Humanizing Hitler
My review of Richard Evans' "Hitler's People"
My review of Richard Evans’ “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich” was published in The Washington Times on August 1. For your convenience, you may read the review below. The book will be available August 13, but can be pre-ordered now.
I am excited to let you know that my podcast conversation with Richard Evans will be published on Tuesday, August 13. History As It Happens is available wherever you find your podcasts.
REVIEW:
Richard Evans tells us not to think of the perpetrators of the most horrendous crimes ever committed as psychopaths. Neither were the leading Nazis gangsters or hoodlums primarily seeking to enrich themselves. They were not insane, either, because the insane do not understand what they are doing. In contrast, nearly all Nazi war criminals were completely aware, remorseless, and proud that they had murdered millions of Jews and others whose mere existence “threatened” their imaginary Aryan race.
“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,” concludes Mr. Evans in his superb biographical study, “Hitler’s People.” If we look to the past to understand the popular appeal of today’s strongmen and wannabe dictators, we must view even cruel tyrants as humans rather than monsters or raving imbeciles. In the right context and conditions, any of us may be capable of contravening societal norms of decency and restraint when sanctioned from above – “to commit acts that would have been unimaginable in other circumstances.”
“Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime, and, by doing so, perhaps learn some lessons for the troubled era in which we live,” writes Mr. Evans, one of the world’s foremost experts on modern Germany and the author of a magisterial three-volume study of the Third Reich published between 2003 and 2008. His new book comprises 22 essay-length biographies; the longest, on Adolph Hitler, runs 100 pages. The rest are 15 to 20 pages in length, covering the highest-ranking Nazi officials down to the middle-class diarist Luise Solmitz.
Humanizing Adolph Hitler and his paladins may strike some as well-meaning but misguided. Yes, Hitler – a nobody “for the first thirty years of his life” – and men like the propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the “Butcher of Prague” Reinhard Heydrich came from unexceptional, mainstream backgrounds. Many were well-educated and not without real talent. As Nazis, however, they would espouse an ideology so radical and violent, turning the words “fanatical” and “pitiless” into positives, that few today might relate to them as ordinary.
Moreover, beneath the level of the chief architects of war and genocide were “hundreds of thousands of Germans” who “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,” Mr. Evans says. So it may be tempting to think there must have been something different about them. After all, most people cannot picture themselves as capable of firing a bullet through the head of a harmless child just because the child is Jewish.
As the author persuasively argues, such behavior must not be abstracted from the ideological and historical contexts of interwar Germany, where “men came predominantly from a right-wing familial and social milieu, in which antisemitism was common and German nationalism a given. They were hardened to extreme violence by experiencing military service in World War I, or in its glorification by the right-wing media in the 1920s, in literature, in film, newspapers, and magazines.” Their lives were plunged into the traumatizing economic and political chaos of the Weimar Republic, fertile soil for demagogues promising the rebirth of German national greatness and the destruction of the “Jewish world-conspiracy.” It was within “a general culture that valorized and rewarded brutality and fanaticism, encouraged from the very top,” that “these men found satisfaction in committing atrocities.”
Equally chilling was the accommodation middle-class Germans like Hamburg’s Luise Solmitz made with the regime, rationalizing the Nazis’ extreme violence from 1933 because they were “restoring order” after a ruinous democratic decade. In her diary, a trove of insights for historians interested in everyday life in the Third Reich, Solmitz “continued to record her approval, welcoming the emergence of Hitler as a ‘strongman’ and applauding” his dictatorial measures. She was so intoxicated by Hitler that she denounced her brother Werner, an enthusiastic supporter of a liberal political party, to a local propaganda organization. Fortunately for Werner, it was not the Gestapo.
Luise expressed almost no sympathy for Hamburg’s Jews as Nazi persecution marginalized them from all aspects of civic life on the road to deportation and murder – even though she was married to a Jewish war veteran. No one coerced this ordinary woman to betray her brother. Her attitude toward Jews was not forced upon her, either. She was no fanatic – just an ordinary citizen who succumbed to a powerful emotional appeal exalting the nation while dehumanizing all those who were excluded from this reborn “organic community.” Therein lies the unsettling lesson of Richard Evans’ searching, humane scholarship.