This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

History records nothing more vile than Hitler and his henchmen. At the height of his power in 1942, Heinrich Himmler boasted that “the Führer has laid this very serious command [extermination of the Jews in occupied eastern Europe] upon my shoulders. No one can take it away from me.” By the end of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring had become a “voluptuary”, wearing lipstick and dressing in a toga, accompanied by a suitcase containing most of the world’s supply of the drug paracodeine. Joseph Goebbels, meanwhile, devoted his brief reign as Hitler’s successor to poisoning his six children. 

The word “Nazi” has become synonymous with evil. Inevitably, therefore, it has also lost much of its original meaning — a case of Hegel’s “night in which all cows are black”. There is a danger that new generations will no longer know what made the Nazis and their crimes uniquely heinous. 

Professor Sir Richard Evans has gathered a representative sample of “Hitler’s people”, ranging from the monstrous to the grotesque, into a single volume. It’s not a work of original research but a collective portrait of “the faces of the Third Reich”. Their unifying factor is the Führerprinzip — their unquestioning obedience to and adulation for Adolf Hitler.

Hero-worship in this, its most sinister form, is still with us. From Narendra Modi to Donald Trump, from Marine Le Pen to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, democracies are still menaced by demagogues. If we are honest, we have all felt the gravitational attraction of “charisma” — a secularised theological concept coined by Max Weber to denote the political authority exerted by an extraordinary individual. Evil often elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Charisma in this sense is contemporaneous with the emergence of Hitler. His cult of charismatic leadership is indistinguishable from the ideology of National Socialism. Cults of this kind had already been prefigured in his day by those of Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin. But the case of Hitler, who cultivated the phenomenon in its most extreme form, remains the paradigm. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and other contemporary despots are still in his debt.

Nazi Germany was indeed run by legions of little Hitlers, each demanding obeisance whilst lording it over their frequently competing or overlapping jurisdictions. The Third Reich was, in this sense alone, a diabolical reincarnation of the First, the Holy Roman Empire, with its patchwork of feudal domains. No medieval monarch, though, had the technological means to inflict such mayhem and misery upon humanity.

Evans begins with the dictator himself, showing how “it was Hitler’s ideological obsessions that provided the essential foundation for everything that happened in the Nazi movement and the Third Reich”. Neo-Nazi apologists pretend that the Führer had never ordered the Holocaust. Yet only a Hitler could have kept an entire continent in thrall to his paranoid theory of “the concerted conspiracy of Jewish capitalists and Jewish Bolsheviks”. 

It is impossible to disagree with Evans when he calls the Nazi ideology “the most murderous in history”. But he might have included amongst “Hitler’s people” the more sophisticated exponents of that ideology, such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, who are still influential to this day.

Then come “the Paladins”, the men who turned their Führer’s nightmarish vision into reality: Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ernst Röhm, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg and Albert Speer. If they had not existed, Hitler would have had to invent them — but they were all his creatures. If you think you know these arch-fiends, look again at their depravities, dissemblings and denials.

A third section deals with “the Enablers”, scarcely less notorious but more subordinate accomplices who made themselves indispensable in various ways: Rudolf Hess, Franz von Papen, Robert Ley, Julius Streicher, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and Hans Frank. 

Amongst these executives of infamy, Papen might seem to be the odd man out: an aristocratic conservative nationalist rather than a Nazi, whose main role was over before Hitler’s had begun, and hence was treated leniently at Nuremberg. Yet Papen too, as Hans “the Butcher of Poland” Frank said at their trial, had been “an ardent Hitler supporter all along”.

In his fourth and final section, “the Instruments”, Evans offers a mixed bag of representative Nazis, who would later claim to have been merely following orders. They include Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, the archetypal Wehrmacht general, whose troops starved and slaughtered millions on the Eastern front, but was let off lightly at Nuremberg. Or Karl Brandt, “the professional”, who began as Hitler’s physician and became one of the most vicious perpetrators of human medical experiments. 

Evans also includes some of “the killers”. the “ordinary Germans” who ran the camps. Like many Nazis, Paul Zapp and Egon Zill were both failures who seized the opportunities offered by the new regime to rise through the SS to positions in which they could exercise unlimited power over their helpless victims. Slightly less culpable but no less feared for their sadism were Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, known respectively as “the Beast” and “the Witch” by the prisoners in their camps. 

Women were, of course, supposed to be confined to Kinder, Kirche, Küche in Hitler’s hyper-masculine dystopia. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the Reich women’s leader, was deeply implicated in Nazi atrocities, not least through her third husband, a senior SS thug. But no less a crime was to spend the rest of her long life justifying the regime and exonerating the female half of the German population, as though women had been incapable of bearing responsibility.

One legacy of Nazism was this kind of smug self-justification, now re-emerging in Germany amongst the Putin fans of both far-right and far-left. For them, the occupation of Ukraine is Russia’s destiny — a vicarious rationalisation of their forebears’ past conquest of Lebensraum in the east.

Leni Riefenstahl, the film director, is one of the few cultural figures included by Evans. Nobody who has seen Triumph of the Will or Olympia, her Nazi propaganda epics, can doubt that Riefenstahl had an eye for the cinematic possibilities of mass spectacle — augmented by the unlimited resources Hitler made available to his favourite star. 

But it seems extraordinary that such a fanatic, whose aesthetics are so specifically Nazi, was able to rehabilitate herself after 1945. She claimed that her films were unpolitical documentaries and in the 1960s reinvented herself as an art photographer, especially of the Nuba tribe in Sudan. It was Susan Sontag who punctured her pretentions with her 1974 article in the NYRB, “Fascinating Fascism”. 

It is true that Riefenstahl was not a Nazi in the sense that she never joined the party. But she had personally witnessed German soldiers shooting Jews whilst filming in Poland in 1939. Her shock is visible in a snapshot taken at the time. She even complained about this massacre; the officer responsible was punished, but then pardoned on the orders of her hero, the Führer. Riefenstahl died, aged 101, in 2003: the last of Hitler’s people and, like all the others, unrepentant to the end.