Ordinary Germans

We know who they were, these men and women who served Adolf Hitler. We know what they did, because the ashes of so many millions lie under the fields and pavements of Europe, and because the words “Western Civilization” are still too charred to read. The thing we don’t know is what made them capable of doing it.

A master historian like Richard Evans, the author of three deservedly famous books on the Third Reich, must turn first to what the Nazis did and what the consequences were.¹ But he evidently remains tormented by the simple, nonacademic questions that twenty-first-century people still ask. How could the Nazis, as members of the human species, have done what they did? Could they be explained away as freaks, moral perverts, sadistic psychopaths, or war-crippled spirits driven by masochistic obedience or fantasies of vengeance?

Evans does not waste much sympathy on those thoughts, which lead toward an absurd guilty-but-insane verdict. He is, of course, too young to have lived in Hitler’s time. But an example of what lies before his eyes as he writes is what British soldiers saw when they entered the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945:

Some 60,000 starving and disease-ridden inmates were found inside, with another 13,000 lying dead and unburied around them; 14,000 of the survivors were so weak that they died within a few weeks of liberation.

The young camp guard Irma Grese was still there when the British arrived. She was “seemingly unaware that she had anything to fear from the representatives of the Allies.” The press went wild about her during her trial, creating a monster of sadistic sexuality that went far beyond her provable crimes of revolting cruelty and murder. But Evans doesn’t diagnose her as a monster: “Grese came across…as a rather immature, simple young woman who had little idea of why she was being demonized”—an unquestioning Nazi to the end. They hanged her eight months later.

During the war, people in Allied countries (and occupied ones too) generally assumed that there was something deviant, aberrant, about the Germans and their leaders—a deformity, in fact. As a wartime child I listened to English soldiers singing as they tramped past in the rain: “’Itler’s only got one ball. Göring’s got two but ver-ee small. ’Immler…” and so on. (If they marched through a village, the sergeant made them change to “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”) Twenty years later, before the Frankfurt “Auschwitz Trial,” journalists were taken to view the accused camp personnel in a dim basement under the Paulskirche. Seeing the terrible face of the torturer Wilhelm Boger—the yellow eyes and boulder skull—I felt for a moment that I was looking at some throwback hominin, not a twentieth-century Homo sapiens. But that thought had to be shaken off.

It was more challenging to face up to the notion that the low-level perpetrators and their commanders were just “ordinary men.” Christopher Browning’s 1992 book of that title broke the hearts of many who believed in humanity. It showed the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, often middle-aged family men with no fanatical Nazi views, shooting naked and defenseless Jewish villagers and their children into pits day after day, a total of some 38,000 victims. They were not even under compulsion. If a man said that he had had enough and asked to be withdrawn from execution duty, he was not punished. Since then, as Evans shows, research has weakened some of Browning’s conclusions. The policemen were volunteers, not conscripts; “they were carefully selected according to ideological criteria…. Their training included heavy doses of Nazi ideology and antisemitic indoctrination.” In short, they were not quite “ordinary men,” or a random sample.

But Evans writes later in Hitler’s People that the “hundreds of thousands of Germans [who] committed unspeakable atrocities” acted with free will and often with enthusiasm. They “positively enjoyed what they were doing.” That leads back toward Daniel Goldhagen’s spectacular claim in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) that “exterminatory” antisemitism and a yearning for dictatorship had long been integral to the German sense of identity: the nation as collective monster, indeed. Evans dismisses some of Goldhagen’s arguments (“an updated version of the wartime propaganda”) and offers a more nuanced reflection: Nazi perpetrators and leaders were not freaks, but they had been brought up in a culture of rancid, self-pitying national paranoia after the defeat of 1918. Almost all the prominent Nazis came from middle-class families with right-wing values—patriotism, antisemitism, fear of “Bolshevism”—for whom righteous violence seemed a sign of manliness.

