Evans, Richard. Hitler’s People. Penguin, New York, 2024. NF;  9/24.

I had recently read some World War II history (Paris‘44, a 2015 book by a William Mortimer-Moore. There was, strangely, another book with the same title published in 2024 by a different author) and thought okay let’s find out about Hitler and the people surrounding him. Evans is a respected academic historian with a focus on Germany who testified in support of an author sued for castigating Holocaust deniers. His methods are documentary-evidence-based and this book is informed by a lot of recent material about Germany’s Third Reich. There’re no horror thrills or blame.

We start with a woman’s testimony at the Nuremberg trials describing unbelievable but true circumstances in a Nazi death camp. There follows an adult life-history of Hitler emphasizing his unusual personality and the coincidence of his impressive command of an audience and the need for leadership to deal with most people in Germany feeling the defeat of World War I. I hadn’t been familiar in detail with his political machinations, use of a brutal police force where German military was limited by the Treaty of Versailles, and grabbing dictatorial control of the government. His brutality, elimination of opponents, initially successful invasions of neighbouring countries, and of course antisemitism with its devastating practical application are all laid out clearly with commentary that never becomes histrionic or steps beyond documented fact.

Each of about twenty individual characters occupy a chapter under sections “The Paladins”, “The Enforcers”, and “The Instruments”. In the first of these Herman Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, and Albert Speer are followed from their birth through their participation in the Third Reich to their deaths. Others including Adolph Eichmann and Leni Riefenstahl (skilled maker of pro-Nazi films) get similar coverage.

The last character profiled is one Luise Solmitz, a Hamburg schoolteacher whose detailed diary throughout the relevant years is available. This traces her personal change from euphoric national pride at Hitler’s promises to rescue the country from the shame and poverty of the 1920s and at his military success in the late 1930s, to her doubts as the war effort collapsed and eventually her rueful pleasure when she heard of Hitler’s death.

Ms. Solmitz was married to a World War I hero who happened to be Jewish. Her diary describes exceptions made by the Gestapo and others for him because of his war history, and her daughter’s escape to Belgium to marry which would’ve been impossible in Germany. Although this Jewish husband avoided the fate of millions of Jews, his wife’s family affectingly represented the terifying forces of German nationalistic pride and Jewish execution. I felt this a bit personally since my English-Irish Canadian mother married, in the relative safety of mid-1940s Canada’s west coast, my dad who was an eligible Czechoslovakian Jew who’d managed to escape from Europe (and had changed his name) in 1939. Four of his aunts were not so fortunate.

This book’s characters are pulled together to provide a nuanced and vivid tapestry of early-to-mid-20th century Germany. But as with most European history of the 1930s, World War II, and the Third Reich there runs alongside the narrative a haunting background question:

How could it have happened? And, of course, How can we keep it from happening again?

Theories about the political pathology leading to ruthless slaughter of innocent humans beyond anything previously imagined include the overwhelming influence of Hitler himself, the character of the German people, and the growth of antisemitism as a response to real and imagined Jewish involvement in the world banking system.

Dr. Evans doesn’t conclude on how Hitler and his people and country did what they did in World War II. It seems, as with much less significant catastrophes like road traffic accidents, there was a series of unpredictable coincidences. Germany was humiliatad after World War I. Subsequent politics included struggles among Soviet-style socialism and wanting to return to the Germany of Hindenburg and Kaiser Wilhelm. The Weimar Republic famously suffered economic collapse, followed by the equities crash of 1929 and world depression.

(Germans) all had in common the shattering emotional experience of a sharp and shocking loss of status and self-worth at an early point of their lives. For a number of them, Germany’s sudden and unexpected defeat in World War I was a traumatic event, bringing a promising career to an end and mocking the sacrifice that they and their families had offered, sometimes in blood. In some instances, an economic disaster.

All this left the country open to the opportunism, charisma, and brutality of Hitler himself and one can imagine his contribution to the events of the war as an ignition spark setting off all the national humiliation like a huge storehouse of explosives. However we imagine those events they seem to have happened while the worst of human nature was hovering over them. Through the critical years of the 1930s and 40s there just never seemed to be a present and sufficient force to stop terrible events from occurring once they got going.

While he wisely declines to conclude as other historians have that one thing or another or some group of things caused the unprecedented catastrophe of World War II, I’m impressed with the direction Dr. Evans points to as he rejects relatively simplistic exculpatory causes. First in respect of Adolf Hitler he says:

(h)istorians and others are sometimes criticized for‘humanizing’ Hitler, but … that is precisely what needs to be done. Hitler was a human being, and his life and career therefore raise difficult and troubling questions about what it means to be human.

And on the subject of there being something the matter with Germans:

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.

Along similar lines to what Jacques Barzun concluded about the effect of World War I on culture and the arts, the second World War opened a new potential for monstrosity among us humans that can show and has shown itself, given a possible and real set of circumstances.

I have to admit I started reading this book with a bit of the kind of expectation one has sitting down to watch a horror movie. My sentiment having finished it is quite a bit different.

9.3/8.9