“We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers

Adolf Hitler and those at the top of the Nazi hierarchy are universally denounced as monstrous aberrations. But, as Sir Richard J Evans stresses, separating them from the lessons of human history is the last thing we should be doing at a moment when democracy is under attack

Adolf Hitler and his lover, Eva Braun, relaxing in Berchtesgaden in 1942. The Nazi leader’s private life was more ‘normal’ than some accounts have suggested (Photo by akg-images)

Published: November 21, 2024 at 3:06 PM

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A little over two decades ago, the first volume of my history of the Third Reich was published. My aim was to produce a comprehensive study encompassing the origins and rise of the Nazi Party, the transformation of Germany under Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship, and the events and impacts of the Second World War.

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It was, of course, a major undertaking and, after the third and final volume was published in 2008, I moved on to other topics. But a commission to contribute to a nine-part television series, BBC Two’s Rise of the Nazis, shown from 2019 to 2022, prompted me to take a fresh look at the Third Reich and its crimes.

What struck me forcibly, given the biographical orientation of the TV series, was that I knew relatively little about the individuals involved in Nazism and the Reich – and, specifically, very little about their personalities and motivations. For decades, German historians in particular had avoided biography, long tainted by its indirect association with the ‘great man’ approach to history – or, as they called it, personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung (‘personalising history-writing’).

The rise of ‘perpetrator research’

Yet in recent years, a massive amount of new documentation and research has been published about the leading Nazis. What historians describe as ‘perpetrator research’ has been at the forefront of scholarship since the turn of the century, and has yielded innumerable fresh insights.

A 12-volume edition of Hitler’s speeches before his seizure of power was completed in 2003. The final volume of the diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels appeared in 2008. The diaries of self-proclaimed Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg were published in 2015. The second volume of SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s appointments diary, discovered in an obscure Russian archive, came out in 2020.

And many other sources have come to light documenting the thoughts and actions of what one might call ‘ordinary’ mass murderers, Nazi activists, SS officers and fellow travellers. These have so far formed the main focus of ‘perpetrator research’ in the 21st century.

German historians have finally overcome their allergic avoidance of biography. Volker Ullrich’s two-part life of Hitler complements the classic biography by the British historian Ian Kershaw, while major studies on Goebbels, Himmler, Rosenberg, Speer, Röhm, Heydrich, Eichmann and many others at all levels of the Nazi hierarchy have been published as well. We now have almost too much biographical material to deal with, rather than too little.

Key individuals in the Nazi hierarchy

The time seemed ripe, therefore, to undertake a new study of Nazi perpetrators, starting with Hitler himself and going down the hierarchy to encompass representative figures from various parts of German society.

The quantitative research of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s had answered the questions of what kind of people voted for the Nazis, who belonged to their movement, and who implemented Hitler’s orders. Now it was time to delve deeper into the mentalities and motivations of powerful and representative individuals.

In addition to all this, an important new reason has emerged for turning our attention to Hitler and those who carried out his orders. For the past few years, democracy has faced a growing threat in many parts of the globe.

Would-be dictators and strongmen have emerged, undermining and attacking democratic institutions in one country after another, replacing the rule of law by the arbitrariness of their own whims, muzzling the media and curbing freedom of thought. They have millions of followers who swallow their propaganda lies and seem to care little about truth, probity or general human decency.

While history never repeats itself, it does, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, sometimes rhyme. By trying to understand Hitler and the men and women who joined him in creating the Nazi dictatorship, we may perhaps help ourselves to better understand the enemies of democracy and the leaders and followers of authoritarian or populist movements and regimes in our own time.

An important new reason has emerged for turning our attention to Hitler and those who carried out his orders. For the past few years, democracy has faced a growing threat in many parts of the globe

Such considerations underlie my new book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich. It was published in August, with the US presidential election campaign approaching its climax – an election in which many fear that democracy and its central institutions are at stake.

In writing this book, I consciously took as my model the late German journalist and historian Joachim Fest’s pioneering and bestselling book The Face of the Third Reich, first published in 1970. Since Fest wrote, the amount of research published in this area has burgeoned almost beyond the manageable. So, while sticking broadly to Fest’s structure, I was able to replace his numerous (and not always convincing) psychological speculations with new and more persuasive material grounded more firmly in the historical sources.

Demythologising Hitler and the Nazis

What did I find? Before I could get very far, I needed to clear away a huge amount of invention and speculation. A nimbus of myth surrounded these people, starting with Hitler himself. Posterity had demonised them to such a degree that they scarcely seemed human any more. Writers repeatedly referred to the collapse of the self-styled Third Reich as the Götterdämmerung, the ‘twilight of the gods’, like Richard Wagner’s music-drama of that name.

But Hitler and his followers were not gods. It would be more appropriate to apply the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s term Götzendämmerung, ‘twilight of the idols’, to the last days of Nazism.

