Hitler's henchmen civilized private life

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They were well-educated, loved poetry, music and art, and grew up in solidly middle-class homes infused with conservative values. They were also the men — and they were almost exclusively men — who planned, oversaw and perpetrated the greatest crime in history.

But, writes the British historian Richard Evans in his new book “Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich,” Nazi Germany’s leading lights were not “psychopaths; nor were they deranged, or perverted, or insane.” Instead, in most aspects of their lives, they were “terribly and terrifyingly normal,” as Hannah Arendt memorably put it after observing Adolf Eichmann in the dock in Jerusalem in 1961.

Evans is the author of an acclaimed trilogy charting the rise and fall of the Third Reich, served as an expert witness in the 2000 libel case brought by Holocaust denier David Irving against historian Deborah Lipstadt, and has been a historical consultant on a number of major television documentaries about the Nazis.

His new study contains 20 portraits of Hitler’s henchmen: from well-known names such as Hermann Goering, Josef Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler to equally brutal but less prominent figures such as Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician who came to oversee the regime’s euthanasia program; Einsatzkommando Paul Zapp and Flossenburg commandant Egon Zill; and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the leader of the National Socialist Women’s League.

For many years, German historians eschewed biography for fear of somehow endorsing the Nazi cult of individual personality. Evans, however, believes it’s time to “strip away the myths” and legends that surround the Nazis and, by cutting them down to size, show them once again as human beings — people who, he says, were “disturbingly like us.”

“There’s been a tendency to say, as it were, ‘They’re not really like us, they’re not really human beings,’” Evans tells The Times of Israel in an interview. “And so we don’t have to worry about the implications of deciding that they are human beings and maybe there are a few things inside ourselves which potentially make us susceptible, or might in those circumstances have made us susceptible, to the Nazi appeal.”

By peeling away the veneer, Evans challenges the notion that the Nazis were simply “marginal outcasts from society” who were “disturbed or deranged.” In such a light, these men become perhaps more terrifying.

Hans Frank, for instance, presided over what one historian has termed a “reign of terror which put all other forms of territorial annexation by the National Socialists into the shade” during his time running the rump of Poland (which the Nazis termed the “General Government”). The territory became a killing ground for millions of Jews from across Europe, fulfilling Frank’s wish that “the more who die, the better … The Jews will realize that we’ve arrived.”

But “the Butcher of Poland” was, Evans writes, also “outwardly civilized.” A proficient classical pianist, he had been brought up in an educated middle-class home, enjoyed opera and theater, and was well-read. As Curzio Malaparte, the Italian writer and filmmaker who spent time with Frank in Poland during the war, recalled, the governor-general combined “a peculiar mixture of cruel intelligence, refinement, vulgarity, brutal cynicism and polished sensitiveness.” Watching him play the piano on one occasion, Malaparte looked down at Frank’s hands and found them “small, delicate and very white.” “I was surprised and relieved not to see a single drop of blood on them,” he wrote.

Reinhard Heydrich, who chaired the Wannsee Conference and whose short, brutish rule of Bohemia and Moravia was marked by “unrestrained terror,” was labeled “devilish,” a “predatory animal” and a “demonic personality” by his own Nazi colleagues. But he too was a cultured man who hailed from a family of professional musicians. Heydrich was a fine amateur pianist and accomplished violinist who played in a string quartet during the war.

Heydrich and Frank were by no means exceptional. As Evans says of those he writes about: “They’re all in the solid middle class, no working class, virtually no lower middle class; their families are from various middle-class occupations.” Nazism, he argues, was “not the ideology of the uneducated or the unsuccessful.”

Brandt, for instance, was a skilled surgeon who specialized in head and spinal injuries. “Highly educated and qualified,” writes Evans, “he was far removed from the rough and brutal type of the ‘old fighter’ or the cold ideological fanaticism of the committed Nazi.” And yet Brandt was a committed Nazi and eugenicist, carried out medical experiments on live human beings, and oversaw a forced euthanasia program that claimed the lives of an estimated 300,000 adults and children with mental and physical disabilities. He showed, Evans notes, “an absolute lack of compassion” for its victims.

Ernst Rohm, the leader of the brownshirts, varnished an image of himself as a “rough, tough no-nonsense soldier” who “gloried in mindless violence and perpetual conflict.” But, says Evans, this doesn’t capture the complexities of his background and personality. An excellent piano player, Rohm was also well-educated, collected engravings, read German literary classics, and befriended artists and opera singers. A member of the monarchist officer corps, he shared its conservative political and social outlook despite his own homosexuality.

There were a few exceptions to the Nazis’ overwhelmingly middle-class leadership. Julius Streicher, editor of Der Sturmer (which Hitler and Goebbels recognized was so grotesquely antisemitic that they didn’t want it openly displayed in Berlin during the 1936 Olympics), was a village schoolteacher who had left school at 13. But Stretcher also painted watercolors and wrote poetry about the beauty of the German landscape and articles about herbalism and Nordic fairytales.

