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Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich Audiobook
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Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and Air Mail
“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 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 J. Evans, author of the acclaimed Third Reich trilogy and more than a 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 and representative members.
Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Hitler’s People forms a typological framework of German society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist’s eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal characteristics and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies—such as 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, such as the schoolteacher Julius Streicher or the actress and film director Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler’s People lays bare the characters whose choices caused the deaths of millions.
Nearly a century after Hitler’s rise, the leading nations of the west are once again being torn apart by an untamed will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous individuals as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of agency and complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility—and even between pathological evil and rational choice—are never easily drawn.
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"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
Quotes
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“A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context.”
— New York Times -
“Evans takes the time to examine these cogs in the machine and see them as people with complicated lives, which makes their choices all the more disturbing.”
— Parade -
“Evans…offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
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 -
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 -
Superb. . . Searching, humane scholarship.
— Washington Times -
Evans takes the time to examine these cogs in the machine and see them as people with complicated lives, which makes their choices all the more disturbing.
— Parade -
Evans . . . offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. . . . A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
Evans . . . offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. . . . A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
Insightful . . . [Evans] strikes a reasoned balance between the need to understand societal context and building a convincing case for the importance of individual personalities . . . This is a valuable work for readers interested in history or threats to democracy.
— Shelf Awareness -
A fascinating and instructive book . . . elegantly written and perceptive.
— Wall Street Journal -
Superb. . . Searching, humane scholarship.
— Washington Times -
Important . . . Sobering and incisive commentary on the men who persuaded ordinary Germans to become mass murderers.
— Jewish Chronicle -
Evans . . . offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler’s spell. . . . A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition.
— Kirkus(starred review) -
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
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
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A #1 Amazon bestseller
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A Foreign Policy Magazine Pick of Most Anticipated Books of 2024
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About Richard J. Evans
Richard J. Evans, one of the world’s leading historians of modern Germany, is the author of many books, including Death in Hamburg, winner of the Wolfson History Prize. He has served as Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge; president of Wolfson College, Cambridge; and provost of Gresham College in the City of London. He has received the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city and the British Academy’s Leverhulme Medal and Prize, awarded for a significant contribution to the humanities or social sciences. In 2000, he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. In 2012, he was knighted for services to scholarship.
About Leighton Pugh
Leighton Pugh trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after studying modern languages at Queen’s College, Oxford. He has narrated audiobooks for Penguin, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Random House, Hachette, and Quercus. His radio work includes the plays Murder by the Book and Scenes from Provincial Life for BBC Radio 4 and the voice of Heinrich von Kleist in the BBC Radio 3 documentary The Tragical Adventure of Heinrich von Kleist. From 2010–2011 he was in four productions at the National Theatre, including The Habit of Art and A Woman Killed with Kindness.