Evans is attempting, in his own painstaking and carefully judicious way, to answer those two indelible popular questions about Nazi leaders and perpetrators: How could they have? Were they abnormal? His answers could be summarized as: the Nazis were not ordinary people; they were ordinary German people, living in the firestorm of hatred and delusion ignited after World War I.

Hitler’s People is divided into four parts: “The Leader,” “The Paladins,” “The Enforcers,” and “The Instruments.” Evans starts with a ninety-page essay on Adolf Hitler, a full, elegantly written account of the Führer’s life that uses the new research of the past few years to update older narratives. As he does throughout the book, he corrects some venerable myths and false details that have fossilized into accepted fact. The story that Hitler was psychologically crippled in his early years by a sadistic father and the death of his mother is ill-founded: “He did not…grow up in poverty; nor does his father Alois seem to have been an alcoholic.” He did not acquire his overwhelming antisemitism in Vienna but much later in Munich, after he emerged from World War I. It was not “big business” that financed and propelled him to power; many leading industrialists were repulsed by Nazi violence and disorder in the 1930s and backed other parties. He was not a drug addict in his last year, which ended in the Berlin bunker; his medication was “conventional,” and he was a wreck mainly because he was suffering from Parkinson’s. And Hitler was not invariably “cold” and “unemotional” or lacking a private life. He sought the company (though rarely more) of a series of pretty women, and at home with friends in the Bavarian Alps he could seem jokey and entertaining. But nothing now remains of the myth that he possessed Napoleonic military genius (the “greatest general of all time,” as the German media called him). The only mystery is how German armies survived to fight so long and so stubbornly under the disastrous orders he screamed to his generals.

Historians have held contrasting views on how Hitler came to exercise such absolute power after 1933. Evans notes that “the conservative German journalist” Joachim Fest concluded in 1973 that Hitler somehow expressed the general disorientation of the German people. Ian Kershaw, in his two-volume biography in the late 1990s, “portrayed Hitler as in part the creation of a ‘charismatic community’ of enthusiastic disciples whose adulation pushed the Nazi leader into an ever-stronger belief in himself.” The German historian Peter Longerich rejected this: Hitler was nobody else’s creation, and he alone achieved his total dominance. By 1940, after his conquest of France and much of Central Europe, he reached a frenzied peak of self-assertion, spraying Germany with Trump-like superlatives. The invasion of France was “the greatest battle of all time,” and the conquest of other European states was the “mightiest series of battles in world history.” Most recently scholars have grown interested in the practice by senior Nazi officials of “working towards the Führer,” that is, anticipating how the erratic Hitler might have carried out a policy he had left unexplained or uncompleted. It’s argued, not very convincingly, that this guesswork led to continual radicalizations of policy that he might not initially have intended.

Almost all the biographies in this book record the overwhelming impact of meeting Hitler for the first time. Some Nazis exaggerated its force, as if to excuse their subsequent crimes. Evans cannot quite explain it. Part of it, we can assume, was a suppressed wish to be morally dominated by a convincing leader. But part was tricks: Hitler’s use of his large eyes to drill into men’s psyches; his insistence on audiences spread broadly around him, not facing him lengthwise; his demagogic oratory (first lulling them with dull, impressive “facts,” then suddenly raising his voice to a shout and bursting into rabble-rousing passion). He spread the crazy conspiracy theories that drove him—above all, the idea of the Jewish world conspiracy in alliance with “Bolsheviks”—and yet he was skeptical about mystic cultishness. Evans could have written effectively about Hitler’s scorn for the pseudo-archaeology of the German race cooked up by Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg. (It may be only a myth that he lost patience with Himmler’s excavations and exploded: “Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no past?”)

