Some readers might immediately recognize the name and distinction of Richard Evans, now Sir Richard Evans, the author of the study Hitler’s People.[1] Evans, the retired Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, was the scholarly companion-in-arms to Deborah Lipstadt when she was accused of libel by the crypto-Nazi provocateur David Irving. Even under the painful constraints of British libel law, requiring the alleged libeler (Lipstadt) to prove that she was right in having debased the libeled party, Lipstadt would win the case, thanks to Evans on her side. Irving had sought to enrich himself at Lipstadt’s and Penguin Books’ expense for falsely terming him a “Holocaust-denier” and “an ardent follower of Adolf Hitler.” Evans proved her correct.
In Hitler’s People, Evans makes a new departure from his previous achievement as a political and social historian of Nazi Germany. Here, he considers the character of the perpetrator. Who are these individuals who–along with Hitler, whom they worshipped—conspired to commit these monumental crimes against humanity, and quite particularly against the Jews? Is there a “new acquist/of true experience” to be had in examining the brief lives of the best-known criminals of the Nazi Reich?[2]—an experience, which Evans hopes, will equip us to better deal with the likes of a Trump and an Orbán (whom we’ve recently met on these pages as members of Autocracy, Inc., the worldwide collective of autocrats)? The jury is out.
And so, out in the open, as well, is the historical factor, because Evans’ approach is part of a longstanding inquiry that he has hitherto avoided, but not others. Such a one is the German historian Robert Gerwarth, author of a biography of the notably vicious Reinhard Heydrich.[3] This line of inquiry concerns a choice of views of Hitler’s people as a pack of psychopaths or, on the other hand, a random mix of citizens from various milieux, ranging from the uneducated flotsam of the rural petty bourgeoisie to graduates with advanced degrees from universitates and conservatories. The view adopted will bear sharply on the fate of one’s own (mostly repressed!) instinct for aggression, repudiation, and revenge. Walter Kaufmann provides the frame for Gerwarth’s conclusions by criticizing the view that true justice might ever be achieved in dealing with such criminals.
Many people have wanted to do what the criminal did but were kept from doing it [let us add: with a change of object] by the law or by their conscience. … The penal code provides an outlet for this criminal desire. He has killed someone, and now you–many of you – also want to kill? All right; kill him! … Thus, the desire for talion–for doing to the criminal what he has done to someone else–does not evidence any profound sense of justice or a primordial conviction that this is clearly what the criminal deserves.[4]
Gerwarth supplies potent confirmation to this (contentious) idea. Asked whether the Germans, after the war, had made things simpler for themselves by turning the perpetrators of the Holocaust into sadistic monsters, Gerwarth replied, “That is perfectly clear. If the perpetrators were from good bourgeois families, university graduates bent on bettering their social position, without perceptible psychological disorders, then suddenly the perpetrators are a lot closer to one than one would like.”
Evans’ current formulation reads, “Thinking of the perpetrators as depraved, deviant or degenerate puts them outside the bounds of normal humanity and so serves as a form of exculpation of the rest of us, past, present, and future” (Kindle 461/598). That is the bias of his presentation.
Evans describes many of the higher types–Heydrich, for one, was a conservatory-level violinist and Hans Frank an accomplished lawyer–but he also gives us the soldierly thug Roehm, who joined the party after failing to revitalize the Bolivian army (sic) and was reduced to doing manual labor in the homeland (Kindle 153/598); and about the abysmal, low-IQ Julius Streicher, enough said. Hence, Evans cannot give a simple account of the origin of the fascist mentality: vile nature or vile nurture? Evans may not have noticed, in his rather hastily assembled book—an assembly-line production of potted biographies—that, a à la Gerwarth, he resists seeing these characters as pathological retards, yet at the same time does not dispute the view of Goering’s prison psychiatrist that Goering was a “psychopath,” with Goebbels, Hess, and others not far behind. In the sorry stages of the German war, Hitler, for Evans, also turned pathological, but from the start owed his success, not (chiefly) to a bad demonism of character but rather to the coincidence of advanced media technology—allowing him to make his speeches everywhere with grand éclat—and the social matrix of post-Versailles despair and economic collapse.
The criminals whom Evans treats are grouped according to their quantity of power (to harm): the Leader, the Paladins, the Enforcers, the Instruments. The Leader, der Führer–it will come as no surprise–dominates this book through the number of pages assigned to him and as, finally, the “onlie begetter” of the movement. We hear, ad nauseum, how, lacking any competence as a military planner let alone as an economist or an expert reader of the national character of his enemies—the British are controlled by Jewish-Bolshevik operators and the Americans are “stupid”–he would inspire in close quarters a crushing sense of awe and reverence for his genius—a “fanatical” adulation for this coarse, mustachioed Austrian incarnation of the German spirit as such. It is hard to understand. Of course, he was clearly terrifying when angry, which was much of the time. The only newness (or renewedness) that Evans brings to his portrait is the lumpen coarseness of Hitler’s diction and such factoids as that Hitler suffered from Parkinsonism for half a decade at the end of his life and for many years was part of a threesome of some sort with Goebbels and his wife Magda. On this topic, there is Goebbels’s perpetual worship of Hitler and–a high point in Evans’ account–the riposte by a workman, in earlier days, to Goebbels’s triumphant speech, “The German people is like the German eagle, the head is our Führer, the right wing the SS, the left wing the SA …”: “And you,” came the cry from (and to) the rear, “are its asshole!” (It is notable, as Evans points out, that not a single member of this criminal organization at its highest level originated as a manual laborer). There is a good deal of truth in the mockery of Goebbels: for all his intimacy with Hitler, he was excluded from crucial decisions made by the Nazis in their war, such as the timing of the invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa, so-called after the great, red-bearded Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor from 1155 to 1190, who re-established the Roman law), and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States. The latter decision, Evans reports, was taken not only (as has been maintained) to give Hitler the opportunity of exterminating the Jewish population of the United States but rather a free hand in torpedoing the merchant vessels full of munitions that were being sent to England (Hitler: “tiny little worms”) under Lend-Lease. An immense amount of–for Evans, reliable–information about the Nazis is owed to Goebbels’ trace learning as the holder of a doctorate in German literature: he kept copious diaries, which were finally published in 2008 in 29 volumes! “Thanks to these extremely detailed journals,” writes Evans, Goebbels stands revealed as having been (in diction that recurs throughout this book on Nazi criminals) “unscrupulous, violent, murderous, self-absorbed, consumed by petty jealousies and rivalries and above all committed to the paranoid anti-Semitism that led to the extermination of European Jews.” (Kindle 146/598).
