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, a historian answers the enduring question: How does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?
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.
