Even if you've read many books on the topic, you'll want to read this one
I'm sitting on the couch, next to my brother Greg. I'm about five years old. The TV is our magical portal to old movies. The elegant dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The wit and romance of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. John Wayne's righteous action hero. But not today. I am witnessing horrors that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Naked, skeletal bodies stacked like firewood. Even worse, some still live, in a nether world that strips them of any concept of human dignity. They stare at the camera and at me and Greg sitting there on the couch in suburban New Jersey.
My mother is furious. "This is what they did to us!"
I don't remember what came before or after these moments. I remember, only, the questions. Who were they? Who were we? Why did they do this to us? What is it about us that rendered us such victims? I remember the shattering of my sense of the world, my place in it, and my view of my fellow humans. Those skeletal men had been jettisoned beyond lines, I had learned as a child, we humans must never cross. One does not walk around naked. If one is starving, fellow humans provide you with food. And, of course, the big, obvious question about God.
We were not Jews. We were Slavs. My father said that his mother's Polish family was "wiped out." One of my mother's aunts, I know, engaged in at least one act of anti-Nazi resistance. My relatives, who lived through the occupation, told me this story with sickening terror in their eyes.
I read book after book, always feverishly scanning the page, hoping to find the answer.
Sir Richard J. Evans is a 76-year old British historian. He is the former Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. Evans is the author of 18 books, including the three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy, released between 2003 and 2008. Of that work, a New York Times review says, "a masterpiece. Fluidly narrated, tightly organized and comprehensive." Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw says, "'Impressive ... perceptive ... humane ... the most comprehensive history in any language of the disastrous epoch of the Third Reich."
On August 13, 2024, Penguin published Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich. The book is 624 pages long, inclusive of endnotes, a bibliography, and an index. There are black-and-white photographs of the Nazis treated in the book.
The New York Times calls Hitler's People "probing, nuanced and unsparing." The New Statesman reviews it as "superb … important … utterly absorbing … If you only read one book about Hitler and the short, bleak, horrendous life of Nazi Germany, then this is the one for you." The Wall Street Journal calls it "fascinating and instructive … elegantly written … shows that there was more to Nazi leaders, and those below them, than caricatures suggest." The Jewish Chronicle says, "This is a sobering book that depicts the duplicity of manipulators, opportunists and psychopaths" who convinced "gullible multitudes" to become "mass murderers."
Hitler's People takes a new approach to answering the "Why?" and "How?" questions. The book consists of interlinked, but independently coherent, biographical essays focusing on a series of Nazis, from Hitler down to Luise Solmitz, a schoolteacher, mother, and housewife, who held no official position, but who kept a detailed diary of the Nazi years.
Previous trends in attempts to understand Nazism militated against the biographical approach. Evans felt that now was the time to take that approach. The reader glimpses into individual lives, and witnesses those moments when individuals turned from "normal" to pure evil. Evans makes use of newly available material, some of it freed up after the fall of the Soviet Union, or by other historical developments. This new material often strips Nazis of their self-exculpating fictions. This is especially true in the case of Albert Speer. Those Nazis who survived the regime to be interrogated by a horrified world offered excuses. "I didn't know; I didn't participate; I opposed; I attempted to help." They knew; they participated; they didn't oppose; they didn't attempt to help.
Evans' book contains pages of exhaustive documentary support. A good percentage of Evans' sources are in German; others are in English, Spanish, and French. Unfortunately there are such things as Holocaust deniers, or those who attempt to soft-peddle Nazi mass murder. Evans' facts are unequivocal. Trade unionists, socialists, handicapped people, Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, were targeted for atrocity, enslavement, and cultural and biological genocide. This targeting was discussed in documented conversations detailing concrete plans. "From the very beginning," Evans writes, in Mein Kampf, "Hitler's antisemitism" "revealed" "its exterminatory core." Hitler's 1925 book indicated what a Hitler regime would entail: "suppression of all opposition, destruction of democracy, creation of a dictatorship … military conquest of living space particularly in Eastern Europe, removal of citizenship from Germany's Jews, prevention of the eugenically 'unfit' from breeding, ruthless use of the death penalty to crush political resistance."