I wanted, therefore, to demythologise Hitler and the Nazis, to understand them as human beings. This has proved controversial, not least in Germany itself, where many historians and broadcasters have expressed their fear that ‘humanising’ Hitler, Goebbels and other leading Nazis runs the risk of making them appear in an inappropriately sympathetic light.

But calling these men and women monsters or psychopaths has the convenient implication (convenient for us, that is) of presenting them as not really human – in other words, not like us. Not only does this help us avoid feeling that we have anything in common with them, it also implies that nothing like Nazism can possibly happen again, because it is not really part of human history.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler (back right) with his wife Margarete, playwright Hanns Johst and propagandist Edith von Coler (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

SS chief Heinrich Himmler (back right) with his wife Margarete, playwright Hanns Johst and propagandist Edith von Coler (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

This is no help at all in defending democracy against the most violent and extreme of its enemies. To portray Hitler and the Nazis as human beings like us is really the first step in understanding their conduct, and ensuring that nothing like it happens again.

Many attempts have been made to portray Hitler as a man who was personally outside humanity, rather in the way that he himself demonised the Jews and called them “bacilli” and “lice”. None of them are convincing. Too many historians have been prepared to accept his own claim that he was a “man without qualities” who had no private life because he sacrificed it in the interest of the country he led.

To portray Hitler and the Nazis as human beings like us is really the first step in understanding their conduct, and ensuring that nothing like it happens again

Yet, his sex life, for example, appears to have been straightforwardly heterosexual; before spending the night with his long-term companion, the much younger Eva Braun, he took an aphrodisiac made from bull’s testicles, prepared by his doctor, Theo Morell.

Hitler grew up in comfortable, middle-class circumstances, but underwent a dramatic social descent after his failure to secure a place at Vienna’s art academy, followed by the death of his parents. He was rescued from his aimless existence by service in the Bavarian army in 1914, and found his way into politics after the war ended.

He could explain Germany’s defeat only through a bizarre and extreme conspiracy theory that laid the blame on a global conspiracy of Jews, who formed a tiny minority of Germany’s population.

Rise of the Nazi Party

Discovering and developing a talent for rabble-rousing oratory, Hitler tried at first to lead his small, fringe Nazi Party in a violent coup against the new, democratic Weimar Republic. When that failed, he combined a continued campaign of violence with a drive for votes that put him in power after the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression made the Nazis Germany’s largest political party.

In collaboration with conservative elites who wanted to overthrow democracy and return to the authoritarian system of the kaiser, Hitler established a dictatorship that began to prepare for a new European war to again make Germany the continent’s leading nation. More than this, he told his followers that he would achieve “world domination” for Germany, as he proclaimed in 1930.

He was neither a military nor a political nor a diplomatic genius; he was a gambler whose all-or-nothing approach, aided by circumstances, initially won him success at home and abroad. This bolstered his popularity, aided by a state-enforced, overwhelming cult of personality, the like of which the world had never seen.

But Germany was only a middle-sized European power, and it could never defeat the combination of three huge empires: the British, the American and the Soviet. Hitler’s drive for world power inevitably led to disaster.

In the end, suicide was the only way out. He would kill himself if he failed, he said, but “we’ll take a world with us”. The result was the most destructive war in history, and the deliberate murder of 6 million European Jews. Hitler was a fantasist from start to finish.

Why did so many Germans follow this man and stick with him to the end, as most of them did? In an effort to answer this question, I turned to his paladins – men such as Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda chief; Hermann Göring, his second-in-command; and Heinrich Himmler, his police chief.

Many historians have tried to write them off as psychopaths or people from the margins of society. A Hollywood film made in 1944 to inform American troops going to fight in Europe – The Hitler Gang, directed by John Farrow and shot in the style of a 1930s gangster movie – portrayed them as a gang of criminals.

Inside Hitler’s inner circle

Snobs such as Joachim Fest dismissed the Nazi leaders, including Hitler himself, as “petty-bourgeois”. In reality, however, almost all of them came from a solidly middle-class background. Not one leading Nazi was working class, and none of them had ever been a socialist or a communist. They were all brought up in a conventionally conservative, German nationalist milieu.

Many of them, though, had suffered a drastic social decline. Having been an air ace in the First World War, Göring then had to eke out a living as a commercial pilot and stunt flier. The comfortable existence of Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the son of a successful military officer, was abruptly ended when his father was dishonourably discharged for criticising the kaiser.

Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg lost everything when his privileged position as a Baltic German was lost when the tsarist regime that sustained it was overthrown, followed by the triumph of Estonian independence. Stormtrooper leader Ernst Röhm was not a revolutionary thug but a friend of the Bavarian royal family and a professional army officer whose vision of Germany’s military future eventually alienated the generals and led to his execution on Hitler’s orders in 1934.

Hermann Göring, pictured while a pilot during the First World War. He was one of many high-level Nazis who had suffered social decline (Photo by Granger/Bridgeman Images)

Hermann Göring, pictured while a pilot during the First World War. He was one of many high-level Nazis who had suffered social decline (Photo by Granger/Bridgeman Images)

Hitler’s endlessly repeated narrative of Germany’s decline and fall from 1918 onwards, and his promise to reverse the country’s fortunes, held a visceral appeal to such men, who saw in it a parallel to their own fall and rise. Once in power, their subservience to him brought huge rewards in terms of status and power, and in the very concrete form of major additions to their personal fortune.

