Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich Hardcover – 13 Aug. 2024

I will not indulge in a demonstration of intellectual vanity.It is good book to read but i learnt nothing new on the subject.

Richard Evans deservedly has the status of one of the most eminent British historians. I admire his books on the 19th and 20th century, as well as his analysis of Nazi Germany. I was looking forward to this book, hoping it would add to my desire to understand what drove the architects and implementers of Nazi Germany. Why did they become involved, what were their motivations? The marketing suggests that this book will add detail to the much misused term 'banality of evil'. The book only partially delivers on this. It clearly has delved deeply in primary sources and earlier publications. However, it is demonstrably written by a historian, not a psychologist. It offers a series of excellent brief biographies of all the main personalities, providing much interesting personal background in a historical context. Occasionally it touches on psychological drivers, but it is mainly a retelling of history. The summary of the period 1920-1945 in the chapter on Hitler is superb. Much of the individual biographies are very interesting. A problem of serial biographies is that all cover the same period, and inevitably many events are repeatedly told. This book offered me many insights in the development of Nazi Germany and the role played by many of the leading characters and their relationships, but less about their psychology. I can strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about the internal functioning of leaders of the Nazi machinery and their interactions, less so for those who want to understand the psychology and pathology of those people. If one is in search of the personality of some of those, I can recommend the book by the prison psychologist G.W Gilbert: Nuremberg Diary. But in fairness to Richard Evans, I suspect that is not the book he tried to write.