Who were the Nazis? The comfort blanket version of history tells us they were aberrant monsters, more beasts than men. And certainly their project was uniquely monstrous, combining pre-medieval barbarism and ignorance with force-multiplying modern technologies like radio, rockets, railways and poison gas to terrorise a continent.
But in his new book, Hitler’s People, Professor Richard Evans, leading Cambridge historian of modern Germany, complicates the picture. In a range of two dozen biographical portraits of prominent Nazis, drawn from his own deep learning and taking account of the latest research developments, Evans shows that the immediate post-war attempts to dismiss the Nazis as psychopaths and/or gangsters were comforting but wrong. He asks us to consider the most pessimistic and chilling possibility of all, that the Nazis were people like us.