Those who formulated policy were not, of course, largely the same people who executed it. I therefore studied the leading Nazis who did so – all, of course, within the broad lines laid down by Hitler.

Again, several of them found in Nazism a solution to their personal crises. Those crises included leading SS man Reinhard Heydrich’s dishonourable discharge from the navy, and the family catastrophe that befell the young Robert Ley – subsequently head of the vast German Labour Front under Hitler – when his father was imprisoned for burning down the family farm in order to claim the insurance.

Hitler’s endlessly repeated narrative of Germany’s decline and fall from 1918 onwards, and his promise to reverse the country’s fortunes, held a visceral appeal to such men, who saw in it a parallel to their own fall and rise

What was interesting about many of them was the central role that various aspects of Nazi ideology played in their allegiance, from the arch-antisemite Julius Streicher’s espousal of nature and folklore to Ley’s stress on its promise of social equality (this was, no doubt, partly for personal reasons – Ley’s family had lost its position). Hitler’s original vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, a Catholic aristocrat, was motivated by the Catholic authoritarianism and fear of communism typical of the 1930s.

Far from being the politically neutral bureaucrat of legend, the young Adolf Eichmann – the principal organiser of the Holocaust – was impelled towards Nazism first as a member of the Protestant minority in Catholic Austria, then as a young man enrolled in the German nationalist youth movement, and finally as a bitter opponent of the peace settlement of 1919 implemented in the Treaty of Versailles.

It is striking that these and other leading Nazis were often well educated: a number of them had studied at university and some, including Goebbels and Ley, even had a PhD. Many possessed such bourgeois accomplishments as violin playing (Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Eichmann) and mastery of the piano (Röhm and Hans Frank, the ‘butcher of Poland’).

The question of complicity in Nazi atrocities

All of this underlined the origins of many of them in the German middle class. An explanation of their adherence to Nazism cannot be found in social marginality or deviance. Leaving aside their perpetration of horrific crimes, they cannot be described in conventional terms as ‘uncivilised’.

What ran through almost all of them was a deep and committed antisemitism – a belief that Jews everywhere were, by their very nature, subversive and engaged in a vast conspiracy to undermine and destroy German and ‘Aryan’ civilisation.

Female guards pictured after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Many Holocaust perpetrators showed no remorse (Photo by Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)

Female guards pictured after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Many Holocaust perpetrators showed no remorse (Photo by Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)

The final group of people I looked at comprised what one might call ordinary perpetrators. These were mainly exemplary figures, including a relatively little-known army general, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who was uncomfortable with antisemitic atrocities carried out in his area of command on the eastern front by the SS, but allowed them to continue anyway, and was pacified by what was in effect a massive bribe offered to him by Hitler.

It is at this level, in one of the most male-supremacist states in history, that women enter the picture, from female camp guards who maltreated and murdered prisoners without compunction, to a conventionally conservative schoolteacher who denounced her brother to the Nazi authorities for anti-Nazi behaviour.

Some of these figures have been demonised by posterity to an extraordinary degree, as in the largely imagined sexual deviance of women like the camp guard Irma Grese. Once again, it was women from a nationalist, middle-class background who proved most susceptible to Hitler’s appeal.

One of the most striking facts at every level was the almost universal lack, among perpetrators, of any remorse for or even recognition of their crimes. Some, such as Goebbels, killed themselves at the end of the war. Some, including Eichmann, fled into exile. Some went underground and tried to make a new life in postwar Germany. Some, such as Nazi doctor Karl Brandt, refused to admit they had done anything wrong when brought to justice after the war.

Modern-day threats to democracy and freedom

Nazism, and Hitler, still retained their power over these perpetrators. It was only the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and 1960s, when West German democracy delivered prosperity – and when a new generation of democratically educated Germans reached adulthood from the late 1960s – that the retrospective hold of Hitler on many Germans was decisively weakened.

What can we learn from this dismaying narrative? It’s clear that economic and political crisis and trauma can bring disillusionment to many and turn them against democracy and its institutions. Equally obvious is the fact that strong legal and political institutions, as those of the Weimar Republic were not, can provide a bulwark against attacks on freedom and legality.

Propaganda, such as that expertly orchestrated by Goebbels – and above all when amplified by the state – can have a hugely persuasive effect on popular opinion as it ceaselessly pumps out lies and distortions of the truth.

Modern-day real and would-be political strongmen and dictators may not want to militarise society or conquer the world as Hitler did, but they nonetheless pose a threat to all of our freedoms. We can learn a good deal about what makes them successful by understanding what brought their predecessors such popularity.

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This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

Authors

Sir Richard J Evans

Sir Richard J Evans is Regius Professor Emeritus of History, University of Cambridge

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