Hitler's People

The Faces of the Third Reich

By: Richard J. Evans

Narrated by: Leighton Pugh

Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews

“A fascinating and instructive book . . . elegantly written and perceptive.” —Wall Street Journal

“Kaleidoscopic . . . A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context . . . Just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.”—The New York Times

Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?

Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler’s People, he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members.

Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist’s eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies—like Goebbels, the regime’s propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust’s chief architect—to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten—like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler’s People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions.

Nearly a century after Hitler’s rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility—and even between pathological evil and rational choice—are never easily drawn.

©2024 Richard J. Evans (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Evans has chronicled Nazi Germany before, but never with such urgency . . . His previous books . . . are models of historical writing, a combination of narrative and exploration, scholarship for the sake of scholarship and yet volumes that are immensely readable, even novelistic in style . . . Hitler’s People is similar in its polish and power. But the motivation and purpose of this latest work, a sweeping examination of Adolf Hitler and his subalterns and subjects, is more utilitarian.”—Boston Globe

“Evans is a wonderful stylist as well as a keen analyst, and in his latest book, Hitler’s People, he deftly focuses on the personalities and temperaments of those who fell under the sway of Nazism and abetted the most evil regime in modern history. Any reader will come away wiser about the Third Reich, if still confounded that it existed at all . . . a brilliant survey of previous biographies of Hitler, each one emphasizing different factors in his rise to power.”—Air Mail

“Call it a roll call of the demonic and demented. Sir Richard . . . is a vivid portraitist who manages to be both unsparing and enlightening. Dealers in death like Rohm, Himmler, Rosenberg, and Heydrich come alive . . . Sir Richard is as adroit sketching the wrecked paradigms and virulent ideologies that made Nazism possible as he is at pointillist renderings of pathologies that made mediocrities into monsters. He has a novelist’s eye for detail . . . Hitler’s People does for the paladins of the Third Reich what Suetonius’s “Lives of the Caesars” did for the Roman Empire and Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” did for the Renaissance—tell a story of an era by way of its people.”—New York Sun

Good companion to his other books

I’ve listened to Richard Evans’ trilogy on the Third Reich (as well as many other books on that era) and this is a fine companion to those. You’ll hear some overlap with many other books but the study itself good and worth a listen.

The Complicit German citizens in committing atrocities.

I liked the exposure of average German comp-licitness in mass murder of innocent fellow citizens by participating or by ignoring and never opposing the process. This scale of injustice was going on all around them openly and not in secret 🤫

Very insightful thorough review of this very perplexing period of time. The narrator was outstanding

Excellent presentation.

A bit of a slow beginning, but if you stay with it, you will be most pleased. Best scholarly piece on the subject I have ever experienced. Well done!!

Good overall review of the major players in the Nazi regime

First of all I perceived this book as a collection of separate essays on the Nazi players. Each chapter is not connected to any of the other chapters. It also doesn’t bring much new material into the background of these major Nazi members. Where I found the most interest was in the minor Nazis that were presented in the last few chapters. These chapters were not only well written but also added incite to the mind of more everyday people that were sucked into the Nazi culture. Worth the listen.

Outstanding

The reading is terrific; the scholarship singular and the information enormous. Don’t miss it reading it!

Better than a barrel of dolphins

Know your Nazis test after each chapter and if I’m a raptor mob feud

Onnthevcraptor

that it gave a general overview of each person

I wish it went deeper into the crimes of the people who were guilty of murder.

Superb.

Professor Evan’s’ books on Nazi Germany are exceptional. A scholar who covers the topic such that anybody can understand.