Richard J. Evans, in Hitler’s People: The Faces Of The Third Reich (Penguin Press), focuses on a rogue’s gallery of Nazis who created a fascist dictatorship and drove Germany into war, genocide and defeat in World War II.

“Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime,” writes Evans, a distinguished historian and scholar of modern Germany.

His biographical approach, which was unfashionable after the war, is modelled after Joachim Fest’s classic work, The Face Of The Third Reich, published in 1963. It’s a sound method, enabling readers to better understand the mindset of the Third Reich’s elite.

Evans’ book is divided into four segments. The first part examines Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party and Germany’s chancellor from 1933 to 1945. The second one focuses on his circle of subordinates. The third zeroes in on the enablers and executors of national socialist ideology. The fourth and last section surveys Hitler’s followers among ordinary Germans.

Evans, a former professor of history at Cambridge University, succeeds in drawing vivid and incisive portraits of “otherwise normal” Germans who carried out or approved unprecedented atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust. Evans has a masterful grasp of his topic and writes in a fluid and accessible style that both general readers and experts are likely to appreciate.

Unsurprisingly, he leads off with Hitler, without whom, he correctly notes, there would have been “no Third Reich, no World War II, and no Holocaust.” Which is precisely why Hitler has been the subject of countless biographies ranging from Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study In Tyranny to Volker Ullrich’s two-volume Hitler: A Biography.

Evans launches into his introductory essay with a bold assertion: “For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody.”

An aspiring artist rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Hitler as a young man led an aimless existence, subsisting on his mother’s inheritance, an orphan’s pension, handouts from relatives, and the sale of paintings copied from postcards. “Of all the Nazi leaders, he was the most declasse,” Evans says.

Although an Austrian by birth, he enlisted in the German army, signing up for service only two weeks after the outbreak of World War I. A dispatch runner, he won an Iron Cross for exceptional bravery. He took control of what would be the fledgling Nazi Party due to his exceptional oratorical skills.

Hitler’s obsessive antisemitism was formed in Vienna, as he claims in Mein Kampf, his turgid manifesto that would become a bestseller and earn him wealth. As Evans expertly explains in voluminous detail, Germany’s ignominious defeat in the war exacerbated his antipathy toward Jews.

The Nazi Party never won more than about a third of the vote in elections. Yet its status as the party with the greatest plurality prompted the aging president, Paul von Hindenburg, to appoint Hitler as chancellor. He and his fellow conservatives mistakenly thought they could control and sideline him. Instead, Hitler proceeded to create a dictatorship.

Evans suggests that Hitler sought not only to reestablish Germany as a great power after the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, but to rule the world. The “moment of Hitler’s greatest triumph” occurred when........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)