Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Röhm, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The roll-call is still grimly familiar some 80 years on from this motley and deeply unsavoury crew’s heyday. And I have to confess to a disquieting familiarity with these monsters’ lives as I spent many months in 2000 and 2001 researching and writing a six-hour TV drama series about Hitler’s astonishing rise to power over the years between 1913-33 – an unparalleled transformation from a homeless, mentally unstable, penniless vagrant in Vienna to the all-powerful chancellor of Germany in Berlin. I have shelves full of memoirs, histories, diaries and biographies of all the key Nazi players. The series was commissioned by the BBC and 20th Century Fox but was never made (Fox lost its nerve), but its conception – it wasn’t based on any book – absorbed and educated me in the history of the Third Reich and its noxious denizens. So, to open Hitler’s People was to renew acquaintances I thought I had left far behind. Scales fell from my eyes.
The premise behind Richard J Evans’s utterly absorbing book is that a biographical approach to the history of the Third Reich will tell us more about the perverse culture and power struggles of those key personages who made up Hitler’s inner circle – and whose influence extended further down the food chain – than the overarching, geopolitical historical studies would. He presents us with 22 short biographies, or “portraits”, of the players he considers as crucial. They are congregated under four headings: the Leader, the Paladins, the Enforcers, and the Instruments. The result is an extraordinary rogues’ gallery of the Nazi elite and its more menial jobsworths. Intriguingly, although the Nazi programme was overwhelmingly male-driven, Evans identifies similarly enthusiastic cruelty among women in the lower ranks: Ilse Koch, Irma Grese and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink are among those he includes under the “Instruments” rubric. This top-to-toe analysis is as shocking as it is surprising.
Evans is a magisterial presence in the history of Hitler’s Third Reich. His three influential books – The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at War – make him pre-eminently suited to assess the significant personalities in the court of Adolf Hitler and, of course, Der Führer, himself, the “Boss”.
Evans starts his brilliant hundred-page biography of Hitler with the sentence: “For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody.” Here lies the utterly compelling paradox. As Evans reminds us, without Hitler there would have been no Third Reich, no Second World War and no Holocaust. How could this deranged young man, selling his mediocre postcards in 1913 Vienna, wearing a yellow cycling cape that failed to disguise his rank body odour, end up as chancellor of Germany 20 years later and, through his crazed ambitions, have plunged the Western world into war and brought about the deaths of millions of people?
There are many possible answers and Evans judiciously analyses all the more recent historical interpretations. We know far more about Nazi Germany today than ever before. The catastrophe and humiliation of the 1918 Armistice; the revolutionary movements and social unrest that then ensued in Germany; the debilitating depression that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash are all useful pieces of evidence that might explain the rise of the Nazi party (the highest vote the Nazis ever achieved was 37 per cent in the 1932 elections) and its drawn-out, bloody, disastrous denouement. But it seems to me that Evans’s biographical approach to understanding this phenomenon is perhaps the new route to some sort of enlightenment.
Of all the “Paladins” that Evans examines, the one that fascinates me most – and who played a significant role in my doomed TV series – is Albert Speer. Speer – tall, handsome, cultured, educated – was an architect, and the youngest member of the Nazi inner circle, only 40 years old at the end of the war. Hitler saw him as a putative son and Speer returned the “love”. It was Speer who first articulated the power of Führerkontakt – that bizarre charisma that Hitler, the most insignificant and undistinguished of men, seemed to possess in his pomp. Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, an urbane, sophisticated American-German who was briefly a kind of PR official to the embryonic Nazi party in the 1920s described Hitler as having all the allure of a “suburban hairdresser on his day off”. And yet Hitler’s singular presence to his acolytes, and the German population, miraculously grew as his power grew. It seemed almost messianic – and he knew absolutely how to cultivate it.
Hitler promoted Speer to become the minister of armaments and munitions in 1942, supervising a vast population of forced labour of some 14 million, which kept the Nazi war machine working to its best ability. Hundreds of thousands of slave-labourers died under Speer’s watch yet, at his trial in Nuremberg after the war, he claimed to be ignorant of every aspect of the Nazi’s ruthless extermination process.
