Richard J. Evans is one of the world’s leading experts on Nazi Germany, and the author of the definitive three-volume account of German history from 1918 to 1945. A professor emeritus of history at Cambridge, Evans has just released his latest book, “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich,” an examination of the lives of individual Nazis, from leaders, such as Himmler and Goebbels, to lower-level servants of the regime.

I read Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich in 2016, between Donald Trump’s election victory and his Inauguration, out of some combination of morbid anxiety and perhaps the need to be reminded that things could always be much worse than they seemed at the time. And indeed, in the introduction to this latest book, he asks, “How do we explain the rise and triumph of tyrants and charlatans?” and makes clear that the project was motivated by a desire to understand the rise of right-wing politicians across the world during the past decade.

I recently spoke by phone with Evans. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different ways in which historians have tried to make sense of Hitler’s personality, how changing trends in German history have altered our understanding of the Nazis, and why many of Hitler’s closest associates have been misunderstood.

You say in the book that the idea for it arose in part because of new scholarship on the Nazis that’s come out since you finished your trilogy. What was that new scholarship, and why did it make you think that you wanted to do this?

Well, there was some real resistance against biographies, especially among German historians, up to around the turn of the century. Obviously, the great-man theory of history, the cult of the individual under Nazism, all of that made the idea of taking a biographical approach rather unfashionable. After I’d written my three-volume narrative history of the Nazi movement and the Third Reich, I moved on to other subjects. But involvement in a couple of television series which took a biographical approach made me realize that, despite all my work, I didn’t actually know a lot of the leading figures, not to mention others further down the chain of command in the Nazi movement. And in the meantime, historians had got much less allergic to the idea of biography, so a whole raft of biographies had appeared.

Notably, of course, there was Ian Kershaw’s wonderful two-volume biography of Hitler. But also a terrific biography of Ernst Röhm by Eleanor Hancock, biographies of Goebbels and Himmler by Peter Longerich, and a whole series of others, concluding with Volker Ullrich’s big, German, two-volume biography of Hitler, which added more detail to Kershaw. And on top of that there were also a lot of new documents, amazingly actually. You’d think everything had been released, but that was not true at all. So, thirty-two volumes of Goebbels’s diaries. Himmler’s appointments book came out in two volumes, with the second volume only a couple of years ago, after it had been discovered in an obscure Russian archive. I wrote a biography of Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, just a few years ago, so that also made me interested in writing biographies, and in biographical approaches to Nazism.

You said there was some skepticism about the idea of biography and the great-man theory of history from Germans. I know there had been some German biographies of Hitler, like the famous one by Joachim Fest, in the early nineteen-seventies. But you’re saying that because of the experience of Nazism, there was some resistance to pursuing biographies within Germany of the leading Nazi figures?

That’s right. Joachim Fest was a conservative journalist, not an academic historian, and he produced this book which was one of the first general histories of Nazism, in 1970, called “The Face of the Third Reich,” which did actually base itself on biographical chapters of leading Nazis, and a few representative figures. And nothing like that had been done since. And so, in a way, my book is based on Fest’s book, which is why I subtitled it “The Faces of the Third Reich.” But of course we know vastly more now than Fest did. And as I said, the real turning point came at the turn of the century—so fairly recently.

The turning point of more people willing to engage with this in Germany, you mean?

That’s right. When I began working on modern German history, the leading historians in Germany at the time, people like Hans-Ulrich Wehler, had this wonderful phrase of condemnation for people who took the biographical approach, which was “personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung,” meaning “personalizing historiography.” And indeed, the great classic works of modern history produced in the eighties and nineties had hardly any people in them at all, and certainly did not use quotations from individuals. They took a much more lofty approach, and used social-science approaches, and functionalist sociology in particular. We’ve moved away from that.

This is interesting because it’s not obvious that that would be the German response to the crimes of the Third Reich. You could have easily said, “Well, if you’re a country that perpetrated this, you want to blame it on the personalities of a few deranged individuals rather than looking for broader approaches.”

You have to switch back to the immediate postwar period, when there were numerous war-crimes trials of the surviving Nazi leaders. But most small fry, as it were, got away, and there was a national amnesia, particularly in West Germany. And it wasn’t really until after 1968 and the generational change that came about then with the student revolts and so on that things began to change—particularly after the reunification of Germany, in 1990, where you had more war-crimes trials. You’ve got the Holocaust coming to the center of historical approaches, particularly in the United States, but elsewhere, too. So the focus was on individual responsibility and on prosecuting those remaining war criminals who had survived, most of them now fairly elderly. But there was a long period in which that approach was not really adopted.

How did writing this book change your view of Hitler specifically?

