ResoluteReader: Richard J. Evans - Hitler's People: The faces of the Third Reich

In his preface to Hitler's People noted historian Richard J. Evans asks, "Who were the Nazis?" What motivated them, and why did people follow them? Most importantly perhaps, he asks "What made otherwise normal people carry out, or approve, terrible and murderous atrocities against Nazism's real and supposed enemies?" This is not just a historical question for Evans. He argues that such questions have "gained new urgency and importance" as democracy is once again under threat from "strongmen and would-be dictators".

Understanding fascism in general, and Nazism in particular, benefits from a detailed study of history, and as the far-right and fascists gain ground, Evans is write to draw parallels to try and understand what is happening today. So how does Hitler's People do this?

Evans begins with a good, and lengthy, account of Hitler's own life, particularly his rise to power. In this he dismisses simplistic and crude reasoning behind his dictatorial policies. He concludes that it was "Hiter's ideological obsessions that provided the essential foundation for everything that happened in the Nazi movement and the Third Reich". Importantly this was not just Hitler's antisemitism. The Nazi leader's obsession with the "stab in the back" narrative, his hatred of the German Revolution and Communist politics and his racist beliefs in German "race" supremacy, directed his activity. But he could not have done it without "a close circle of immediate subordinates to sustain him, bolster his public image, boost his self-confidence and carry out his ideological programme."

The first section of the book looks at the closest of these, figures like Goring, Himmler, Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg. Later sections look at lower levels of the Nazi machine and government - from those who planned the Holocaust, to Generals and individual figures who ran the Concentration Camps. There are many similarities. Many of the figures, including key Nazi leaders, had authoritarian fathers. And it is interesting to see how abusive and bullying parents shaped their later behaviour. Evans however doesn't narrow down the Nazi regime to such simple arguments: "When there were millions of people... who grew up in families dominated by an authoritarian father, did only some of them become Nazis?" Too much "stress" has been put on these factors by historians like Joachim C. Fest, argues Evans. Instead, he says:

Individual murderers in all countries, whatever the political system that governs them, commit their crimes in violation of punishments on them, while Nazi murderers and fanatical supporters of Hitler were legitimated by the Nazi movement and the Third Reich. Nazism released people from the normal constraints that society imposes on the violent and abusive desires that exist to a degree among all of us, and actively encouraged people to act them out. Ideological and historical context in the end was more important that individual psychology.

This can help explain how people were freed up to behave as they did. But it is not enough to explain why the Nazis gained support and eventually power. Understanding this requires looking deeper. One key point that Evans repeatedly notes is that the majority of the people who he describes have a deep-seated hatred toward the left, and Marxism/Communism. This hatred rests in the fear of revolution, and the anger at the German Revolution that they saw as ending Germany's ability to fight in WW1. This affected even those who didn't join the Nazis, but were around them. The far-right German Chancellor in 1932, Franz von Papen who helped bring Hitler to power, but never joined the Nazi Party, despite playing a key role in the government demonstrated this well. Evans writes, "conservatives like Papen put the destruction of democracy and the extirpation of 'Marxism' above any lingering conern for humanity, legality or decency."

But combined with this hatred and fear of Communism is the class basis of the support for the Nazis. As Evans explains:

Most Germans who belonged to the educated middle classes, the so called Bildunsbürgertum, comprising people with university degress and professional status, welcomed the coming of the Third Reich and collaborated with the Nazi regime to the end.... Under the Bismarckian Empire they had enjoyed a secure and respected place... a position they lost with Germany's defeat in World War I, the Revolution of 1918, the creation of the Weimar Republic with its enthronement of democratic rights ... and the advent of the feared and hated (and largely working-class) Social Democrats. If relatively few of them were Nazi fanatics, the great majority still openly or tacitly supported Hitler because they saw in him the guarantor of social order, national pride, economic stability and cultural tradition.

For some, the Nazis offered more - they offered work and stability in difficult economic times, as well as a chance to express their abhorrent ideas. The "solidily middleclass" Paul Zapp "served Nazism... because it offered a way out of career problems". But Evans is careful to point out that Zapp's prior politics meant that "he had no difficulty in executing [the regimes] decrees in the most murderous and brutal possible way." Zapp was head of a Sonderkommando that followed the German army into Eastern Europe killing hundreds of Jewish people in mass shootings.

Evans concludes that

Neither a concentration on individual pathology on the one hand, nor a sweeping account of national identity on the other, can explain how hundreds of thousands of Germans committed unspeakable atrocities behind the Eastern Front and elsewhere, as camp guards, SS killers, ghetto officers and others, and beyond that, remotely, sitting at their desks in Berlin. An explanation has to be found at an intermediate level between these two extremes.

It is notable that few of those whom Evans discusses abandoned their support, acknowledged wrongdoing, or the horrors that they had been party to. This is because those functionaries of the Holocaust came to the Nazis from "a right-wing familial and social milieu, in which antisemitism was common and German nationalism a given."

But as Evans says, understanding the Nazis rise to power means also understanding how a section of German society was driven wild by the threat to their very existence posed, even abstractly, by the left and the Communists. The economic crisis of the late 1920s, the defeat of Germany in WW1 and the German Revolution meant that a generation of middle class people felt their whole worldview threatened. To most of them Hitler offered salvation. They formed the ranks of the Nazis, and many went on to become part of the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews, opponents of the regime and many millions of others the Nazis deemed unfit. Some, from higher class positions, were also attracted to Hitler, and not a few of these were also attracted by his promises.

Perhaps the only other thing to add, however, is that the book reminds me that the Nazis almost did not succeed. At crucial points before their coming to power, they were divided and weak. Had the left not failed to unite, and had it offered a radical alternative to Hitler, history could have been very different. Understanding the Nazis is one task for the current period. But another is remembering how they could, and can, be defeated. As Richard J. Evans concludes:

Only by situating the biographies of individual Nazi perpetrators, with all their idosyncracies and peculiarities, in these larger contexts, can we being to understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influnce. By doing this, we can perhaps start to recognize the threats that democracy and th eassertion of human rights are facing in our own time, and take action to counter then.

This excellent book is part of that fight.