Jim Kelly at the Air Mail: For many decades, most historians of Nazi Germany have tended to focus on the country’s institutions and traditions and even German citizens themselves to explain what you call “this darkest of all chapters in modern history.” The biographical approach of examining Hitler and his lieutenants was downplayed lest it look like all blame was being placed on just a few. That has now changed. Why?
Richard J. Evans: Professional historians, especially in Germany, very much wanted to avoid the kind of “great man” approach that became so central under Nazism and before. They wanted an objective, impersonal kind of history based on social-science models, explaining Nazism in terms of broad trends and developments and avoiding what they called, in a term intended to be derogatory, “personalizing history-writing” (personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung). This also reflected the rise of social-science history more generally in the 1970s and 1980s. This trend delivered a lot of important work on Nazism, for example, in quantifying who voted for Hitler, who belonged to the Nazi Party, and the like, but it also had a distancing effect.
Toward the end of the 20th century, this approach began to reach its limits, and historians began to focus more on cultural and emotional history as tools of explanation, which pointed toward biography. The trend was strengthened by a growing distance in time from the Nazi period as well as an increase from the 1990s in prosecutions of former Nazis and, especially, restitution and compensation actions related to Nazi crimes, again pointing to issues of individual responsibility.
J.K.: You offer a brilliant survey of previous biographies of Hitler, each one emphasizing different factors in his rise to power. Some were criticized for humanizing Hitler, but, of course, he was human, which may mean we have to redefine what being human means. As you point out, Hitler was neither a political nor military genius, he benefited enormously from the ruinous toll of the Great Depression and by aligning himself with conservative and nationalist elites, and in the end was thus allowed to exercise what you call the core of his worldview: “a visceral race hatred of what he called the ‘Jewish world-enemy.’” So let me ask you this: could another German dictator who had all the attributes of Hitler absent the virulent anti-Semitism still have started World War II?
R.J.E.: Yes. The most likely alternative to Hitler in 1933 was a military dictatorship. While the German generals were not as obsessed with anti-Semitism as Hitler was, they were consumed with the desire to rerun World War I and conquer Europe again. They would also most likely have imposed some restrictions on the Jews.
J.K.: Hitler has often been depicted as a loner, with no personal life, a depressive in his younger days who had contemplated suicide, someone fearful of intimacy. Yet, as you point out, he was loyal to staff and depended on them to bolster his self-confidence, and so many of them stayed with him until the very end. You write about many of them in a section called “The Paladins,” and argue that to brand them as a criminal gang of psychopaths is too simplistic. Why so?
R.J.E.: Because they were not psychopaths but normal people living in abnormal times. The leading Nazis came from the German middle class and had many features of middle-class culture, such as a good education, cultural strengths (a good number were fine amateur musicians or had a strong interest in visual art), a military background, and a comfortable childhood and upbringing.
At the same time, many experienced a drastic collapse in their social and economic position either before or at the end of World War I, to which Hitler offered a solution linked to his constantly repeated view of Germany itself collapsing as a viable and stable nation in 1918. Calling men like Goebbels or Eichmann psychopaths dehumanizes them and allows us all to put them outside the normal bounds of human society, thus saying that no normal human being could have committed the crimes they carried out. This is too easy an evasion of human responsibility.
J.K.: Is it fair to say that Nazism brought out in many people the sort of behavior that other societies routinely punish, in the sense that brutality and hatred were celebrated and encouraged? You seem to be saying that if many of these people had lived in, say, Switzerland, their violent and abusive desires would not have emerged the way they did under Nazism.
R.J.E.: Yes, I think this surmise is broadly correct. Nazism upended conventional morality, so that peace and peacefulness were despised, and violence, rudeness, and aggression were valorized.
J.K.: The seeds of Nazism were very much planted in the defeated soil of World War I, and Hitler tapped into both an anger and inferiority complex that propelled him to power. Today, there are strong leaders with deep authoritarian instincts that rely on resentment to fuel their careers, but your book is so detailed about what made Nazism unique that I came away both appalled by the past but pretty confident that a carbon copy of Hitler could not achieve that prominence today. Am I too optimistic?
R.J.E.: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain is said to have remarked. Nazism was very much a product of World War I, and it included a militaristic drive to foreign conquest and the regimentation of society that one can’t see in authoritarian leaders or would-be dictators in today’s world. They may be nationalistic, but populist politicians like Trump, Le Pen, or Orbán don’t seriously intend to invade other countries or put their followers into jackboots and military uniforms. They do flirt with anti-Semitism, but they don’t orchestrate the kind of anti-Semitic measures taken by Hitler…
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