Book Talk: Hitler’s People, Richard J. Evans

Who were the Nazis? What happened to their moral compass? Join us for a discussion of a new biographical study of the lives and personalities of the leaders and functionaries of the Nazi regime, which offers a new way to understand the atrocities that followed.

In the last twenty years our knowledge of the lives of ordinary Germans of the Nazi era has been transformed by the publication diaries, letters and memoirs, from the complete Goebbels diaries to the appointments book of Heinrich Himmler, alongside numerous previously unavailable sources offering a deeper view of the lives of Nazi perpetrators at every level of society. Hitler’s People uses this material to create surprising and compelling portraits not only of Hitler and his inner circle, Göring, Goebbels, Eichmann and many others, but also of the middle-ranking and low-level Nazi individuals who provided the scaffolding for a regime that murdered millions and launched the most destructive war in history.

Of the leading Nazis, almost all of them solidly middle-class, educated and cultured (a number of them were accomplished musicians, for example, such as Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reinhard Heydrich or Hans Frank); the notorious antisemite Julius Streicher wrote lyric poetry that has been described as ‘quite attractive’ and painted watercolours as a hobby; while ordinary conservative middle-class people, such as Luise Solmitz, could be married to a Jew yet support the regime to the extent that she even denounced her own brother for his liberal views.

Illustrated with telling photographs, questions of what made ordinary people become ‘perpetrators’, ‘bystanders’ and ‘victims’ are understood within a wider context of coercion and consent, of psychological makeup and events. As we see the re-emergence of autocratic ‘strongmen’, there are lessons to be learned on the nature and appeal of dictatorship.

Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.

Dr Toby Simpson has been Director of The Wiener Holocaust Library since 2019. He completed his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge supervised by Richard Evans with a thesis on criminology and post-war criminal justice reforms in West and East Germany. He led the project Testifying to the Truth: Eyewitnesses to the Holocaust which catalogued, digitised, and translated over 1,000 eyewitness accounts, gathered by the WHL between 1954 and 1961. Dr Simpson joined the WHL in 2011, setting up a new programme of exhibitions, tours, and events.

Host or Publisher The Wiener Library