THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER

A History Today Best Book of the Year 2025

‘Elegantly written and powerfully argued … it ranks among the best works on this terrible period’ Sunday Times

A biographical study of Hitler's inner circle offers a new way to understand the horrors of the Nazi regime

Why did so many Germans take part in the crimes of Nazi Germany? How did they come to support Hitler and follow him almost to the very end? For too long, the Nazis have been presented as little more than psychopaths or criminals. In his major new work, renowned historian Richard J. Evans makes use of a mass of recently unearthed new evidence to strip away the veneer of myth and legend from the faces of the Third Reich and present a more realistic view of Nazi perpetrators as human beings who were disturbingly like us.

Evans offers rounded, fresh and often startling new portraits of the men and women who created and served Nazi Germany, beginning with Hitler himself and going on to encompass leading figures like Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, enforcers of Hitler’s orders such as Eichmann and Heydrich, propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl, low-level perpetrators such as the notorious Irma Grese and unknown sympathizers and fellow-travellers who helped the regime in myriad ways.

Hitler’s People is a chilling, brilliantly written work which allows the reader to understand the texture and values of the Third Reich and just how far individuals will go when so many normal moral constraints have disappeared.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich shows how valuable a biographical approach to the past can be. The book combines gripping individual portraits, all exhaustively researched and deftly painted -- Kristin Semmens * History Today, Best Books of the Year 2025 *
A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition * Kirkus Reviews *
An important [and] sobering book that depicts the duplicity of manipulators, opportunists and psychopaths to convince gullible multitudes into becoming mass murderers. Professor Evans has produced an incisive commentary on the continuing fragile nature of the human condition. * The Jewish Chronicle *
[Richard J. Evans] argues persuasively that only by examining individual personalities can we understand ‘the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime… . His book is enriched by the findings of recent scholarship and his pen portraits have all the excitement of novelty. Even his depiction of Hitler feels fresh -- Piers Brendon * Literary Review *
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 -- Jennifer Szalai * The New York Times *
Evans dispenses his judgments about how Nazism happened and developed in bite-sized, almost laconic, pieces attached to the short biographies. This has the effect of inviting the readers to draw some of their own lessons.... if Evans’s purpose is getting the reader to think about what is particular and what is universal about the descent of one of the world’s most “civilised” nations into genocidal barbarism, then I believe it succeeds -- David Aaronovitch * The Financial Times *
Evans has chronicled Nazi Germany before, but never with such urgency… His previous books, which include a masterful trilogy on the rise, rule, and destruction of the Nazi movement, are models of historical writing, a combination of narrative and exploration, scholarship for the sake of scholarship and yet volumes that are immensely readable, even novelistic in style… Hitler’s People 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 * The Boston Globe *
What drove Germany’s citizens and leaders to support a regime committed to war, genocide and dictatorship? Evans, a prominent historian of Nazism, tackles a question that remains even now a conundrum, seeking, through portraits of diverse Third Reich figures — including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Hitler himself as well as the architect Albert Speer and the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl — a common human denominator * The New York Times *
In his new book, Hitler’s People, Professor Richard Evans, leading Cambridge historian of modern Germany, complicates the picture. In a range of two dozen biographical portraits of prominent Nazis, drawn from his own deep learning and taking account of the latest research developments, Evans shows that the immediate post-war attempts to dismiss the Nazis as psychopaths and/or gangsters were comforting but wrong. -- Ethan Croft * The Standard *
Engaging... a book worth reading. It is recommended to anybody with an interest in human behaviour, the Third Reich, and the role that individuals played in it, be they the paladins of the regime or ‘ordinary people’ * CHACR Critique *

Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2010 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.