The Dachau concentration camp was established in March, 1933, the same month that Hitler first gained plenary power from the Enabling Act. In Dachau, thousands of Germans perceived as enemies of the regime were tortured. Also in March, 1933, Berlin Brownshirts publicly beat random Jews. Kristallnacht took place in 1938. Aktion T4, the mass murder of handicapped people, began in 1939. Aktion T4 killed perhaps 300,000 victims. "From the very beginning, the war against Poland was a genocidal war … Poland was to be wiped from the map, its culture annihilated, its leading citizens killed."
In other words, Nazi crimes were not always committed far away from everyday German's lives, they were not always committed in a foreign country, they were not always committed during wartime, and they were not always committed under cover, for example, behind the mask of a false claim of "deportation." Nazi atrocities began occurring in Germany proper, as soon as Hitler gained power, before the war ever began, and Nazism's first victims included non-Jewish Germans. Yes, as Evans shows, Germans knew.
Evans doesn't argue that everyone who voted for Hitler voted for genocide. He acknowledges that Hitler toned down antisemitism when speaking to audiences not yet ready for it, and Hitler peddled the "end to territorial demands in Europe" when such a false claim served his ultimate goal. Evans also acknowledges that Hitler was willing to put his various genocides on the back burner if the time was not ripe. Catholic organizations would be suppressed and priests would be sent to Dachau but full erasure of the Catholic Church had to wait.
Rather, Evans argues that people, inside and outside Germany, had every reason to know what Hitler was all about from the 1920s on, and they supported him because of or in spite of his evil. Germans voting for Hitler might have wanted a job and stability. They might not have hated Jews, but decided that persecution of Jews was a small price in exchange for economic security. When Goebbels organized a boycott of Jewish shops in April, 1933, many Germans ignored it and shopped at Jewish businesses, anyway. Evans mentions, of course, the pressures brought to bear. Any German who resisted Hitler would likely end up in a concentration camp. Fear of the Nazis coerced otherwise decent people into cooperation. Another tool was relentless propaganda equating Jews and other targets with non-human enemies like lice and bacteria. Resistance became more common "once Germany started to lose battles rather than winning them." Once Hitler's evil impacted them personally, some-not-all Germans acknowledged that they had made a mistake.
Hitler's People is one of the best books I've ever read. It's the kind of book that makes me want to buttonhole other people and encourage them to read it. Evans' knowledge as an historian is breathtaking and ranges from history's big sweeps to the detailed minutia of everyday life. His skill as a writer is no less admirable. It's never easy for a normal person to read about, for example, Josefine Block, an Austrian woman, who murdered a seven-year-old Jewish girl by repeatedly stomping on the little girl's head. Or Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer, who injected twenty Jewish children, all under age twelve, with tuberculosis, to prove the theory from scientific racism that Jews respond to disease differently than do non-Jews. He later mutilated and eventually hanged the children. I stared at the page for several moments, and thought for hours afterward, about an Austrian non-Jew who was sent to his eventual death in Dachau after refusing to agree to a Nazi's taking possession of his home. A Nazi was sent to Sachsenhausen for trying to replace his boss. Even though I knew about it before reading Hitler's People, the ease with which Nazis murdered not just their alleged racial inferiors, but also their fellow Germans and even their fellow Nazis, in the Night of the Long Knives, for example, astounded me anew.
It's not just what these characters do that astounds. It's what they say. People who have Jewish friends suddenly announce that all Jews must be murdered. Men who had nothing to fear from Poles or Poland record that Poles must be reduced to slaves for Germany and eventually they must be wiped out.
In the hands of a lesser writer this book would be a much more difficult read. Evans is a masterful storyteller. He takes a "just the facts" approach. His prose contains no ornamentation, no striving for the heights of oratory; there is no academic jargon, no wall erected out of scholarly theory. A high school student could assimilate this prose. Biographies move swiftly. Reading this 624-page book was easier than reading a poorly written one-hundred pager.