Well, I decided to go back to the original sources, which was something my old tutor in Oxford, Martin Gilbert, said. I was his last undergraduate pupil before he became the official biographer of Winston Churchill. And he always sent me to the sources, and said, “Hey, don’t bother about arguments and about reading other historians.” So, in this instance, I followed his advice and plowed my way through a new, big, annotated, scholarly two-volume edition of “Mein Kampf,” multivolume editions of his speeches, and his writings, and declarations, and so on, and a number of new things emerged.

I hadn’t realized before the importance of what he emphasized in his speeches of the last years of the Weimar Republic. So, 1929 to 1932, when Hitler and Nazism really became popular. His emphasis was on restoring unity to the German people, on overcoming divisions he thought were hampering Germany.

I found an extraordinary speech given to Party members in 1930 before he came to power, about how Germany was going to rule the world. He used the word “Weltherrschaft,” which is “dominating the world,” essentially. And he said Germany had missed out in the first division of the world, as it were, a division of the spoils in the so-called scramble for Africa, and the era of colonialism in the eighteen-eighties. There’s going to be a war, he says quite openly to his followers in the Party, And we are going to win, and we’re going to take control of the world. It’s quite extraordinary. Of course, once he was in power, he wasn’t so open about it because a lot of his foreign-policy speeches in the thirties are designed to deceive other countries. But what he says to his followers is very revealing.

And so what did that tell you about him? What did you take from that?

A lot of historians and other observers have wanted to portray the scale of his ambitions as limited. There was no limit of time or space to his ambition for Germany as he saw it.

I read Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler, and I read the first two volumes of Stephen Kotkin’s life of Stalin. And I know some historians have tried to compare and contrast Hitler and Stalin, Alan Bullock most famously. What stuck out to me about it—and this is not a moral comment because they’re two of the most hideous men who have ever lived—but Stalin very much in Kotkin’s book is interacting with the world. He’s writing letters to people that seem sane. He’s commenting on art and culture and literature. He’s interacting with his wife in a sort of, I won’t say normal way, but he’s interacting with her in a sort of human way, at least part of the time. Whereas Hitler seems much less human.

Well, historians and biographers, including Ian Kershaw in those books, which I hugely admire, have tried to portray Hitler as a “man without qualities,” to quote the title of a very famous novel at the time. And I think they’re accepting Hitler too much at his own valuation of himself. Hitler would always say, I don’t have a private life. I’ve sacrificed everything for Germany. When people said, Why aren’t you married? He said, I’m married to Germany. In bios by Peter Longerich and others, it is very much the same portrayal. But, in fact, if you look closely, he did have a relatively normal, if you like, personal life. He fell in love. He had girlfriends. He eventually settled for Eva Braun, a much younger woman, but that’s not unique. I was struck by his medical records—his personal doctor, Theodor Morell, kept a very detailed log of what he prescribed, what drugs he gave, and all the rest of it, in case Hitler died suddenly. It’s very striking that before he spent a night with Eva Braun, he took a Viagra-like preparation made from bull’s testicles.

I thought your portrait of many of the high-ranking Nazis in this book was interesting because you don’t shy away from saying that at some level they were charlatans and cranks, but you do try to present them as being more complex than foaming-at-the-mouth monsters, talking about their interest in culture and so on.

Historians tended to write off the leading Nazis as psychopaths, as individually disturbed, or as marginal to German society in some way or another. And I think that’s a very worrying way of looking at them because it’s to detach them from the rest of us. It’s a way of saying, “They’re not human beings, so we don’t have to worry about the characteristics they would share with us.” And I try to present them as human beings. It’s clear, and this is another thing I learned, that they come, the leading Nazis—so Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Hitler himself—from the center of German society. They were solidly middle-class. They are not criminals, outcasts, marginal people. Joachim Fest, in his book “The Face of the Third Reich” was quite fond of describing them as petits bourgeois, but that’s a real kind of snobbery. Most were entirely respectable middle-class, not one single ex-communist or ex-socialist, nobody from the working class.

There’s actually a controversy going on in Germany at the moment about whether it is legitimate to “humanize” the Nazis. It’s around a film, a movie about Hitler and Goebbels, “Führer und Verführer,” leader and seducer, if you like. And I’m with those who defend that movie by saying, Nazis, yes, they were human. It makes it more difficult for us, of course, but we can’t just write them off as not being human. I was quite surprised to find the kind of bourgeois cultural accomplishments of some of them.

Hans Frank, the butcher of Poland, the governor general of Poland, was apparently an accomplished pianist. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most ruthless implementers of the Holocaust in the S.S., was almost a professional-level violinist. These were often cultured people. There’s a fantastic movie made during the war for American troops to tell them what they’re fighting against, called “The Hitler Gang.” It portrays the story of Nazism in the style of a nineteen-thirties gangster movie. It was very funny, but it’s very misleading. This was not a gang of criminals in occupation of Germany; these are people who came out of the middle of German society.

How much did you think in looking at these men as individuals—I’m talking about Hitler and other high-level Nazis—that they were driven by antisemitism specifically?

