Hitler’s People, Richard Evans Interview
In his new book, historian Richard Evans has selected twenty-four Nazis, examined the historiography, and written biographies on each in an attempt to understand why they did what they did. The traditional view post-War is that the names in here were monsters. We then tend to dismiss their humanity since their actions were so horrific, murderous and criminal that to try to get to know them perhaps brings us closer to them. We might recognise some of their very real emotions in ourselves: jealousy, humiliation and anger to name but a few. This is the reason for Hitler’s People. So with my first question I made the mistake of describing the book as almost an extended version of Who’s Who.
“Not, it’s not a biographical dictionary. It’s a book which has a message…What we’re dealing with here when you look at Nazi perpetrators from Hitler downwards through Goebbels, Goëring, then Heydrich, Eichmann, and then right down to the lowest level of what you might call ordinary mass murderers, is we’re dealing with human beings. So much of the literature in a weird way glorifies, or perhaps demonizes. There’s a German word that’s often used with the law about the last few months of Nazi Germany, which is Götterdämmerung, and that means Twilight of the Gods. For goodness sake, these are not gods.
“Friedrich Nietzsche talked in a different context altogether of Götterdämmerung, which is a much better phrase, it’s Twilight of the Idols. They’re not gods, they are human beings. The first thing I try and do is to dethrone them, demystify them, to push away this mythologisation which you find surrounds so many of them. I have stories and anecdotes about people like Himlerr or Goebbels and so on, which try and point out that they are actual human beings. If we demonise them, saying, ‘Well, they’re not like us,’ it is not really a human problem. It comes from outside, it’s beyond history, beyond society. That’s much too easy. It’s a form of exculpation for the rest of us. By humanizing them, it almost acts as a kind of a warning.”
Professor Evans was knighted in 2012 for services to scholarship. His Third Reich Trilogy (The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at War) was described by Ian Kershaw as ‘the most comprehensive history in any language of the disastrous epoch of the Third Reich.’ His historical credentials are therefore second to none so it was only natural that he would be engaged in the libel trial brought by the historian and Holocaust denier, David Irving in 1996. It was Evans’ testimony that was hugely important in the eventual ruling in 2000 that found ‘Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.’
The trial was later dramatised in the movie Denial, directed by Mick Jackson and written by David Hare. In it Evans is played by the rather portly John Sessions who died in 2020, and Irving by Timothy Spall. Deborah Lipstadt gets Rachel Weisz, and Tom Wilkinson, who also sadly died recently, played the barrister Richard Rampton. Evans admits to being slightly miffed by his casting.
“I do feel he should have lost weight before he went in front of the cameras. But then I’m consoled by the fact that the leading actors bear no relation physically to the people they’re portraying. So Timothy Spall portrays Irving as a sort of weaselly little man whereas he was a large, dominating, loud figure.”
I had read somewhere that early on in his career Irving had achieved some success, and had a burgeoning reputation in the 1960s. Evans gives this short thrift.
“He’s quite the elderly now, he was born in 1938, and apparently he’s not very well, but he was always a right -wing extremist, I think. Even at school he was an admirer of Hitler. There was an extraordinary moment later on in the end of the trial when he was giving his closing address to the court and he had a slip of the tongue and called the judge, ‘Mein Fuhrer.’ Everybody laughed. I was phoned by a psychiatrist, curiously, a few days later, who was working on Freudian slips, and he said, ‘Did you hear that?’ I said, ‘Yes, I did. I couldn’t believe my ears!’ I asked him, ‘How do you explain it?’
“Born in 1938, Hitler for Irving was a kind of benign father figure, because his father went away to the war and didn’t come back. His mother must have said, ‘He’s gone to fight for Mr. Churchill.’ So for Irving, Hitler became this benign authority figure…During the war he lived just to the east of London and when German bombers were coming over, Irving rushed [his brother] out into the back garden to give a Nazi salute to them…and so in the excitement of the closing statement, Irving just confused the Judge with Hitler’s two benign authority figures. I found that quite a plausible explanation, really.”
Evans’ book not only examines those infamous names of the Nazi regime, Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels and Heydrich, but also figures that may be less familiar, and who certainly never held senior positions. Combined the reader comes away with an enhanced understanding of the people that constituted that word that is all too easily bandied about today, the Nazis. One figure that has long held a fascination for me is Reinhard Heydrich. Born into a musical family, he was a talented violinist. His upbringing was not a struggle by any means. Continuing the film theme, he is played quite brilliantly by Kenneth Branagh in 2001’s Conspiracy, a BBC/HBO production that closely followed historical record and depicted the 1942 Wannsee Conference, attended by many in the Nazi government, and chaired by Heydrich. He was the very image of the supposed Aryan ideal, tall, blonde and utterly ruthless, and this meeting formalised what later became known as The Holocaust.
“You were about to say Blonde Beast and that’s what he’s not of course. It’s a very good example of how these people came from the centre of respectable German society, they all came from conservative families, nationalist families on the right. Not a single ex-communist or ex-socialist among them, nobody from the working class… [Heydrich] joined the Nazis and became Head of the Nazi Security Service. In that capacity, he then had enormous power in Himmler’s organization and became one of the key figures in carrying out The Holocaust. It’s striking when you read accounts of what Heydrich believed in. There’s a real cold fanaticism there that is difficult to find in a number of other leading Nazis. It’s been argued by some German historians that this is a kind of generation, the first post-war generation of young nationalists, right-wing Germans who think it’s their job to finish off the war, fight it better and more ruthlessly and more completely than it was done by the generals and admirals who failed between 1914 and 1918.”