The style serves the substance of Evans' attempt to answer the how and why questions. Fairy tale scholars point out that tales as told by traditional storytellers do not generally make use of adjectives. Traditional tellers in village gatherings didn't identify Cinderella as "beautiful" or Jack as "brave." They just told their audiences what happened. We know Cinderella is beautiful because she enchants the prince. We know Jack is brave because he takes on a murderous giant. For the most part, Evans doesn't waste many adjectives on the Nazis about whom he writes. He tells us what they did, in crisp, economical prose. No more flourishes are wasted to apply adjectives to Nazis penning millions of Soviet POWs until they all starve to death than to a report of when a given Nazi married.
There are many similarities between the biographies. One similarity, from one biographical essay to the next, is what non-entities these monsters were. Nazis told us that they were Übermenschen, supermen. There is not one single Übermensch in this book. Hitler was a shabby bum on the margins of society, living in a homeless shelter, lacking purpose. "For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody," Evans writes. Hermann Göring was an obese drug addict. Heinrich Himmler was pasty and flabby. Hans Frank, a butcher on the outside, quivered on the inside. Adolf Eichmann whined that he, not the Jews, was the real victim, because he had to witness the massacres he ordered. Joachim von Rippentrop was universally despised by just about everyone he met.
To get through a book like this, I remind myself of the real superheroes, such as the nineteen-year-old orphaned Texas sharecropper Audie Murphy, who single-handedly repelled a company of advancing German soldiers. I think of Anne Frank, whose artistry and soul have touched tens of millions around the world. I think of Sophie Scholl, a German Lutheran who resisted. I think of Dr. Janusz Korczak, who was offered escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, but who would not leave the orphans in his care, accompanying them to Treblinka. "You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this." Of course these real superheroes are not mentioned in Evans' book. I mention them here because they are the antidotes to the dregs in Evans' excellent book.
Individual Nazis were not supermen; Nazis as a group were not a joyfully unified folk community. They were scorpions in a bottle, competing against, backstabbing, and sometimes murdering each other. Nazism did not create a well-ordered society. Nazi government was a chaotic mess, with players competing, rising, falling. Agencies duplicated each others' work. Nazis didn't "love" Germany. They were eager to betray Nazism and their countrymen as soon as the Allies crossed into their territory – Göring attempted to take power as soon as Hitler left the scene and Himmler attempted to negotiate a surrender with Sweden. Toward the end of the war, when it was apparent that Germany could not win, Hitler "sacrificed the lives of millions of his soldiers. More than a third of all German troops killed during the war were killed between January and May 1945 when it was clear to most Germans that the war was already lost." And, of course, Hitler issued his "infamous Nero order" – a ruthless scorched earth policy that would have left Germany a smoking ruin of use to no one, including the invading Allies. Nazism caused the deaths of between 6,600,000 and 8,800,000 Germans.
Most Nazis were middle class. Germany's fall after World War I affected them personally, lowering their status. They were traumatized by Germany's World War I defeat and humiliation by, inter alia, the conditions of the Versailles Treaty. Many participated in the Freikorps or Free Corps, gaining experience in brutal violence against perceived enemies. Many were influenced by neo-Paganism, social Darwinism, and romantic nationalism. A surprising number – including Hitler – had positive interactions with Jewish friends, relatives, co-workers, or bosses. Many were young. They were more often Protestant than Catholic. They were mesmerized by Hitler. A fact that disgusted me is that those who escaped hanging after the war often lived to ripe old ages. Leni Riefenstahl died at 101.
Evans argues that it isn't accurate to characterize Nazis as mentally ill or even as just stupid, even though Nazism was a "half-baked" "mishmash" of "simplistic slogans." Antisemitism, as an explanatory factor, goes only so far, "since more than half" of Nazism's victims of mass killing "were not Jewish." Some were sadists but most would not qualify. Through the biographical facts, Evans addresses Hannah Arendt's idea of the "banality of evil" and the related obedience experiment by Stanley Milgram; Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution; and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Evans offers his own answer to the big questions, which differs from all of these books.