Evans does not conceal his own horror at the sheer ruthlessness of Hitlerite terror, a boundless hatred culminating in the Holocaust. Perhaps inevitably he gives only a few pages to anything worthwhile that the Nazi regime might have achieved. Yet the social welfare programs launched by Robert Ley and the Labor Front were vast and innovative, from the “Strength Through Joy” cruises and cultural activities for workers to improved, more egalitarian conditions in workplaces. All this was authoritarian, erected on the ruins of the crushed trade unions. But for the first time the working classes could feel that a German government, even a fascist tyranny, was deliberately using its energies in their interest.

Some of that feeling survived the collapse of the Reich. It’s worth remembering that parts of Germany were scarcely affected by the bombing and battles of the war. For many Germans, the disaster came in the two years following the defeat, when millions suddenly found themselves lacking food, heat, work, and even soap. For this shame, people were disinclined to blame Hitler. The past was seen through selective tunnel vision. I remember being struck speechless when an old lady in Bonn said to me, “Say what you like about him, but in Adolf’s time at least there was no crime!”

The “paladins,” the leading Nazis who formed Hitler’s “court,” were variously explained away by their Allied conquerors. Churchill, invoking old American movies, called them “gangsters.” The Allied Control Commission observed unhelpfully that “so grotesque and preposterous are the principal characters in this galaxy of clowns and crooks” that it was impossible to see how anyone “could have taken them for rulers.” The psychiatrists appointed to observe the Nuremberg defendants asserted that they were variously psychopathic: Rudolf Hess was “a self-perpetuated hysteric”; Julius Streicher was “paranoid”; Ley had “frontal lobe damage” and “organic brain disease”; and so on. It was an English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who compared them to Roman courtiers. Evans rather agrees. It’s remarkable, he observes, that almost all of them survived to the bitter end. Unlike Stalin, who had most of his paladins arrested and shot, Hitler did not extend his paranoia to his inner circle until they began to desert him in the final days of the war.

Evans includes brief biographies of the members of that inner circle: Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Ernst Röhm, and Rosenberg. He omits Martin Bormann, the grim careerist who rose after 1942 to become Hitler’s secretary and—next to the Führer himself—the most powerful figure in the Reich. With very few exceptions (Göring’s antisemitism was “perfunctory and conventional,” while Speer exploited the enslavement of Europe’s Jews without subscribing to racial theorizing), Evans insists that most of Hitler’s paladins believed unquestioningly and passionately in a “Jewish world conspiracy” that was directing the policies of foreign powers against Germany. This belief, he implies, was the most enduring motive for their actions and choices.

But there are other ways of looking at Nazi beliefs. The late Erhard Eppler, a radical Christian who became “the conscience of the Social Democrats” in postwar West Germany, used to invoke the Roman fasces as the image of twentieth-century fascism: a bundle of quite disparate rods (or policies) held together by the strap of the leader. When the strap is cut, the rods scatter, and people could claim that “I agreed with Hitler about revising the Versailles Treaty or ‘degenerate culture,’ but I always thought the persecution of the Jews a grave mistake. So I never believed in the whole fasces-bundle. So I was never truly a Nazi!” To which Evans’s book in effect retorts: During the Third Reich, you could not pick and choose between “rods.” You either accepted or rejected the bundle as a whole.

General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commanding Army Group North in the Baltic, was revolted by the SS massacres of Jews around his units but did nothing to stop them, although he was formally responsible for what took place in his region. He and his deputy “accepted at the very least that there was a ‘Jewish question’ that was urgent enough to justify compulsory sterilization.” In his chapter on Franz von Papen, the right-wing politician who helped Hitler come to power in 1933, and in many other essays in the book, Evans reminds us how widespread a “conventional” antisemitism—no longer restricted to religious prejudice—had become in twentieth-century Europe. In many ways, the appalling experience of fascism has overshadowed the sheer nastiness of the European conservative parties it replaced: class-based, crudely patriotic, authoritarian, and clerical, often with racist colonial ambitions, and violently opposed to the political expression of the working class.