Streicher was also, of course, a proud antisemite who boasted that he came to hate Jews at the age of five. Even if this was something of an exaggeration, he was a radically antisemitic far-right political organizer and journalist by the time he joined the Nazis. Likewise, Alfred Rosenberg, whose racist writings led Hitler to describe him as “the Church Father of national socialism,” was an “obsessive, monomaniacal” antisemite long before he entered the Nazis’ orbit.

All those attracted to Hitler’s ranks were “antisemitic to one degree or another,” says Evans, and many, like Streicher and Rosenberg, came into politics with a “ready-made preexisting antisemitism.” For others, however, Hitler’s own all-consuming conspiratorial antisemitism — which lay at the very heart of his worldview — had something of a radicalizing effect. Himmler, for instance, “did not have a lifelong obsession with the imaginary threat posed to the ‘Aryan’ race by the Jews.”

Similarly, despite their later blood-soaked records, both Heydrich and Frank do not appear to have initially been driven by the kind of fanatical Jew-hatred that animated Hitler, Rosenberg and Streicher.

Nightmarish men of dashed dreams
So what characteristics did these men share beyond their middle-class, nationalist backgrounds? Evans believes a crucial trait was that they were haunted and gripped by their experiences of downward socially mobility and thwarted ambition — a shared trauma into which Hitler’s wider message skilfully tapped.

“Hitler’s narrative of national crisis, disintegration and decline offered them a way to overcome the effects of this trauma by identifying their own lives with their country’s,” says Evans. “Germany’s calamitous defeat and humiliation, like their own, could only be reversed by radical action.” For Germany’s nationalist middle classes, Hitler offered a simple explanation for their own woes and that of their country: the Jews.

As the book’s individual biographies draw out, a thread of frustration, humiliation and disenchantment runs through the early lives of both the leading Nazis and the lower-level perpetrators who followed their orders.

Despite graduating at the top of his class and earning a PhD, Goebbels found his hopes of joining the academic world blocked by the economic crisis wracking Weimar Germany. He worked briefly as a bank clerk but lost his job and built up a stash of unpublished books, articles and plays.

Rohm’s hopes for a military career — with all the social and political privileges that entailed — were also frustrated. In the 1920s, he had to settle instead for turns as a traveling salesman, factory worker and manual laborer.

And Heydrich, whose comfortable middle-class upbringing had already been shaken by the fall of the kaiser and the inflation of the 1920s, found his career in the Navy abruptly curtailed. In this case, his own philandering, rather than politics or economics, was to blame. When he became engaged to the aristocratic Lina von Osten, the father of his jilted long-time girlfriend pulled some strings to have the young officer dishonorably discharged.

For some, the sting of disgrace and shame came much earlier, but it would prove just as pivotal. Six-year-old Robert Ley, who later led the Nazis’ Labor Front, found his childhood shattered when his father, a well-to-do farmer, was arrested and imprisoned. Heavily indebted by bad investments, Friedrich Ley had set fire to his own farm and attempted to fraudulently claim the insurance money.

In Hitler, Evans believes, Ley found a father figure to replace his own disgraced father, while the notion of a classless “people’s community” offered a way for the ambitious young man to overcome the humiliations of his childhood. Frank, too, saw his father, who got into financial difficulties during the war, sent to prison after being convicted of embezzlement and struck off the register of lawyers, sending the family into poverty.

However, Frank was unusual among his fellow mass murderers in publicly expressing a degree of remorse for his crimes at Nuremberg. While, as Evans suggests, there are questions about the genuineness of his contrition and conversion to Catholicism, in the dock he admitted his role in the Holocaust. (Unlike Albert Speer, who swayed the court with expressions of regret and claims to have been no more than an apolitical architect, Frank didn’t escape the hangman).

Few other Nazis followed their example. Rosenberg wrote of his sympathy for Hitler and the “millions of murdered, hunted Germans” but had no such words for Europe’s Jews. Even as he awaited trial, for Ley, Hitler remained “the shining hero of this age,” while antisemitism was simply a defense against Jews “flooding” into Germany from the East. And, living in Buenos Aires in the 1950s before his capture by the Mossad, Eichmann expressed pride in his role in the Holocaust, which he viewed as a historical necessity.

This near-universal lack of guilt, which ran from the highest to the lowest echelons of the regime, is a testament to the manner in which millions of Germans “willingly surrendered their moral autonomy” to Hitler, believes Evans. Conventional morality was uprooted and overturned; qualities such as brutality and ruthlessness, for instance, were to be admired, not condemned.

“Nazism released people from the normal constraints that society imposes on the violent and abusive desires that exist to a degree among all of us, and actively encouraged people to act them out,” he says.

For Evans, the Nazis thus represent a timely warning from history.