Evans argues, and this is also my best understanding of the answer to the how and why questions, that Nazism was the product of a perfect storm. A series of events made Nazism possible. These events include Germany's World War I defeat; the stab-in-the-back conspiracy theory; the humiliations and privations of the Versailles Treaty; the shock of the fall of the monarchy and subsequent liberalization under the Weimar Republic; the threat of Communism; the conspiracy theories conflating Judaism and Communism, but also capitalism; young men's training in brutality in post-war street brawls between the right and left; hyperinflation; and the Depression. One of the many factors that contributed to this perfect storm was one that might seem relatively minor: Hitler had a fine speaking voice, and he carefully studied how to manipulate crowds through speech. He rose during an era when public speeches were popular and influential. Had that one factor changed – had Hitler been the man he was but somehow incapable of speech – chances are Nazism would not have arisen.
Given his tight focus, Evans pays relatively little attention to factors that contributed to Nazism's rise before World War I. These include social Darwinism, the rise of neo-Paganism as evidenced by Wagner and the Grimms, and Herder's romantic nationalism. German antisemitism and contempt for Slavic people preexisted Nazism. The German Eastern Marches Society and Kulturkampf both worked to suppress Polishness and Germanize Polish lands decades before Hitler's rise. Germany produced the notorious antisemites Wilhelm Marr and Heinrich von Treitschke, and the eugenicist and Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel, who advocated for euthanasia for the unfit.
The fertile ground that previous movements provided for Nazism did not guarantee the rise of Nazism. There were certainly antisemites and those advocating overtly for euthanasia for the unfit in the United States, as well. Witness Bronx Zoo co-founder and redwood and bison advocate Madison Grant. Nazism did not gain power in the U.S. as it did in Germany. In addition to producing Marr and von Treitschke, Germany also produced Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and author of a foundational argument for Jewish emancipation that is sometimes called "The Bible of Jewish emancipation." Yes, there were preexisting trends that Nazis exploited. But these preexisting trends did not make Nazism inevitable. As late as 1928, after the publication of Mein Kampf, Nazis won only 2.6 percent of the vote. Germany seemed to be entering "the calm waters of political stability." Then the Great Depression hit. For many, that was the last straw in Germany's bad luck.
Part I of Hitler's People, "The Leader," devotes one hundred pages to a Hitler biography. Part II, "The Paladins," provides biographies of Göring, Goebbels, Röhm, Himmler, von Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, and Speer. Part III, "The Enforcers," addresses Hess, von Papen, Ley, Streicher, Heydrich, Eichmann, and Frank. Part IV, "The Instruments," discusses General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, Dr. Karl Brandt, SS members Paul Zapp and Egon Zill, notorious female Nazis Ilse Koch, Irma Grese, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, and Leni Riefenstahl, and the previously mentioned Luise Solmitz. Evans closes with a brief but unforgettable anecdote about a German woman who recognized Nazism's evil early on and left her natal country. He asks, and cannot answer, why that woman recognized and acted upon facts that so many others ignored.
Hitler's People's preface is a solid paragraph of questions: Who? How? "These questions are at the heart of the present book." One answer: "Without Hitler, there would have been no Third Reich, no World War II, and no Holocaust … Hitler's ideological obsessions provided the essential foundation for everything that happened in the Nazi movement and the Third Reich."
In the essay devoted to him, the reader learns that Göring posed as an '"Iron man" and liked to be photographed with lions. He always, though, disposed of the lion cubs once they matured to a point where they posed any threat to him. Göring was a notorious looter of art, but he needed an expert to tell him which art to loot. Göring's mother's lover, Hermann von Eppenstein, was a practicing Catholic but also half Jewish. He was Göring's godfather and he gave the family a castle in which to live. Göring "blatant bloodthirstiness" and "raucous laughter" were evident during the Night of the Long Knives, when he personally ordered the murder of some of his former Nazi comrades.
After the war, Göring would tell an interviewer that "antisemitism played no part in my life." He was attracted to the party because of its promise of glory for Germany and for the elimination of the Versailles Treaty. Göring was, as Evans says, "cynically opportunist." Evans acknowledges that Göring cared for his wife in her final illness and was distressed by her death. We can't, this fact tells us, write all Nazis off as incapable of any feeling. Göring's tenderness to his wife merely confuses the reader.
