REVIEW: 'Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich' by Richard J. Evans

Hitler must be the most fascinating character of all time. He is good for thousands of books and learned articles, films, and documentaries -- even children's books like When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. The flow won't abate, though 80 years have passed since Der Führer shot himself in the Reich Chancellery about to be overrun by the Red Army. In Hell, Stalin must gnash his teeth in envy since he outdid Hitler as a mass killer. Do you know Stalin's wife? You do recall Eva Braun, who died along with Adolf in the last days of the Third Reich. Only a profile of their shepherd Blondi, a Germanic Urhund, is missing.

As the New Yorker has it, "Hitler is so fully imagined a subject that to reimagine him seems pointless." So in recent times, attention has shifted to his entourage -- like Guido Knopp's Hitler's Henchmen (1996). Now, Richard J. Evans, a noted scholar of the period, has added to the still modest pile with his most recent book, Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich, which weighs in at 625 pages, yet without granting a footnote to Knopp. The names of Hitler's henchmen are familiar: Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann ... The eternal question keeps haunting us. How could this German Kulturnation have done it -- this pillar of Western civilization?

Naturally, Hitler stars in Evans's tome, fetching a hundred pages. His 22 minions rate 10-plus pages each. And rightly so: no Führer, no followers. Why the morbid allure? Writing in the U.K.'s New Statesman, a reviewer of Hitler's People makes it deceptively simple: Hitler "was insane," as his "endgame in April 1945" showed. He was a "thought-disordered, drug-abusing, weirdo-nutter ... the man he had always been."

Evans stays sober. Hitler was "neither a political nor a military genius." Perhaps. Yet his record was quite impressive. A man who molded a disheveled, rudderless NSDAP into the mightiest party machine of his time. He demolished his rivals within, outfoxed the West in the runup to World War II, conquered almost all of Europe, and made it to the gates of Moscow. Not bad for a soi-disant Loonie after only 12 years' worth of work.

Was German anti-Semitism the engine of his rise? Actually, there was less Jew-hatred in the Kaiserreich than in France (recall the Dreyfus Affair). Was it the humiliation inflicted by the victors of World War I? By 1925 Germany was back at the table, scoring diplomatic wins east and west. The Depression? It spewed forth Fascism in Italy and Eastern Europe -- no Teutons needed. Complicit in the Holocaust, Poles and Ukrainians did not have to read Mein Kampf.

Books like Hitler's People and Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners are helpful guides, though these, too, do not crack the cosmic puzzle. Nor were Hitler's helpers "weirdo-nutters." In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt came up with the "banality of evil." This engineer of the "Final Solution" was "terribly and terrifyingly normal." Many critics saw the report on Eichmann's trial as apologia. Perhaps, but her point does stick.

Evans writes, as did Goldhagen when he looked at the hands-on killers of Jews in the East (like the murderous "Order Police"), that there was "no individual pathology" at work. Thus, too, in the case of Hitler's "paladins" and "enforcers," as Evans calls Hitler Gang of 22. He stresses a common trait: All but one "came overwhelmingly from a middle-class background; there was not a single manual laborer among them." And "most of them grew up socialized into a bourgeois milieu." No dregs from the beerhalls they, nor psychopaths or sadists; we might even call them "privileged" today.

Let's do "ladies first." Erna Petri, an SS officer's wife, who had run an estate in Poland, told her postwar interrogators she had wanted to show her husband's SS colleagues that she was "as good as any of the men," Evans relates. So she shot 10 Jews, 6 of them children, as proof of prowess. "Nazi feminism," so to speak. Also in Poland, Gertrude Segel ordered the death of slave laborers. Ilse Koch, the "Beast of Buchenwald," also nicknamed "commander," has a rap sheet too long to spread out here, including corruption, torture, and murder. The court handed down a life-term in 1947. She hanged herself in her cell 20 years later -- justice postponed.

Among the Top 22, Albert Speer is this reviewer's "favorite." This elegantly dressed, well-bred architect with lots of academic laurels embodies normalcy to the max. Directly, he never got blood on his hands. In his case, "banality of evil" must change to "opportunism of evil." This ambitious youngster made an early bet on Hitler, which speaks for the uncanny foresight all fast risers have. Plus, what is known as "networking" today.

Before Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, Speer had caught Goebbel's eye, and now it was up, up, and away. Once he had insinuated himself into Hitler's inner circle, he "began to accumulate offices in the regime," reports Evans -- and, of course, lucrative contracts. Among them was the design of a permanent rally site for the Nazi Party in Nuremberg; recall Leni Riefenstahl's path-breaking film Triumph of the Will. She stars in the book, too. Speer was also commissioned to build the Reich Chancellery -- a much more magnificent project than the White House.

In 1937 -- Speer was just 32 years old -- Hitler appointed Speer as general building inspector for Berlin. In this job, he would oversee the Resettlement Department -- an innocuous term presaging the horrors to come. Relocation spelled the eviction of Jewish tenants from their homes in Berlin -- another early step toward the "Final Solution."

In 1942, three years shy of his 40th birthday, this nimble climber reached the pinnacle as Reich minister of armaments and war production. Practically, he ran a Nazi-style version of Stalin's vast command economy. In the end, according to Evans, 14 million "overwhelmingly forced laborers" from occupied lands and the concentration camps were dragooned with the help of Himmler's SS. How many perished? Evans thinks "hundreds of thousands." And clean hands for Speer. Germans have a trenchant word for him: Schreibtischtäter, clumsily translated as "desk-bound perpetrators."

But the best part of the "opportunism of evil" was still to come -- after the war. In Nuremberg, Speer got away with murder, given only a 20-years prison term, which he served to the end. How did he evade the gallows? Again, he had read the future correctly, cooperating with the Allies' court and turning against the other 23 accused. Like Sergeant Schultz in Hogan's Heroes, he insisted, "I know nussing!" -- nothing about Auschwitz, et al. And the lies worked. Evans notes drily: "Nobody noticed that key incriminating documents ... were missing from the material he had supplied [to the Court]."

It gets even better. While other Nazi grandees were hanged at Nuremberg, Speer became a best-selling author behind the walls with his autobiographies Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries. (Spandau was the Allied prison where war criminals were locked up.) Opportunism, banal or brilliant, has never been more profitable. Speer is the real poster boy among Hitler's People -- a normal, though supremely flexible guy.

As befits a tale of horrors, Evans ends his magnificently researched work on a pedagogical note. Why yet another tome on evil? Only by studying the lives of the perpetrators "can we begin to understand how Nazism exerted its baleful influence." Thus, we can fathom the "threats to democracy" in our days. We can "take action to counter them." Whom? Ruthless totalitarians like Putin, Xi, Khamenei who have learned nothing from the past? Alas, the past never repeats itself one-on-one. Hitler could not have dreamt of today's tools: cyberwar, fake news, digital subversion -- no need for panzers and bullets to the head.

The literature on Hitler will continue to expand. Backward-looking wisdom should indeed be refreshed in every generation. At the end of Evans's soul-breaking tale, let's make a modest proposal. In the flood of Hitleriana, one item is still missing: Hitler's shepherd Blondi. Why add canines to the relentlessly growing pile whose features have been well-documented by now -- like the unbreakable career of Albert Speer? The answer is a no-brainer. Blondi was the most deutsch of dogs. These creatures terrorized and killed concentration camp inmates. Weren't they Hitler's "people," too?

Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich

by Richard J. Evans

Penguin Press, 624 pp., $35