Overview

“A fascinating and instructive book . . . elegantly written and perceptive.” —Wall Street Journal “Kaleidoscopic . . . A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context . . . Just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.” —The New York Times Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil? Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler’s People, he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members. Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist’s eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies—like Goebbels, the regime’s propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust’s chief architect—to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten—like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler’s People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions. Nearly a century after Hitler’s rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility—and even between pathological evil and rational choice—are never easily drawn.

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Reviews

“Kaleidoscopic . . . A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context . . . Just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.” —The New York Times “Evans has chronicled Nazi Germany before, but never with such urgency . . . His previous books . . . are models of historical writing, a combination of narrative and exploration, scholarship for the sake of scholarship and yet volumes that are immensely readable, even novelistic in style . . . Hitler’s People is similar in its polish and power. But the motivation and purpose of this latest work, a sweeping examination of Adolf Hitler and his subalterns and subjects, is more utilitarian.” —Boston Globe “Evans is a wonderful stylist as well as a keen analyst, and in his latest book, Hitler’s People, he deftly focuses on the personalities and temperaments of those who fell under the sway of Nazism and abetted the most evil regime in modern history. Any reader will come away wiser about the Third Reich, if still confounded that it existed at all . . . a brilliant survey of previous biographies of Hitler, each one emphasizing different factors in his rise to power.” —Air Mail   “Call it a roll call  of the demonic and demented. Sir Richard . . . is a vivid portraitist who manages to be both unsparing and enlightening. Dealers in death like Rohm, Himmler, Rosenberg, and Heydrich come alive . . . Sir Richard is as adroit sketching the wrecked paradigms and virulent ideologies that made Nazism possible as he is at pointillist renderings of pathologies that made mediocrities into monsters. He has a novelist’s eye for detail . . . Hitler’s People does for the paladins of the Third Reich what Suetonius’s “Lives of the Caesars” did for the Roman Empire and Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” did for the Renaissance—tell a story of an era by way of its people.” —New York Sun   “Superb. . . Searching, humane scholarship.” —Washington Times   “Evans takes the time to examine these cogs in the machine and see them as people with complicated lives, which makes their choices all the more disturbing.” —Parade “Evans . . . offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. . . . A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Evans . . . offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. . . . A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Evans has chronicled Nazi Germany before, but never with such urgency . . . His previous books . . . are models of historical writing, a combination of narrative and exploration, scholarship for the sake of scholarship and yet volumes that are immensely readable, even novelistic in style . . . Hitler’s People is similar in its polish and power. But the motivation and purpose of this latest work, a sweeping examination of Adolf Hitler and his subalterns and subjects, is more utilitarian.” —Boston Globe “Evans is a wonderful stylist as well as a keen analyst, and in his latest book, Hitler’s People, he deftly focuses on the personalities and temperaments of those who fell under the sway of Nazism and abetted the most evil regime in modern history. Any reader will come away wiser about the Third Reich, if still confounded that it existed at all . . . a brilliant survey of previous biographies of Hitler, each one emphasizing different factors in his rise to power.” —Air Mail   “Call it a roll call  of the demonic and demented. Sir Richard . . . is a vivid portraitist who manages to be both unsparing and enlightening. Dealers in death like Rohm, Himmler, Rosenberg, and Heydrich come alive . . . Sir Richard is as adroit sketching the wrecked paradigms and virulent ideologies that made Nazism possible as he is at pointillist renderings of pathologies that made mediocrities into monsters. He has a novelist’s eye for detail . . . Hitler’s People does for the paladins of the Third Reich what Suetonius’s “Lives of the Caesars” did for the Roman Empire and Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” did for the Renaissance—tell a story of an era by way of its people.” —New York Sun   “Superb. . . Searching, humane scholarship.” —Washington Times   “Evans takes the time to examine these cogs in the machine and see them as people with complicated lives, which makes their choices all the more disturbing.” —Parade “Evans . . . offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. . . . A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Author Information

Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany. He has served as Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge; president of Wolfson College, Cambridge; and provost of Gresham College in the City of London. He has received the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and the British Academy’s Leverhulme Medal and Prize, awarded for a significant contribution to the humanities or social sciences. In 2000, he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defense of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War, and The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination. In 2012, he was knighted for services to scholarship.

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