Richard J Evans was regius professor of history at Cambridge University from 2008 to retirement in 2014. In the millennium year, he served as the expert witness for Penguin Books in the libel case brought unsuccessfully by Holocaust-denier David Irving. Evans’s three-volume history of the Third Reich, completed in 2008, is the definitive account. A new book, Hitler’s People, re-examines that history through the life stories of prominent Nazis.
After completing your trilogy on the Third Reich, why did you want to return to this material now?
There were several reasons. One was that the biographical approach to German history became very unfashionable – because historians were wary of the Nazi cult of personality. But I think around about the turn of the century, the biographical approach came back; the big pioneer there was Ian Kershaw’s wonderful biography of Hitler. And also that approach coincided with the rise of strongmen and would-be dictators in Europe, and also, of course, more recently in the States. So it has become urgently important to study why people, again, at every level, have started to depart from democratic norms. Continue reading...
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