The broad notion behind Hitler’s People is that recent history requires the study of individuals. Evans is instinctively suspicious of broad-brush collective analyses. Writing about General von Leeb and the reputation of the Wehrmacht, he notes that “social-science approaches to history, dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, strengthened…anonymizing tendencies.” It was not until the 1990s that a traveling exhibition caused furious protest in Germany by demonstrating that the Wehrmacht, and not just the SS, had committed widespread mass murder and crimes against humanity during World War II. At the same time historians began to examine the choices and conduct of individual Wehrmacht commanders, such as Leeb. Ironically enough, this had already been done fifty years earlier but then concealed. The American military tried fourteen German generals in 1948, including Leeb, and gave eleven of them heavy prison sentences, “but as the Cold War got under way, the Americans came under huge pressure from West German institutions”; the West needed to revive the German army, and the generals were freed.

It’s fair to say that the lives (and deaths) of most of Evans’s subjects are reasonably well known. What he adds is twofold: first, a scrubbing away of false myths; second, a sharp-edged series of discussions about the changing verdicts of historians over the eighty years since the Reich was destroyed. Hess, for instance, was not mad, although he pretended to be at his trial. He had once been a fanatical and effective deputy führer, and his lone flight to Scotland in 1941 to find the Duke of Hamilton and make a separate peace was not crazy, in the sense that it fit into the utterly distorted Nazi view of how the world worked.

Evans’s chapter on Adolf Eichmann becomes a “trial” of Hannah Arendt and her endlessly debated concept of “the banality of evil.” He stoutly defends her:

This phrase was widely, sometimes willfully misunderstood. What she meant by “the banality of evil” was not that Eichmann was a mere bureaucrat…. For Arendt, he was typical of the kind of person who…were the executors of regimes like Hitler’s or Stalin’s: second-rate minds, lacking the faculty of independent or creative thought.

Evans shows that, far from being a faceless operative with no opinions, Eichmann was “a deep-dyed antisemite” and “a man of overweening ambition” who “lacked any kind of moral intelligence.” Hans Frank, the Nazis’ favorite courtroom lawyer, suddenly found himself ruling the “General Government” of occupied Poland. He is remembered now for his deliberate extermination of Poland’s elites (“the Polish lands are to be changed into an intellectual desert”) and for his corruption—he looted portable treasures from all over Eastern Europe. Less well known is Frank’s delusional attempt to outflank his rival Himmler by preaching a return to the rule of law, only to be silenced by an infuriated Hitler.

Evans shows no mercy for Speer, whose personal myth of being just a nonpolitical technocrat who tried to restrain the worst excesses was swallowed whole or in part by so many biographers and historians. He joins the consensus, however, in finding no good word to say about Ribbentrop, Hitler’s abominable ambassador to London and later foreign minister. Absurdly crude and tactless, Ribbentrop greeted the British king with a Sieg Heil salute that only just missed the royal nose. He sought to keep in Hitler’s favor by pushing his policies to extremes; at the end of the war, it was Ribbentrop who organized the overthrow of the Hungarian government in order to ensure the murder of Hungary’s Jews. The terrifying Reinhard Heydrich, the expressionless Aryan “god” who was head of the Gestapo and the SS, was dogged by the false whisper that he had Jewish ancestry. From a musical family, he played the violin beautifully. His boss Himmler was only briefly a chicken farmer; Evans shows that this man, more directly responsible than anyone for the murder of millions, was intensely concerned with respectability. He forced the SS into shirts and ties and smart black uniforms, and in his 1943 “Posen speeches” to his assembled killers insisted on the maintenance of “decency” (Anstand) as they shot and gassed.

A few women appear in Hitler’s People, in spite of the regime’s “hyper-masculine ideas of toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” and its pseudo-Germanic segregation of gender roles. Two of them—Ilse Koch and Irma Grese—were concentration camp guards, but Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was Reich women’s leader, heading the huge Frauenschaft organization. Recent research has shown that its members—and many German women who were not members—were

deeply involved in many aspects of the regime, even if they did not engage directly in its crimes. As wives and mothers, they knew, and for the most part tolerated or approved of, and sometimes even assisted in, the crimes of their menfolk.