If Goebbels was the runt of the litter, Goering was the ox: on being arrested, he weighed 264 pounds. Of the entire gang, Goering is the minimally less repellent, chiefly by virtue of one or two engaging sides of his lunacy: his voluptuousness and aesthetic self-display. Evans cites Hugh Trevor-Roper on Goering’s way of receiving guests at the palace Carinhall he built for himself: “he dressed … now like some oriental maharaja, now in a light-blue uniform with a bejeweled baton of pure gold and ivory, now in white silk, like a Doge of Venice, only studded with jewels, with an emblematic stag of St Hubertus on his head, and a swastika of gleaming pearls set between the antlers.”
Goering’s flights of fancy ware no doubt stimulated by some of the “20,000 tablets, each with a small quantity of paracodeine, which [he carried with him in a suitcase and] had been especially manufactured for his personal use.” Something of such feats is well-known; what is new is the exoneration of his guard, US Army Lieutenant Jack G. Wheelis, who–fascinated by Goering and supplied by him with gifts—allegedly supplied him in turn with the cyanide capsule that killed him, allowing him to escape hanging. (Trigger warning). It was subsequently mooted by authority that Goering had taken the capsule “either from the toilet pan or from his anus” (Kindle 138/598).
After dismissing Goering’s courtroom plea for leniency as “an honorable soldier” and “an old-fashioned nationalist,” etc., Evans concludes:
His brutality is revealed in moments such as the Night of the Long Knives [when hundreds of members of Roehm’s SA, along with Roehm, were slaughtered], his self-aggrandizement, his ruthless ambition, his vanity, his corruption, his indifference to human suffering, his contempt for the normal decencies of human behavior, all this and much more prompted some like the prison psychologist Gustav Gilbert to brand him a psychopath. But putting everything down to individual pathology was too simple. It was only in the twisted moral universe of the Third Reich that such a man could rise almost to the very summit of power.
(Is this also to supply an answer to the question of what prompted women perpetrators like Ilse Koch and Erna Grese, as well, to become killers? What does it mean to say that their development “was by no means exceptional as their demonization would seem to have suggested?” Is it true, as Evans would have it, that it “did not require any deep-seated psychopathic personality disorder for an ordinary woman to become a killer?” and are we to refer back once more to the key, the “twisted moral universe” of the Third Reich? But what constitutes this “twisted moral universe” if not the decisions of a vast collection of twisted, viz., psychopathic individuals?)
Let’s return to Evans on his anti-self, the flamboyant Goering: With this torrent of platitudes, Evans reveals a typical shortcoming of his work, which requires another sort of genius to grasp, and not merely record, for example, the transition from Goering the drug-addled, painted voluptuary (who arrived at prison with “sixteen matched, monogrammed suitcases, a red hat box, and his valet”) to the exemplar, thus Evans, of “the bold and vigorous behavior he had displayed in his early days, assuming [at Nuremberg] a leadership role among the remaining Nazi leaders on the one hand and doing his best to charm his interrogators, on the other” (Kindle 128/598).
If this book was meant to deliver a final, stunning insight into the character of those men and women most likely to abet the construction of a “twisted moral universe,” the habitat of the fascist leader, it accomplishes nothing of the sort. Evans is and remains a historian: it’s one damned, rebarbative fact after another—facts confined, this time, to individual biographies. The book falls back on what the author always already knew would be the outcome of these “exemplary lives”: the perpetrators were “not psychopaths” [though that’s not what the text shows]; “not gangsters or hoodlums” [which is more or less true, though if not literally gangsters, they were steeped in gangsterish cunning]. Their vile commitments, thus Evans, were inspired by “Germany’s sudden and unexpected defeat in World War I, [which 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– the hyperinflation or the Great Depression–had a comparable effect” (Kindle 461/598). In their behavior, then, was there no element of real, substantial depravity (read: psychopathology) as, for example, in their intense, insane hatred of and cruelty toward the Jews (less than 1% of the German population)? The predictable reader’s final response might well be nausea and despair, not enlightenment.
Notes
[1] Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin Press, 2024).
[2] Milton, Samson Agonistes.
[3] Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman, The Life of Heydrich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
[4] Walter Kaufmann, Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy (New York: Peter Wyden, 1973), 54. Cited in Stanley Corngold, Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 361.