At the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, many psychiatrists attributed the crimes of the top echelon of Nazis to their pathological personalities. Other commentators viewed them as a criminal gang.
More persuasive, according to Richard Evans, a professor of history at Cambridge University, preeminent chronicler of modern Germany and principal expert witness at the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial in London, “is a conceptualization of Nazi leadership as a kind of imperial court,” in which leaders vied for the supreme leader’s favor.
In Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, Evans – whose books include In Hitler’s Shadow, Lying About Hitler, and a three-volume history of the Third Reich – provides detailed biographies of the Führer and two dozen of his “paladins” (including Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler) and less well-known “enforcers” and “instruments” to help us understand what motivated them to commit unspeakable atrocities.
A masterful work of history, Hitler’s People is especially relevant at a time in which popular support for democracy is waning and ethnic and racial hatred is rising.
Who were the Nazis?
Nazi perpetrators, Evans demonstrates, were mostly male, drawn predominantly from Germany’s middle classes, former soldiers, Protestant denominations, and rural areas, crossing two generations. For most of their lives, these people had stayed within the bounds of normal behavior. To brand them deranged or perverted, gangsters or hoodlums, Evans suggests, “serves as a form of exculpation” for them and everyone else.
The Nazis shared a set of experiences – Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I; hyperinflation, economic austerity, and the threat of communism during the Weimar Republic; and the Great Depression – which resulted in a loss of professional opportunities, status, and self-worth. Drawing on nationalistic, anti-democratic, and antisemitic convictions already embedded in Germany’s culture, Adolf Hitler offered Germans “a way out of their feelings of inferiority,” humiliation, and despair by linking their fate and the nation’s fate to the creation of a homogeneous, prosperous, and powerful “people’s community.” In return, this meant subservience to authority and a vast apparatus of surveillance and control. Dehumanizing whole categories of people, Evans writes, “including the mentally ill and handicapped, Slavs, Gypsies, petty criminals, the ‘asocial,’ the ‘work shy,’ and, above all, Jews, the Nazi regime created a framework that encouraged and legitimized acts of murder, sadism, and torture, unimaginable in other circumstances.”
Nazi perpetrators “had choices,” Evans emphasizes; none of them was forced to surrender their moral autonomy to Hitler. The tiny number of men who refused to take part in mass killings were rarely imprisoned, let alone executed. And after 1945, perpetrators did not find it difficult to return to normal moral values and behavior.
Evans also documents the breadth and depth of antisemitism in pre-Third Reich Germany. Many army and navy officers, he indicates, were receptive to “blame the Jews” appeals well before Hitler appeared on the scene, while the medical profession was training doctors, including Karl Brandt, who served as Hitler’s personal physician and administered the Nazi Euthanasia Program, in what became known as “racial hygiene.”
Between 1919 and 1923, Alfred Rosenberg, who became the Nazi Party’s chief theorist, proponent of Aryan supremacy, and popularizer of the term Untermensch, wrote seven books and 13 articles bearing witness to his “obsessive, monomaniacal antisemitism.” Rosenberg attached himself to the Nazi Party, Evans writes, not because he needed confirmation of his antisemitic views but because he concluded that Hitler was best equipped to implement them.
Julius Streicher, publisher of the violently antisemitic weekly newspaper Der Stürmer, “was suffused with a deep hatred of Jews well before he met Hitler.” Heinrich Himmler, who became head of the SS and an architect of the Holocaust, joined the fledging Nazi Party before he met Hitler.
Hans Frank, who became the party’s top courtroom lawyer and then “The Butcher of Poland,” came to Nazism through the Thule Society, a group founded in 1919 to disseminate antisemitic conspiracy theories.
At the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Evans reminds us that Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Third Reich’s Security Service, who had been authorized by Hermann Göring to prepare “a total solution of the Jewish question,” told participants they must overcome difficulties and delays and exterminate all Jews on the continent. Adolf Eichmann prepared the Wannsee Conference minutes, listing the number of Jews residing in virtually every country in Europe but leaving out what he later characterized as “certain over-plain talk” about killing and physical annihilation.
There can be no doubt, then, that the Nazis knew they were violating the most fundamental of moral norms. Indeed, in a grotesque display of special pleading, Himmler told SS officers that a “difficult decision had to be taken, without suffering damage in spirit and soul, to prevent Jewish children from growing up, and taking revenge on our sons and grandsons” and imperiling Germany’s racial future.
Nonetheless, after Germany surrendered, Evans points out, Göring insisted that the Nazis’ hatred of Jews had been an electoral ploy; he had no knowledge of the Holocaust, which he blamed on Goebbels, and antisemitism had played “no part” in his life.
Convicted and sentenced to be hanged, Göring committed suicide.
He was cremated along with other war criminals in an oven at the Dachau concentration camp, which he had established in 1933, his ashes scattered in a nearby stream.
Like his fellow Nazis, Evans concludes, Göring portrayed himself as an honorable man but was, in fact, brutal, self-aggrandizing, vain, corrupt, and indifferent to human suffering and human decency.
“But,” writes Evans, “putting everything down to individual pathology was too simple. It was only in the twisted moral universe of the Third Reich that such a man could rise almost to the summit of power.”
Glenn C. Altschuler is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
- HITLER’S PEOPLE: THE FACES OF THE THIRD REICH
- By Richard J. Evans
- Penguin Press
- 640 pages; $35