When I grew up, the story I was told about the country I had been born into was that the Nazis had ruled it until 1945, causing terrible destruction and murder on the largest possible scales — and then they were gone. They had not merely stopped being in power: they were literally gone. At least that was the story. Nobody had had any involvement with the Nazis. In fact nobody had known anything.
For example, the next-door neighbour who would spend all day looking out of the window, glaring at everyone and everything in his view, and who, or so I was told, had a metal plate in his head was just to be left alone. That neighbour might have been the closest I have ever come to meeting an actual former Nazi.
But then who knows whether he had been one. He might have simply done his duty like many Germans. That explanation was offered when someone found himself in the position that he was unable to explain away his presence in the Nazis’ murderous machinery (such as the Chancellor who had been an artillery officer and who had just done that: his duty). And who knows how many former Nazis I met without realizing in whose presence I was.
Already when I was very young, I found all of this very fishy, especially given how the lack of knowledge or responsibility was applied in a very selective fashion. The same very competent people who clearly knew how to go about their lives and jobs turned into the complete opposite any time the Nazi era was brought up.
It wasn’t even so much that I was curious about the Nazis per se. I was not and still am not particularly interested in the lives of strangers. And yet, there have always been those nagging questions for me: why had they done what they had done? How was this even possible? The crimes committed by Nazi Germany were so monstrous that it was inconceivable to me how anyone would be willing to take part in them, however small or large their role might have been.
Over the course of the past thirty years, historical research produced many findings that confirmed that my suspicions had in fact been correct: Many people had known, and many people had played their parts. Most of them had managed to evade being held responsible for what they had done or what they had contributed to.
With Hitler’s People, historian Richard J. Evans dives yet again into the Nazi era, this time to look into its most well known and a number of lesser known characters. “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories,” he writes, ” can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime, and, by doing so, perhaps learn some lessons for the troubled era in which we live.” (p. xii)
Evans starts from the very top, Hitler himself, and makes his way down to smaller and smaller characters, even as their depravity and crimes do not in fact get much smaller. For example on page 375, we encounter Karl Brandt, the physician responsible for Aktion T-4, the organized murder of people deemed to have lives not worth living. In the end, up to 200,00 people suffering from various types of mental illness or with conditions such as cerebral palsy had been killed.
Brandt was an easy person to understand and detest: in Evans’ description, he struck me as a sociopath (Evans would probably disagree with this assessment. And yet, he wrote “What was striking about Brandt’s behaviour when observing the murders was his absolute lack of compassion.” — p. 380). If Nazi Germany’s leadership and perpetrators had been composed of sociopaths, that at least would offer some explanation (however disturbing it would be).
But in Hitler’s People, Brandt is an exception. What’s striking is how many of the people described by Evans came from rather prosaic middle-class (or lower middle-class) backgrounds. There are themes emerging here and there, such as shock over Germany’s loss in World War I, which appeared to have pushed many in the direction of radical right-wing politics.
Maybe the most insightful comment by Evans comes towards the back, in which he discusses Brandt and others. “The Nazi regime itself,” he writes, “beginning at the very top, created a moral milieu in which hyper-masculine ideas of toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism — all positive terms in the language of the Third Reich — encouraged the maltreatment and dehumanization of people excluded from the national community and treated as helpless and weak” (p. 398).
This is a stunning realization, especially given how Germany has prided itself for hundreds of years as the land of the poets and thinkers. Whatever you want to make of the particular circumstances of how World War 1 and the Weimar Republic conspired to create the circumstances that would result in Nazi Germany, it still is quite the jump from poets and thinkers turning into people addicted to “toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” — unless, of course, “toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” had been brewing underneath the surface all along.
Which obviously they had — and still are (and not just in Germany).
Having read Evans’ masterful Hitler’s People, I don’t think that I need to dive into another book to look for more answers. This book provided me with a lot of information and insight, and yet my questions mostly remained. None of it is the historian’s fault: what it comes down to is that I was and still am looking for clarity where none can be had.
I’m now convinced that I could reads hundreds of additional books about Nazi Germany, and I would still not be able to grasp how or why people contributed to it.
What I’m left with, instead, is a renewed sense of responsibility for, to re-quote Evans, “the troubled era in which we live”.
Summing up the individuals he portrayed, Evans writes that “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.” (p. 461, my emphasis)
Hannah Ahrendt had expressed this idea in a different form decades ago, which created a huge backlash. It would seem that we want to see monsters where they are none. Or rather: given the right circumstances, we can become monsters.
Maybe the most stunning chapter in the book is the very last one, the epilogue, in which Evans remembers meeting an anonymous elderly woman on a train ride to the Netherlands. As it turned out, she had left Nazi Germany early on because she wanted to have no part in what was unfolding in front of her. She went to Denmark, married someone there, and started her life away from the country she had been born into.
Of all the people portrayed in the book, that anonymous woman is the only one who had understood and accepted the moral choices presented to her. Everybody else had either just gone along or actively contributed — and then laying all the blame on Hitler once everything had come crashing down.
Highly recommended.
Richard J. Evans: Hitler’s People — The Faces of the Third Reich; 624 pages; Penguin Press; 2024