I mention Conspiracy and ask what Evans thinks of the film. Branagh was awarded two Emmy awards for his performance, and described playing the part of Heydrich as one of the most disturbing experiences of his career – and that he had not slept well during filming. In another interview, the actor went on to say he thought Heydrich would have been just as enthusiastic were he charged with removing 11 million tennis players from the continent.
“It was excellent. It’s very clever because there are minutes of the Wannsee Conference taken by Adolf Eichmann, one of these leading bureaucratic figures in the Holocaust. But they [the filmmakers] fill in the gaps by using other sources like the diaries Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazi party, for example, also a figure in my book. It’s very good and well worth watching.
“Neither Heydrich nor Eichmann were the kind of men just following orders. That was a standard excuse of those Nazis who survived the war and were not absolutely at the top level. Anti-semitism is central to the regime. The message that the Jews are evil and wicked and must be exterminated is pumped out, either directly or implicitly, by Nazi media all the way through the 1930s and early 1940s. Heydrich internalised this until he believed that the Jews had to be killed without exception. The Wannsee Conference minutes are extraordinary because there’s a long list of how many Jews there are in each European countries, including many countries where the Nazis had not succeeded in conquering or occupying. This is going to go on and on.”
In the chapter on Heinrich Himmler, there is a story early on quoted from an Italian journalist that serves to remind us of the sort of character the SS Reichsführer was. It’s a trip to the sauna in Lapland, Finland in July 1942. Himmler is sweating away but flees in terror when hit on the back with birch branches, a Finnish ritual. This is much to the bemusement of Signor Malaparte.
“I tell that story partly to demythologise him; he is a human being. It’s typical of the way in which the Nazis have been mythologised. In his case, as with many other leading Nazis, he described as petty bourgeois or a socially marginal. There’s an idea you find quite widespread that they are gangsters. There is a wonderful Hollywood movie made to show American soldiers what they’re going to fight about. It’s a movie made called The Hitler Gang and it’s in the style of a 1930s Hollywood gangster movie. It’s very entertaining and not very accurate, but they chose not famous actors, but lookalikes.
“Himmler is described as petty bourgeois, but if you look at all of these people as far as I’ve done, you’ll find that they’re from the centre of German society. They’re from the educated middle class. Himmler’s father held down a very prestigious job, which was a high school professor…and he was also a tutor to a member of the Bavarian royal family so they were very well connected.
“…Himmler’s trip to Finland was not just to enjoy the sauna (he became actually really enthusiastic about saunas later on). It was also to try and ensure that Finland delivered its Jewish population, which is absolutely minute – only a few hundred, to him for taking to Auschwitz and being killed.”
Another element that was fascinating to me was learning of Himmler’s micro-management. One example was already apparent during the questioning of Georg Elser, the attempted assassin of Adolf Hitler in November 1939. After his capture Himmler personally attended the interrogation, and even stuck the boot in himself during Elser’s torture.
“We know a lot more about him than we used to. So with the sauna story, for example, we can verify that because his appointments diary turned up a couple of decades ago in a Russian archive. There it is on the day in question: sauna. A second volume of that appointments diary turned up even more recently, about a half dozen years ago. His letters have been collected, and letters to SS offices and the micro-management is absolutely extraordinary. He tells them what to do all the time. He tells them who to marry and what to eat. There’s a hilarious directive he issues about porridge. You’ve got to make it with water and not with milk and that kind of thing. Power often brings out a hidden side. It allows people to fulfil their fantasies.”
With the recent anniversary of the Stauffenberg Plot, I was intrigued to know who Evans thought would have made a worthy replacement of Hitler. Is Goebbels someone we underrate, given he’s a figure of fun for us today?
“It’s impossible to answer, but I think it’s unlikely. He didn’t have an independent power base. He was completely bound to Hitler and Hitler’s own personality. We know more than we ever did about him. The last of 32 volumes of his diaries came out in 2008 in Germany. He was like Samuel Pepys, he was one of these compulsive diarists who can’t finish a day or begin the next one without actually writing a diary entry. Of course [we can] be critical about them. They don’t always tell the truth, but they’re actually surprisingly honest in most ways. He was the chief propagandist of the Nazi Party and then of the regime. He organised public life and the media in particular. He had seen the basic fact about dictatorship is [that] they have to control the media. They have to suppress alternative ways of portraying what’s going on.
“Of course, in Nazi Germany, didn’t have an [independent] police, you didn’t have an independent press. He was a very clever propagandist. He realised people didn’t want to listen to a continual diet of political stuff. In our country it’s been bad enough during the election campaign. People get bored quite quickly. So he had all kinds of ideas for alternative, more or less non-political media events: request concerts on the radio. He banned films after Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a propaganda film about the 1934 Party Congress. He then banned any more films of that kind. One was enough. It was absolutely brilliant piece of propaganda. If you were going to do it you have to do it indirectly.”
We end our discussion on Evans’ view of Hitler, given the Wannsee plan showing Jewish populations beyond Nazi occupied Europe. Would the Nazis have marched on the British Mandate of Palestine had they succeeded against the Allies?
“Yes, there are even hints in Hitler’s so-called Second Book, which only came to light in the 1960s and which wasn’t published for various reasons. Six sequels of Mein Kampf in which, when he gets control of the whole of Europe, he [plans] going off to America. For Hitler war without end and without limit was actually central to his vision of the future. because he believed a race like the Germans, or Aryans as he called them, could not survive unless it was engaged in perpetual warfare which would toughen it up.”
Sir Richard Evans is the author of Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich. You can listen to an interview with Sir Richard on the Aspects of History Podcast.