I was not surprised by the extent to which they were all driven by antisemitism. It’s very rare in the Nazi leadership to find someone who is not driven by antisemitism. Albert Speer, who came relatively late to the Nazi leadership, claimed not to have been, but that’s not true at all. He bought into the ideology of Nazism. Others, such as Julius Streicher, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, were fanatical antisemites. I think for some of them it was a personal, visceral hatred, while for others it was more a political imperative. But whatever the reasons, it spreads. It’s common across the Nazi leadership.

You also talk in this book about some people who were not high up in the regime, and whose roles have been debated by various scholars. What do you feel you learned in studying them?

Well, we’ve got two very different debates. One debate, from the nineteen-eighties, is about intentionalism versus functionalism. One side said Hitler was lazy, didn’t issue precise instructions, and so people had to guess what he would want. And when they guessed, they would always guess the most radical measure. And so that’s a self-radicalizing system, against so-called intentionalism, which is that everything happens because Hitler orders it to happen. And my view on that is in the middle. Hitler laid down the ground rules and the basic ideological parameters. And of course people sometimes had to fill in the details, but their guesses were always informed guesses. It’s Hitler who’s driving them on; it’s not a self-radicalization from below.

And then there’s a second debate, which took place in the nineties and two-thousands, about the motivation or conduct of what you might call low-level mass murderers, ordinary S.S. men, ordinary policemen, and even soldiers who massacre Jews—men, women, and children—in the course of the war. Is that a situation in which anybody in any time in history could have been impelled to operate, as Christopher Browning argues in his classic book “Ordinary Men”? You put people in a particular situation where there’s a war, their lives depend on the support of their comrades in the same unit, they have orders to kill, and so they carry them out?

Or is it, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen—who criticized Browning’s view—argued, a matter of the German national character? Goldhagen said that from the very beginning of German national consciousness—remember, Germany was not united, did not become a nation-state, until 1871—the whole drive toward a German nation-state had antisemitism as a key part of it. I disagree with that very strongly.

I guess I’m wondering how looking at more ordinary people changed the way you viewed German society and its complicity with the Third Reich.

Well, there’s been a huge body of work on ordinary perpetrators, partly sparked by the Browning-Goldhagen debate. We can now see the whole gamut of reasons why people carried out criminal orders, and it’s very interesting. I cite a journalist who, well after the war, in the sixties, attended a trial of former S.S. guards in Auschwitz who committed the most horrendous, sadistic, brutal crimes: murder, torture, and so on. And he said as they filed into the courtroom, and he saw these men, that they looked like kind of harmless bureaucrats, and many of them had fitted into postwar German society seamlessly. It was difficult to imagine how they committed these terrible crimes.

It’s rather reminiscent of what the philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil. These weren’t raving monsters. You have a Third Reich, which is constantly pumping out from every source—education, propaganda, newspapers, newsreels—hatred of Jews, blaming Jews for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and for everything that went wrong in Germany in the nineteen-twenties. You have along with that a moral system of Nazi Germany that upends most what you might call normal moralities. So words like “brutal,” “ruthless,” and “barbaric” become positive words of approbation in the Nazi propaganda apparatus. So that’s the context within which you have to see ordinary individuals in Nazi Germany. But it doesn’t excuse them in any way.

We make our moral decisions within a context. Marx said, “People make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing.” So to refer to that context doesn’t absolve people of the bad moral choices that they made. One of the things that Browning points out very effectively is that the policemen he studied were given the chance to say no when they were ordered to shoot Jews behind the Eastern Front during the war. And a number of them did, and they didn’t suffer any consequences.

About that Marx quote: one thing from your three-volume history that really struck me when I finished it was that there’s barely a page that went by where you’re not aware of the impact of the First World War and what it did to every aspect of German society.

Yes, there’s no change in my view. So right through these biographies I have just written in this book, the First World War emerges as a kind of massive social and psychological trauma. You can’t understand Nazism without beginning at the First World War, and that’s really absolutely crucial. One of the things that surprised me and I hadn’t been aware of before was how much Hitler, Himmler, and a lot of the other leading Nazis went through some kind of personal trauma, or family trauma. Some kind of dissent or loss of social status, loss of income, and so on.

And Hitler’s narrative, his central narrative, which he repeated endlessly in his speeches, was that he himself personally had suffered badly, was rescued by military service, and pulled himself up by his bootstraps in the twenties.

And he draws a parallel between that fate and the fate of the nation, which had suffered this terrible defeat in 1918, and then the Treaty of Versailles, and the humiliation of that, and then how he was going to rescue it. And indeed, how he did. He said, I rescued it from division, trauma, military humiliation, collapse, loss of international reputation, all the rest of it. And you can read that through the personal stories of many of the men who decided to follow him, and ended up playing crucial roles in Nazi Germany. ♦