Himmler in the sauna, Hitler in love, Eichmann playing ping-pong: Richard Evans brings the Nazis closer to make them even more horrifying

It is not at all common for a book on the history of Third Reich criminals to put you in a sauna with a naked Heinrich Himmler. Richard J. Evans, one of the world’s leading experts on Nazi Germany, chooses to open his biographical portrait of the sinister character with the image of the Reichsführer SS shorn of his flashy black uniform, in fact naked, in a Finnish sauna, showing “a swollen, pinkish belly, with the navel strangely in relief, like a delicate rosebud.”

It is not that Evans, 77, saw it personally (the scholarly British academic and knight would hardly have been so close to Himmler), but he collects the description of the writer and correspondent Curzio Malaparte who was there, sweating, on July 31, 1942. It is an example of how the historian chooses to present the men and women who feature in his latest book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (2024): demystifying them, “taking them down from their pedestal,” and showing their human side, far from the cliché, in order to avoid the reassuring detachment provided by seeing them through the prism of pathological monstrosity.

Adolf Eichmann was a good ping-pong player, Von Ribbentrop played the violin (like Heydrich, who had mistakenly managed to get into the SS) and was a virtuoso figure skater (and not just because of his diplomatic blunders); Göring told fibs about his exploits in World War I (he exaggerated his role as a fighter ace), Ernst Röhm, the gay head of the SA, played the piano (like Hans Frank; what an orchestra the Nazi leaders could have put together!), was a passionate Wagnerian, and liked to wear intense perfumes even with his brown uniform.

Hitler, for his part, was not the cold, asexual, and emotionless person that many historians have imagined, Evans tells us, but was always “susceptible to female charm.” It is well known, he notes, “that he was close to a certain number of older women, generally wealthy and well-placed.” But he was also interested in younger women, “even much younger,” such as Maria Reiter, a hotel worker, or Henriette Hoffmann, daughter of his personal photographer, not to mention his half-niece Geli Raubal, or Eva Braun herself, who was 23 years his senior (Hitler met her when she was 17) and with whom, Evans stresses, he undoubtedly had sexual relations, as evidenced by her use of contraceptives.

The book is made up of 24 biographies of Nazis, including five women: one cannot ask for parity in the Third Reich, although Evans deals with the subject of feminism in Nazi Germany in a very interesting way. The subjects range from Hitler himself to a schoolteacher from Hamburg who denounced her own brother and who represents the silent majority of Germans who embraced National Socialism, passing through the usual bigwigs — Göring, Goebbels, Speer, Von Ribbentrop, Hess — and some second-rate perpetrators; a general, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who represents the criminality and corruption of the Wehrmacht, a doctor (Karl Brandt, not Mengele), the wife of a concentration camp commander, and a guard.

Evans tries to clarify who the Nazis were and his conclusion is disquieting: they were not psychopaths or insane, degenerates or essentially depraved, but, for most of their lives, completely normal people. “Ordinary people can be drawn to evil in a system that subverts morality,” he reflects. “All human beings have the capacity to do evil.”

In the preface to his book, Evans stresses the importance of understanding Nazis today, when “strongmen emerge, aspiring dictators who — often with great popular support — strive to weaken democracy, muzzle the media, control the judiciary, stifle the opposition and undermine basic human rights.” He adds: “How do we explain the rise and triumph of tyrants and charlatans?” This seems prophetic after the re-election of Donald Trump.

“Yes, one of the reasons I wrote this book was the rise of populism and the fact that people seem to distrust democracy,” Evans notes in an interview with this newspaper. “Although Trump, Orbán and Maduro [a left-wing populist] all want to destroy democracy, there are differences with Nazism, which was a creation of World War I and was militaristic, and carried the germ of international aggression, with the aim of recovering territories. Trump is the opposite, an isolationist, and although Orbán has repudiated the Treaty of Trianon, which forced Hungary to cede part of its territory, he has not taken effective steps in that direction, nor do I imagine the German AfD [Alternative for Germany, an ultra-right party] proposing to invade Poland.”

“Hitler saw himself as a warrior,” he continues, “and he wanted to militarize German society, he wanted everyone in uniform and he spread great enthusiasm for war. In contrast, the masses at the assault on the Capitol on 6 January, 2021 were a mob; there was no military discipline or order. I don’t see Trump commanding legions of SA.”

Evans continues: “The fuel for the far right is immigration, which was not a central issue for the Nazis, who, on the contrary, recruited seven million foreign forced laborers. What is common to the Nazis and our populists is disillusionment with democracy, a feeling widespread in sections of the population in the U.S. and Europe. The feeling that democracy does not mean prosperity, as the Weimar Republic was reproached for. The idea that states, politics, and their representatives have failed.”

Among the most curious characters in Evans’ selection is Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, officially designated Reichsfrauenführerin — leader of the women of the Reich — a pompous title that the Nazis took care to empty of meaning. “Although her position was, indisputably, the highest that a woman achieved in the Third Reich, to believe that she was a female equivalent of Hitler is an exaggeration; she was a leader without power, with responsibilities only in indoctrination and welfare in a movement that denied women the right to engage in politics.”

