Hitler’s People — the lesser-known faces behind the rise of Nazism

In Hitler’s People, Richard J Evans is trying something new in what is not so much a packed field as an expanding galaxy of works on the Nazis. There are big histories, such as Evans’s own substantial three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy; there are major sociological works on aspects of Nazism; there are huge, celebrated studies of Hitler himself, including Ian Kershaw’s brilliant two-part work and, more recently, another two-parter from German historian Volker Ullrich. There are also plenty of biographies of Nazidom’s leading figures, notably German journalist Joachim Fest’s first book The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership.

What is unusual about Hitler’s People is that it represents a kind of synthesis in which Evans uses the lives of 24 Germans — not just the top leaders — to situate them “with all their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities” in the larger context of late 19th and 20th century German history, the better to “understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influence”. And thereby, naturally, to understand how threats to our democracy can, even now, develop from within.

The first 100 pages offer a concise and well-judged distillation of the much-biographised Führer’s life. Then we move on to the main satraps — Himmler, Göring and the biggest of the Nazi bigwigs such as Hess, the SA storm trooper leader Röhm and arch propagandist Goebbels. Part 3, “The Enforcers”, introduces a more polyglot assortment of senior Third Reich figures. Finally, in Part 4, we have what Evans, late of the University of Cambridge and now provost of Gresham College in London, calls “The Instruments”, the people who actually did the things that helped keep the Nazis in power.

Out of these lives, we do indeed see some patterns of background, behaviour and even psychology emerging. An obvious one is the brutishness that absolute power over other, ideologically despised human beings, can elicit. Two of Evans’ “instruments” are the notorious female concentration camp guards Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. A third is Paul Zapp, a literate, musical, mystical Hessian from a well-heeled family. He found it in himself in September 1941 to command a group that shot all 5,000 Jewish inhabitants of the Ukrainian town of Mykolayiv. After the war Zapp was put on trial, convicted and served 16 years in prison, before he was released for “good behaviour”.

The step from a bourgeois milieu of German nationalism and conservatism to the more radical form represented by the Nazis was only a short one

Interest in the occult is another theme. Deputy Führer Hess, party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg and the Reich’s leading Jew-baiter, Julius Streicher, were all students of the esoteric and spiritual — which is to say, they were all woo-merchants. Streicher has been described as a “brown Green”, one of what Evans calls “a host of writers [who] celebrated the Germans supposed rootedness in the forested landscape of medieval times [to] contrast it with the imagined urban ruthlessness of the Jews.”

Evans adds ominously: “These ideas had a particular appeal to German schoolteachers”. People wondering today at how some figures from the “wellness” industry have emerged first as anti-vaxxers and then moved to the far right might find parallels here.

Then there were the chancers — the amoral, ambitious people who saw an opportunity to advance and even to exert godlike powers in this new Nazi world. Evans has no time for the self-exculpations of the charming Albert Speer, who passed himself off to the postwar world as an apolitical architect — and lied about what he knew concerning both the “Final Solution” and the slave labourers who worked and died on his grandiose architectural and military projects.

Even more chilling is the evolution of the handsome young physician Karl Brandt from a man who tended the injuries of miners in the Ruhr, via becoming Hitler’s personal doctor, to the person most personally responsible for the enforced euthanasia programme — codenamed Aktion T4 — that killed hundreds of thousands of disabled children and adults.

Evans observes the god syndrome not only in Brandt, but in German medicine at the time. The confidence of the profession was immense, buoyed by its international reputation and pioneering successes in research and fighting diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis.

By the time second world war broke out, Evans tells us, half the students in German universities were studying medicine and well over half the universities were led by medical professors. And, he adds: “Brandt’s crimes were not the product of some individual pathology on his part. Quite the contrary: they reflected attitudes and beliefs that were common in the overwhelming majority of the medical profession in Germany.”

One thing that is notable in these biographies, Evans points out, is that apart from one baker’s son, all these figures “came overwhelmingly from a middle-class background; there was not a single manual labourer among them”. Even the gay street fighter Ernst Röhm, his face disfigured from wartime wounds, was the son of a railway inspector and had been educated at one of the best schools in Munich.  

This is not simply a product of Evans’s selection. There were, of course, working-class Nazis. But of those Nazis of any prominence, “most of them grew up socialized into a bourgeois milieu of strong German nationalism and conservatism; converts from Socialism or Communism or even conventional liberalism were rare in the extreme,” he writes. “The step from here to the more radical form of nationalism represented by the Nazis was only a short one.”

And because they had possessed more before the cataclysm of the first world war, they had also lost more. What they had in common, Evans writes, was the “shattering emotional experience of a sharp and shocking loss of status and self-worth at an early point of their lives . . . [and] Hitler offered them a way out of their feelings of inferiority”.

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. Personally, my shelves stuffed with big, opinionated tomes on the subject, including Daniel Goldhagen’s famous indictment of the Germans, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), I find this departure attractive. 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.

I found two lives of particular resonance, for very different reasons. One is that of Franz von Papen, the conservative and devout Catholic politician who helped open the door to Hitler in 1933. Von Papen is a case study in the way the reactionary can enable the fascist. A man who disparaged liberalism and democracy, von Papen became Hitler’s vice-chancellor in the belief that he could convert the Führer to monarchism. Evans deals with von Papen with a masterly and devastating precision. He was, says Evans, always “an enemy of democracy, a clerico-fascist”, who was never there when the human bill was being paid.

The second pertinent life, who brings up the tail in Hitler’s People, is an ordinary Hamburg schoolteacher called Luise Solmitz, born in 1889, whose diary, Evans writes, “is one of the most voluminous and detailed sources we have for everyday life in Germany in the first half of the 20th century”.

Solmitz is enamoured of Hitler’s vision for Germany before he takes power, and afterwards by his “personal courage . . . decisiveness and effectiveness”. So much so that she denounces her own brother to the authorities for his liberal tendencies. But she has another problem: her husband is Jewish, albeit a convert to Christianity. Soon Hitler’s race laws see the family facing a series of restrictions.

Nevertheless Solmitz shares in the exultation over Hitler’s victories in 1940. Five years later, with Germany destroyed and on the brink of defeat, the courageous and decisive Führer has turned into “the shabbiest failure in world history”. A bloody failure, she seems not to recognise, that her determined cognitive dissonance had in some small way helped sustain. Right now, it seems to me, when I look at social media, that it is awash with pre-regret Solmitzes.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans Allen Lane £35, 624 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen