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.
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