As for the Reich’s most famous and argued-over woman, the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the book includes the photograph of her aghast face as she watched German soldiers open fire on a crowd of Jewish civilians. Evans recognizes her astounding talent, but he is unsparing about her long, intimate friendship with Hitler and her inestimable services to the image of Nazi Germany. Demolishing her efforts to denazify her past, Evans resurrects Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” published in these pages, which demonstrated the hidden continuities in Riefenstahl’s work, from Nazi propaganda in the 1930s to her postwar filming of Nuba tribesmen in Sudan.²

He follows this by reminding readers (Eppler’s fasces image again) that “there were many Germans who were not fanatical Nazis but supported Nazism because it put into practice a sufficient range of their desires and aspirations for them to discount the other aspects.” His witness for this is the decades-long diary kept by the outwardly ordinary housewife Luise Solmitz in Hamburg. Solmitz felt patriotic ecstasy when she first heard Hitler speak in 1932 and was “drunk with enthusiasm” when he became chancellor; her only reservation was that the Nazis might turn out to be too “socialist.” She even denounced her brother for “disloyalty,” saying that she preferred to betray her own sibling rather than betray Hitler: “Like many other middle-class Germans, she was willing to accept almost any measure taken by the Nazis if it could be justified in terms of maintaining order and warding off the threat of revolution.” And yet she was married to a Jew.

Her husband, Friedrich Solmitz, was a decorated war veteran whose family had converted to Lutheranism and had lost any connection with the Jewish community. But as war approached, restrictions on this “non-Aryan” began to bite on the pair and on their “mixed-race” daughter Gisela, forbidden now to matriculate or to marry an “Aryan” German. Luise raged on Gisela’s behalf and even wrote a protesting letter to the Führer, but she recorded in her diary that “we were all exhilarated by happiness and enthusiasm” after Germany’s victory over France in 1940. Then, gradually, the balance between her pride in Hitler’s achievements and her distress over gathering antisemitism began to tip. Somehow Gestapo attempts to deport Friedrich (to his death, they could guess) were fended off by reference to his medals and his Aryan wife. But as the British air offensive against Hamburg began, killing 40,000 people in a few nights of firestorm, Luise turned at last against Hitler himself: “A great man,” she wrote, “is only one who knows how to moderate himself.” After the dictator’s suicide, she called him “the shabbiest failure in world history.” But as Evans notes, she always avoided identifying herself and Friedrich with the collective fate of Germany’s Jews: “Hitler’s ultimate crime indeed in her view was that he betrayed Germany.”

To emerge from Evans’s long gallery of criminals against humanity is to feel educated but pessimistic. So many of them came from respectable middle-class families, were educated, and played stringed instruments with love and skill. Is it possible that they were not only cruel and fanatical but also stupid? Evans won’t have this: “Many Nazis were neither stupid nor ignorant, but highly educated and well informed.” Well informed? It’s almost impossible now to imagine how little nations knew about one another ninety years ago and how they filled that void with every kind of cartoonish stereotype. Germany, knocked senseless by military, economic, and political disaster, was especially delusive. And yet the evidence about international reality was available. It took genuine stupidity for Nazis of normal intelligence to believe—or choose to believe—in a world Jewish conspiracy, or that the Duke of Hamilton could pull Britain out of the war, or that General de Gaulle would join Himmler in a new war against Britain. All those absurdities arose from the same stupidity and often willful ignorance that made Irma Grese expect a friendly welcome from the Allied troops liberating Bergen-Belsen. Evans concludes that Germans in that period “exercised their own individual will when making the decisions they took.” But one of those decisions was to abandon critical reason. Gloomily, he warns that the invitation to wide-eyed stupidity, ignoring evidence and common sense, has returned to degrade politics today.