Towards the end, Göring suffered close to the same fate as the one he meted out on the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler lost faith in him and mocked him in meetings. Speer took advantage and shoved Göring out of the way. Göring responded by retreating to life as a "voluptuary" in finger-and-toe-nail polish and lipstick. While an Allied prisoner, he threatened Speer with assassination, and he told his captors that he had helped Jews. After his suicide, his body was cremated in Dachau's oven. Göring's evil career was not made inevitable by genetics. His brother Albert was hostile to Nazism and he used his influence to help prisoners escape.
"Nobody likes me," is perhaps the truest thing Goebbels ever said, but it's not completely true. "No one apart from Hitler." Goebbels called Göring "a lump of frozen s---" and Himmler "that crafty swine." Goebbels, in spite of his physically handicapped foot and leg, "had a strong sex drive" and conducted many affairs, including one with a Slavic starlet. That had to nipped in the bud by Hitler. "The hardest time in my life" Goebbels wrote. Joseph and Magda Goebbels are the poster children for how rotten Nazism was not just for its stated enemies, but for Germans as well. They are just the most famous of the many Germans who killed not just themselves at the end of the war, but their own children. Goebbels was a writer and his diaries, Evans says, reveal him to have been "unscrupulous, violent, murderous, self-absorbed, consumed by petty jealousies … and above all deeply committed to paranoid antisemitism."
Ernst Röhm described himself honestly in his autobiography. "Because I'm an immature and bad person, war and unrest say more to me than well-behaved, bourgeois order." Hitler and Goebbels used Röhm's homosexuality as an excuse for murdering this man who had been close to Hitler. In fact, though, "Röhm was murdered because his plans threatened to get in the way of Hitler's." Evans quotes Röhm: "The Germans have forgotten how to hate' … Röhm encouraged the torture and murder of Nazism's opponents."
Naked in a Finnish sauna, Heinrich Himmler revealed "tender rosiness like a delicate rosebud … a child's navel in an old man's belly." During the traditional sauna birch switch beating, Himmler revealed "rage and fear." This event demonstrated Himmler's "personal cowardice and physical weakness." "He was a sickly child, unathletic, frequently ill … unable to withstand the physical rigors of military training." He and his wife exchanged daily letters proclaiming love for each other and for Nazism. He hated the Catholic Church, seeing it as Jewish. He adopted neo-Paganism. He had sadistic fantasies of torturing with insects his Nazi underlings. Himmler was "capable of love" as his marriage and his extramarital affair reveal.
His fellow Nazis treated Joachim von Ribbentrop "with open contempt." His father was a career officer in the Prussian military, where he practiced the ideal "Kadavergehorsam" or "corpse-like obedience." "Ribbentrop was a passionate violinist." He bribed an elderly cousin to adopt him so he could add the noble prefix "von" to his name. In his pre-Nazi career as a wine merchant, he interacted positively with Jewish businessmen. He turned on his former colleagues with zeal to prove his bona fides. Before the Allies hanged him, he gave relativism a try, insisting that the Allies were just as bad as the Nazis.
Alfred Rosenberg, who wrote The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which, according to a prize Hitler awarded to the book, "laid the firm foundation" for understanding Nazi ideology, was from the Baltics. As a Baltic German, he inherited the view that Germans were superior to lesser peoples like Lithuanians and Poles. Rosenberg was a fanatical antisemite and he also hated Christianity. He wanted to "destroy" "the Slavs." Hitler recognized that Rosenberg's anti-Christian position had to be shelved till Nazis had enough power to apply it. Rosenberg and Himmler endorsed neo-Paganism; Hitler didn't like this, as he preferred to view Nazism as "scientific." Myth, writes Evans, "After Mein Kampf, was undoubtedly the most important book produced by anyone in the leadership of the Nazi movement." Rosenberg made callous comments after Allied bombing killed 40,000 Germans in Hamburg and he "showed a real lack of sympathy during the last illness of his wife." "Hatred was probably the deepest emotion he felt." The Allies hanged him.
