One could make the case – and I have – that the study of followership was primarily prompted by the events of World War II. How was it possible, some social scientists started to ask a decade or so after the war ended, that citizens of a country as cultured as Germany followed – many highly eagerly and many others wildly enthusiastically – a leader as evil as Adolf Hitler? Hitler who was able, despite his being a genocidal, ultimately compulsively destructive dictator, to get most of his followers to do most his bidding most of the time – and of their own volition.
It’s a question that in the last seventy-five years has been asked, repeatedly. Though there are still thousands more books on Hitler specifically than on Nazis generally, there are now many studies not only about Germans during the 1920’s, ‘30s and ‘40’s, but about the historical context within which the Nazi era originally unfolded and ultimately unraveled.
Moreover, the fascination with ordinary people (to use Christopher Browning’s indelible phrase) during an extraordinary time persists. Which explains why we have a significant contribution to the literature, by a distinguished British historian of modern Germany, Richard J. Evans. As the title of his new book suggests – Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich – the focus here is not on Hitler. Rather it is on those who dedicated themselves, effectively slavishly, to doing what he ordered them to do.
After the first chapter, a long one about Hitler, Evans does what most of us who write about followers do – divide them into groups. Inevitably we find that all followers are not alike. Thus, the rest of the book is divided into three parts, each about a different type of follower. Evans does not use the word “follower.” He uses, as in the title, “people.” Nevertheless, followers is who we’re talking about here: dedicated Nazis who followed wherever Hitler led.
Part one is about “The Paladins,” men who were highest in the hierarchy and who were therefore, after Hitler, the most powerful people in the Third Reich. Most of the names in this section are familiar; they include Herman Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer and Joseph Goebbels.
Part two is about “The Enforcers.” They were less important than the Paladins but nevertheless key to executing orders given them from on higher. Most of these names are also familiar certainly to those who know the history of Nazi Germany; they include Rudolf Hess, Franz von Papen, Julius Streicher and Adolf Eichmann.
Finally, part three is about “The Instruments,” most though not all bourgeois Germans, too many of whom were found after the war to have committed “appalling crimes.” Like other scholars before him, Evans points out that it will not suffice to say that these people were “just obeying orders.” For in nearly all cases they had choices.
Hitler’s People is recommended as a primer on Nazi followers of the Nazi leader. It is well written and clearly organized by an expert on Germany in the mid-twentieth century. But students and scholars of leadership and followership looking for information, or an angle, that is new or different will be disappointed. This is not because Evans is deficient. Rather it is because this ground is already very, very well covered. More to the point perhaps, there is no Rosetta Stone here, no key to understanding what happened, how it was possible for an entire people to either directly or indirectly sanction sadistic mayhem and murder.
Evans himself admits that “individual psychopathology is of little use here.” He further acknowledges that the “range of explanations … for why people supported Hitler and implemented, or accepted, Nazi policies and ideas is almost limitless.” What he falls back on then – for good reason – is the importance of context. Specifically, the rage for revenge engendered by the “humiliation” of Germany’s defeat in the first world war and, additionally, the subsequent rampant inflation.
What happened in Nazi Germany cannot, then, be understood without understanding the three parts of what I call the leadership system: the leader, the followers, and the contexts. Evans himself concludes that, “Only by situating the biographies of individual Nazi perpetrators, with all their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, in these larger contexts, can we begin to understand how Naziism exerted its baleful influence.”