Cover image of "Hitler’s People."

Remarkably, year after year, new books keep hitting the shelves about the Third Reich. After all, the whole misbegotten enterprise came to a bloody end nearly 80 years ago. Of course, some are mere knockoffs, rearranging what others have written in the past. But new primary sources keep appearing. Private diaries of Hitler’s henchmen. Long-lost letters. And new documentary sources from the voluminous and often untouched files of the regime. And Cambridge University emeritus professor of history Richard J. Evans has just come out with an extraordinary new book that delves into the lives and motivations of the people who worked to make Adolf Hitler’s demented dreams come true. It’s largely based on these newly available sources, much of it in the words of Hitler’s partners in crime themselves.

Portraits of the movers and shakers of the Third Reich

Hitler’s People spotlights the powerful men (and a few women) who played instrumental roles in the Third Reich. Beginning with Hitler himself, featuring his closest and most trusted aides, and continuing progressively down through the hierarchy of the regime to examine the lives of those in the middle ranks and then a little lower. Make no mistake, though. Even those in the fourth and lowest category were in some cases extraordinarily powerful, responsible for murder on a large scale. Anyone familiar with the history of the period will recognize many, if not most of the names, even in the lower ranks. But it’s likely any reader will find surprises in every one of the portraits (with the exception of Hitler’s itself). Evans is a consummate historian, and his use of fresh primary sources continually surprises.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans (2024) 624 pages ★★★★★

Photo of Hitler with his staff
Hitler poses with his staff in 1940. Some of the more prominent of these men—survivors of his rage—are featured in capsule biographies in Hitler’s People. Image: Wikipedia

Sometimes mixed motives to become Hitler’s partners in crime

For the overwhelming majority of those who turned early to Adolf Hitler and the nascent Nazi Party, the shock of their loss in the Great War loomed large. That theme recurs again and again. The humiliation they felt was a major factor, and in many cases the principal factor, for their attraction to Adolf Hitler in the first place. After all, he offered an active and aggressive response to the failure of the Kaiser’s general staff to admit that they had, in fact, lost the last war on the ground. Their forward momentum had been spent, and their troops were deserting. But, Instead of feeling sorry for themselves, they could strike out against their imagined enemies, Jews most prominent among them, and all would eventually be rightside up again. That logic was faulty, of course, but none could see it. And the early followers of Der Führer shared that constellation of twisted beliefs in every respect.

However, some, even many, joined the Nazis out of sheer opportunism, and that motive may well have outweighed their attraction (or their indifference) to Hitler as a person and to his ideology. Evans deals adroitly with these distinctions and the changes over time. But for surprisingly few was there any significant shift in their loyalty to Hitler even as the war dragged on and defeat loomed ever so surely in the near future. With only a single exception, none of those profiled in this book expressed any reservations about the rightness of the Nazi cause even after May 1945. All went to trial unrepentant, at the very least begging off as (to use the cliché) “just following orders.”

The generals were a different story

It was different for the generals, however. Nearly to a man, they stood out as exceptions. After all, nearly every one of them had been born in the 19th century and were in middle or old age in World War II, and a great many had attained high rank in the First World War. They were the Kaiser’s men, Prussian aristocrats nearly to a man. Many lost faith in Hitler not long after the Nazis’s successful conquest of Western Europe. The overwhelming majority of the general staff joined them after it became clear that Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—began to stall. Nearly all the rest grew livid when Hitler took operational command of the army in December 1941, as his forces came up short against a fierce Soviet counteroffensive outside Moscow.

There are surprises throughout Hitler’s People. It’s a wonderful addition to the credible literature about the Third Reich. I can’t recommend it more highly.

About the author

Photo of Richard Evans, author
Richard J. Evans. Image: Financial Times

Richard J. Evans is the author of more than two dozen books of 19th and 20th century European history, most of which focus on Germany and especially on the Third Reich. He was a Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until he retired in 2014. Since then he has held other prestigious academic posts. He has won innumerable honors for his work and was knighted for his services to scholarship. Evans was born of a Welsh family in Essex and earned an MA and Phil from the University of Oxford.

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