A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context ... Evans has provided us with just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through.
I find Evans’s approach very persuasive, and his book is so elegantly written and powerfully argued, with plenty of provocative insights and revealing anecdotes, that it ranks among the best works on this terrible period.
His previous books, which include a masterful trilogy on the rise, rule, and destruction of the Nazi movement, are models of historical writing ... Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich 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 ... He thus positions his hefty new work as a tool as much as a story and an analysis.
Much of this will be well-known to students of this subject, and because many of the henchmen were present at the same events as each other, there are elements of repetitiveness; Evans does not always seem to have been well-served by his editors. It is only as the author seeks to explore the middle-ranking figures of Nazidom, and others even further down the food chain, that the book seems to go more into little-charted territory.