Scholtz-Klink’s “pseudo-feminism” serves the historian to address the subject of women in the Third Reich. “The German feminist movement was destroyed by the Nazis, who considered feminism a Jewish concept and that men should be brave and women maternal and homemakers.” Only 5% of the members of the Nazi Party were women, notes Evans.

There has been a tendency to view German women as victims of Nazi misogyny and male supremacy, as great sufferers of the war, or as indirect perpetrators who sustained the violent barbarity of men. Evans stresses that the spectrum of their activities in support of the Third Reich was vast: guards in concentration camps, military and police secretaries, doctors and nurses in human experiments and in the Aktion T-4 criminal eugenics, informants for the Gestapo, volunteers for Germanization, looters of Jewish property and occupied populations… the historian also recalls that in 1944 some 450,000 young women had enlisted in the Reich’s anti-aircraft defense units as gunners.

And above all — like Scholtz-Klink herself, married to an SS Obergruppenführer (a family with undoubtedly high-profile positions) who held high responsibilities in the extermination camp system, as well as a nephew who was a collaborator of Mengele — many German women were well aware of the crimes carried out by their men, tolerated them, approved of them, and even helped to perpetrate them.

Evans also recalls that among the people who voted for the Nazis at the end of the Weimar Republic, women represented more than 50%. Other portraits of women presented by the scholar are those of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose responsibility he underlines, Ilse Koch, “the witch of Buchenwald,” and Irme Grese, “the beast of Belsen,” two direct perpetrators. Koch took her own life and Grese was hanged by the Allies. Evans follows the “incredible” process of demonization that they experienced — tinged with sexualization — and which led them to be viewed as exceptional cases, when they were not. “For a normal, ordinary woman, just like a man, to become a murderer or to help or facilitate the crimes of Nazism, no psychopathic disorder was required,” he insists. Curiously, Nazi Germany, where abortion was a crime, encouraged it in Jewish women.

Would Hitler have found himself in trouble today over his half-niece, something that would be seen today as a clear abuse of power? “He had an affair with her and kept her confined to the apartment they shared until she took her own life, but the story, which could have done him considerable political damage, was successfully covered up. Hitler had several affairs, despite always saying that he was married to Germany, a claim that unfortunately many historians have believed. He even fell in love with Magda Goebbels before she married the Minister of Propaganda. Apparently, the three of them reached a singular compromise and it was agreed that she would play the role of First Lady of the Reich [platonic, in principle] when required.”

Among the Nazi leaders in whom Evans reveals surprising aspects is Göring, a showman more concerned with his image than anything else, and to whom the Berlin zoo provided a new lion cub when the previous one grew up: he had seven in all. The Reichsmarschall exaggerated his list of kills in the Great War, inflated his image, and painted his fingernails and toenails.

For his part, Ernst Röhm was very aware of his homosexuality (Evans describes a scene in which, when a reporter was surprised in a cabaret by the confidences of a transvestite waiter with the head of the SA, the latter shouted: “I am not a customer but your commander, he is one of my storm troopers!”). “New investigations have changed his image as a street thug: he was bourgeois and sensitive, and Hitler certainly did not have him killed for being gay,” the historian notes. Himmler himself does not respond to the emotional void that has been attributed to him and “was capable of love,” (and of having a very typical mistress: his secretary).

Unforgettable in the portrait of the felonious, lecherous and anti-Semitic Julius Streicher, who was sent into violent shivers by the mere mention of the word “Jew,” is the scene Evans describes of a visit to the Nazi in prison by Erika Mann, the daughter of the writer Thomas Mann, who was in Nuremberg as a correspondent covering the trials. Streicher (who would later be hanged) recognized the young woman and said: “So you’ve come to the zoo to admire the wild animals, now you’re going to see everything,” and pulled down his pants. Erika, a resolute lesbian, didn’t flinch and left without saying a word to visit another prisoner.

Evans believes that not even Gitta Sereny herself was able to extract the truth from Speer, who managed to present himself as a “good Nazi,” and was spared with a 20-year sentence in Nuremberg. The scholar believes that Speer “deceived Sereny” into believing that he was confessing “but without actually doing so.” He points out how difficult it was to “deconstruct” the character and demolish his self-mythologization.

Should more of the Nazis tried at Nuremberg, including Speer, have been executed? “I do not believe in the death penalty, which I believe dishonors the state. That said, the Nuremberg trials were very important for our current understanding of war crimes and a great educational exercise, especially for the Germans. The Allied bombings were, of course, also war crimes, but it must be emphasized that Nuremberg set a fundamental precedent.”

Among the little-known facts that Evans explains in his very interesting book are that Hitler considered sterilizing artists he didn’t like (a radical form of art criticism), that Goebbels accused numerous Catholic priests of pedophilia, and what happened to Robert Ley’s brain, extracted after his suicide in prison and taken to the U.S. (and that his body, without it, was buried in a scene worthy of the gravediggers in Hamlet).

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