Albert Speer "fooled almost everybody, including intelligent and informed historians." Evans examines Speer's crafty attempts to play innocent. In fact Speer was as guilty as any other top Nazi. Rudolf Hess took to wearing a monocle when he was only nineteen. Hess, Evans notes, was inspired by pre-Nazi thinker and geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904). Ratzel was inspired by Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. Ratzel first used the word Lebensraum. "Ratzel’s view was that it was not wrong or immoral to take the land of weaker people, such as Slavs, but rather doing so was in harmony with the 'law of nature.''"
Franz von Papen was a conservative aristocrat who thought he could manipulate Hitler to his own purposes. In his memoir he depicted himself as "an honorable person motivated by a deep Catholic faith … someone trying to do his best to keep the Nazis under control." Had "the German Empire, in all its power and majesty" not been overthrown, Hitler would never have come to power, Papen wrote. The abdication of the Kaiser was "the collapse of every value we had ever known … the end of everything we had believed in for generations, the disappearance of all we had loved and fought for." In 1936, when Goebbels unleashed a propaganda campaign against Catholicism, Papen, a Catholic, did not protest. When Nazis began sterilizing those deemed "unfit," some brave Catholics risked their lives to protest. Papen did not. Papen wasn't able to keep the Nazis under control even in the case of his own nephew, who died in Buchenwald. That the courageous anti-Nazi resister Felix von Papen was related to his befuddled collaborator uncle shows that genetics and environment cannot completely explain why some became Nazis and others did not. Evans rejects Papen's claims of innocence. He says that Papen is "an example of how easily conventional politicians can be seduced into supporting demagogues." Hans Frank said of Papen, that he "was trying to get out of the fact that he played along with the Party."
Robert Ley, largely forgotten now, was one of the most powerful Nazis. He was an alcoholic with a speech impediment. His natal family suffered financial setbacks and Ley dreamed of the egalitarian German folk community Nazism promised. Once in power, he wallowed in luxury and began affairs with younger and younger women. He promised lush vacations to German workers; the Nazi elite were the ones who could afford themselves of these "worker" vacations. After the war, his third suicide attempt was finally successful.
Julius Streicher dreamed of Germany's return to nature and nature beliefs. He joined in the Nazi summer solstice celebrations. He published Der Sturmer, an antisemitic Nazi rag. Himmler and Göring tried unsuccessfully to take him down. As with Rosenberg, who was also primarily a writer and publisher, not a mass killer, the Allies hanged Streicher.
Reinhard Heydrich was "the most demonic person in the Nazi leadership." "Everyone was afraid of Heydrich" said one Nazi who worked under him. And yet he was from a musical family and played the violin. He was dogged by rumors that he was Jewish; he was not. An anecdote depicts Heydrich catching his own reflection in a mirror, whipping out his gun and shooting, saying, "At last I've got you, you scum." With no experience in intelligence work, he was hired by Himmler because he had read many detective novels and used them for inspiration during his job interview. He "unfolded a campaign of persecution against the Catholic Church … he drew up a list of 61,000 Poles to be shot … he set up the Einsatzgruppen" who mass murdered Jews. Even though "he was director of the largest mass murder program in history," "he does not seem to have been driven by an obsessive hatred of Jews." Arriving in Prague, he declared that Czech lands would be "once and for all settled by Germans." The Slavic "garbage" would be eliminated. Two Slavic assassins, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, ended Heydrich's life. His death was slow and painful.
As a child, Adolf Eichmann had Jewish friends. As a young adult, Jewish bosses advanced his career. Evans describes the Depression, and Eichmann's losing his job, as a key turning point. In time, he "became obsessed with carrying out the complete extermination of the Jews."
Hans Frank, "The Butcher of Poland," was "weak … insecure … unstable … vacillating." He liked to play Chopin on the piano. "All members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed," he announced. "Slavs" "were incapable of acting as guardians of European culture." "We are sentencing" Poland's Jews "to death." This genocide of Jews is "only a marginal note." His son, Niklas, considered himself "lucky" to have seen his father hang.
