Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich

Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and Air Mail

“A fascinating and instructive book . . . elegantly written and perceptive.” —Wall Street Journal

“Kaleidoscopic . . . A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context . . . Just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.” —The New York Times

Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question: How does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?

Richard J. Evans, author of the acclaimed Third Reich trilogy and more than a dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Ger­many. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler’s People he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement—namely, the lives of its most important and representative members.

Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Hitler’s People forms a typological framework of German society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist’s eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal characteristics and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies—such as Goebbels, the regime’s propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust’s chief architect—to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten, such as the schoolteacher Julius Streicher or the actress and film director Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler’s People lays bare the characters whose choices caused the deaths of millions.

Nearly a century after Hitler’s rise, the leading nations of the west are once again being torn apart by an untamed will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous individuals as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the compli­cated nature of agency and complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility—and even between pathological evil and rational choice—are never easily drawn.