Speer’s “get-out-of-jail” ruse was to assert that, at the very end of the war, he had tried to gas Hitler in the bunker, and those in the bunker with him, and bring about an end to the conflict. Ironies abound – gassing Hitler? He failed, he said, because the ventilation towers of the bunker were too high. However, Speer’s intellectual, classy, soigné manner was persuasive in court. He wasn’t to be executed – he was sentenced instead to 20 years imprisonment. Another brutal irony – Speer’s number two, Fritz Sauckel, was executed for the crimes Speer’s organisation committed. Speer’s incarceration ended in 1966 and his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, became a bestseller and made its author an international celebrity, continually interviewed about his unique familiarity with the Hitlerian court. He spun his story extremely well. Speer died in 1981, after having a stroke in a London hotel while on a visit to his mistress.
Evans is unsparing about Speer, calling him out as a clever, manipulating, unscrupulous liar who finessed his way to avoid his justified execution as one of the mass murderers of the Nazi regime. However, his portraits of the other significant figures in the Hitler entourage are far more nuanced. Evans rejects the knee-jerk depiction of Himmler, Göring and Goebbels, et al, as sociopaths, deviants and losers. His short biographies weigh up all the new evidence and present these ghoulish, mythic personas as rounded, three-dimensional figures. They were, by and large, middle class, and from normal, happy families. They had clearly delineated personalities. Röhm was an accomplished pianist; Goebbels had earned a doctorate; Göring was an enthusiastic if erratic art collector. But all of them owed their ascent to power to one man, Adolf Hitler.
So what about the “Boss”? Evans says that, despite the mass of new material about Hitler, “opinion among historians and biographers remains deeply divided”. But it is clear that this ordinary, disturbed man was transmogrified into a sort of semi-deity that the German populace readily identified with. Evans argues that:
“Constant adulation further corrupted Hitler’s already narcissistic mentality. His arrogance and overconfidence, based on crude racial stereotypes, led him into fatal misjudgements during the war. The Americans, he declared, were “as stupid as chickens”. “The Russian colossus is collapsing under its immobility”. The “English” were “decadent”… From the very beginning, misled by the memory of World War I, Hitler grotesquely overestimated the ability of Germany, a medium-sized European power, to confront and defeat three vast empires, the British, American and Soviet, any one of which possessed resources that far exceeded its own. But for Hitler, economic statistics were irrelevant: what counted in his mind was strength of will, a reflection above all of what he supposed to be the Germans’ racial superiority.”
My conclusion, after spending many months reading and writing about Hitler and his “people”, was that the most cogent interpretation of his behaviour and abhorrent values, from the outset of his rise to power, was that he was insane. This was to be the message of my aborted TV series. “Deluded”, “narcissistic”, “egomaniacal” – similar interpretations don’t do enough to explain his actions. To me, Hitler’s fraught endgame in the bunker in April 1945 was the moment the veils were stripped away. The rambling, thought-disordered, drug-abusing, Parkinson’s-diseased, weirdo-nutter was, writ large, the man he had always been.
Martin Amis, in the afterword to his 2014 novel about the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest, would appear to agree with me. He wrote about Hitler that “we are continuing to beg an enormous question: the question of sanity… And madness, if we impute it (and how can we exclude it?) is bound to frustrate our investigation – because of course we will get no coherence, and no legible why, from the mad.” If you only read one book about Hitler and the short, bleak, horrendous life of Nazi Germany, then this is the one for you. Richard Evans’s superb and important account – with its dark and chilling narrative of Hitler’s eagerly compliant associates, underlings, servants and enforcers – establishes that evil, apocalyptic regime as the most potent warning to our contemporary world.
William Boyd’s novel, “Gabriel’s Moon”, is out 5 September
Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich
Richard J Evans
Allen Lane, 624pp, £35
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[See also: The scandal that rocked the London art world]
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This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback