who argued that the history of fascism offered insights into what was taking place in the United States. “You can’t win the political battles of the present,” he admonished, “if you’re always stuck in the past.”

Evans ends his new book with a sentiment that is not necessarily a reversal, though it does seem like something of a departure. It is only by understanding “how Nazism exerted its baleful influence,” he writes, that “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.” I take this to be a plea for fewer polemics and more thinking. With “Hitler’s People,” Evans has provided us with just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.