General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb liked to see himself as "a professional soldier who took no part in politics." A Catholic, he annoyed Hitler by attending mass in full dress uniform. The Gestapo surveilled him and Hitler forced him into retirement. Hitler needed good generals, though, so he called him back. Leeb condemned some Nazi behaviors but he kept serving as a general. When Hitler ordered him to commit atrocities against Russians Leeb responded naively, "German soldiers don't shoot women and children." Starving hundreds of thousands of civilians to death in Leningrad was not his style; he had a nervous breakdown and left active duty. Elsewhere, Nazis starved three and a half million Soviet POWs to death. Leeb "shared … racist belief in the inferiority and dispensability of Slavic 'subhumans' … Such atrocities were the result neither of 'difficult' military situations nor the 'brutalization' of the troops … they were the result above all of … deep-seated antisemitism and anti-Slav racism that had permeated the officer corps for decades and had only been strengthened by years of Nazi indoctrination." When a fellow German general complained about mass shootings of Jews, Leeb replied, "We have no influence … the only thing left is to stay away." Leeb was tried and released. He died an old man. His family retains the estate given to him by Hitler.
Nazi Dr. Karl Brandt, "handsome, elegant, courteous, charming," was influenced by a book published in 1920, long before Hitler became a national figure. Eugenicist Alfred Hoche published The Legalization of the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Life. In 1939, as part of Aktion T4, Brandt injected with poison those deemed "unfit." He gassed other victims, watching their final agonies through a peephole. Goebbels and Martin Bormann resented his power and conspired to get him condemned to death. He survived their efforts and, believing himself blameless, surrendered to Americans after the war. He was tried, found guilty, and lead to the gallows. He gave a long speech; the hangman became impatient, and while Brandt was still relativizing his crimes with reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hangman shoved a hood over Brandt's head, then a noose, then death. Not all Nazi doctors met Brandt's fate, and some continued in medical careers long after the war.
In his final chapters, Evans covers Leni Riefenstahl, as well as lesser known Nazis. The one who astounded me the most was Luise Solmitz. Solmitz was a school teacher, mother, and housewife who never occupied a powerful position, but she did keep a meticulous and detailed diary throughout the Nazi years. Her diary entries are like many others that anyone who studies this period will have read. She was thrilled by Hitler. She rejoiced at his promise to avenge Germany's losses. Evans does not quote her expressing any sympathy for the citizens of the countries Germany invaded. Rather, he quotes her celebrating these invasions. She wants to fly a swastika flag from her house. She wants her child to join a Nazi youth group. She sounds almost drunk with enthusiasm for Hitler as a person and for the Nazi program. She denounced her own brother because he was insufficiently loyal to Hitler.
As time goes on, the inevitable happens. She fears dying in an Allied bombing raid. She can't find enough to eat. She hears of German defeats. Suddenly it hits her that maybe this Hitler guy was not the hero she made him out to be. She realizes this only when Nazism's crimes affect her. Hitler becomes, to this former fangirl, "The shabbiest failure in world history."
What makes Solmitz's diary almost something out of science fiction is this detail: her husband was Jewish. She tried to fly a swastika; Nazis stopped her. Jews were not allowed to do so. She wanted her daughter to join a Nazi youth group; she couldn't. Jewish children were not allowed to join. Her daughter wanted to marry a non-Jew. She was forbidden. Solmitz heard Nazis singing songs about "Jewish blood that must spurt from the knife. Who took that seriously then?"
Perhaps one must read Solmitz's entire diary to understand her blindness. I don't know. Luise Solmitz, though, for me, offers a commentary on every evil idiot in Evans' unforgettable book. They all boarded a train that was headed straight for Hell, not just for other people, but also, ultimately, for the country they all supposedly "loved." One does not finish this book overwhelmed with respect for human nature. That is why, when reading books like this, I must continuously remind myself and others of the real supermen and superwomen, those who, at often terrible cost to their physical bodies, resisted, and thus elevated their own souls, and the souls of all the rest of us.
Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
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