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"The outcome of one man's beliefs": why the Holocaust happened
Why did the Holocaust happen? Sir Richard J Evans explains how Adolf Hitler's delusions led to the mass extermination of six million Jews
80 years ago, early in 1945, what is now generally known as ‘The Holocaust’ – that is, the mass extermination of some six million European Jews – was more or less over. In the years 1941-45, in the midst of the Second World War, Jews all across the continent, in areas conquered or dominated by Nazi Germany, had been rounded up and killed. This was no accidental by-product of the war; it was an organised process, deliberately planned and executed. And it was above all the outcome of one man’s beliefs and delusions: Adolf Hitler. This programme of mass murder on a gargantuan scale was what Hitler and his Nazi Party termed “the final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe”, a problem that was entirely the product of their own warped imagination. In 1944, Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined a new term to describe what happened: ‘genocide’, meaning the destruction of an entire people or nation. Such was indeed the Holocaust, visited not upon the Jews because of their religion, their culture or their social position, but because of their race. Even people who were half- Jewish or quarter-Jewish were targeted by the Nazis. Hitler's beliefs Dismayingly, there have been other genocides since the end of the Second World War. But the Jewish genocide had an extra dimension not shared by any other. Antisemitism was, and remains, fueled by a paranoid conspiracy theory, according to which Jews of every kind were driven by what Hitler called their “racial instinct” to engage in a ceaseless and unrelenting “drive to world domination”. The only way to stop this – in Hitler’s view – was to exterminate them wherever they were to be found. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/GettyImages-1278103471-f23880c.jpg" width="769" height="1024" alt="Hitler's claimed in his political manifesto 'Mein Kampf' (first published in 1925), that “the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great”.(Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images)" title="Hitler's claimed in his political manifesto 'Mein Kampf' (first published in 1925), that “the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great”.(Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images)" /> Hitler conceived this bizarre theory as he searched for an answer to the question of why Germany had been defeated in the First World War. Serving as a soldier on the Western Front, an experience that gave meaning to a life hitherto marked by failure and frustration, he had proudly believed in the victory propaganda pumped out by the German High Command up to the final weeks of the conflict. As he lay recovering in hospital from a poison gas attack at the very end of the war, the only explanation he could grasp for was one held by a tiny minority of far-right German nationalists, according to which Jewish socialists had stabbed the army in the back by undermining morale, above all on the Home Front, and destroying the will to fight. Read more | "We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers Hitler devoted the rest of his life preparing to re-run the First World War, this time successfully, creating a militaristic dictatorship, building on the removal of what he saw as the Jewish threat at home, and preparing for the new European conflict through rearming and preparing the German people for the struggle. When he came to power in 1933 he almost immediately implemented antisemitic measures. On 7 April he sacked all Jewish public employees except those who had fought for Germany in the First World War. By 1935, laws promulgated at the annual Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg banned Jews and non-Jews from marrying or having sexual relations and effectively reduced Jews to the status of second-class citizens. German Jews’ rights were further curtailed in the following years, as they were pushed out of the economy by the ‘Aryanization’ of their businesses and jobs. Escalating violence In November 1938, the Nazis mounted a nationwide pogrom – Kristallnacht – in which over a thousand synagogues were burned to the ground, 7,500 Jewish-owned shops were trashed, and 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up on Hitler’s personal orders and sent to concentration camps, from which they were released only on promising to emigrate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/GettyImages-535083324-fb8981e.jpg" width="1024" height="733" alt="Businesses and properties owned by Jews were the target of vicious Nazi mobs during a night of vandalism that is known as 'Kristallnacht'. (Photo by Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive)" title="Businesses and properties owned by Jews were the target of vicious Nazi mobs during a night of vandalism that is known as 'Kristallnacht'. (Photo by Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive)" /> Jews made up less than one per cent of the German population, and half of these had emigrated by the outbreak of the Second World War, leaving only about a quarter of a million behind. But the German conquest of Poland in 1919 brought 3.5 million Jews under German control, fully 10 per cent of the population. While German Jews were highly acculturated into mainstream German society, most Polish Jews were not; they dressed differently and spoke Yiddish rather than Polish. They had to suffer considerable discrimination at the hands of the government and non-Jewish population. Seizing the opportunity to intensify his antisemitic actions, Hitler sent in death squads of the SS Security Service to round up and dispossess Jews and confine them to specially created ghettos in walled-off areas of cities such as Warsaw and Lodz, where they rapidly became malnourished and sick. This process was conducted with considerable violence and brutality. Both the SS and regular German troops treated the Jews with a special degree of sadism, seeking to degrade and humiliate them in countless different ways. Mass murder The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 ratcheted the violence up a further level, as Hitler regarded Bolshevism as a Jewish creation, a view that lacked any foundation in reality. He sent in six armed and motorised SS Security Service death squads behind the army as it entered eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the former Baltic states, their task to create more ghettos where Jews living in the area were to be confined and to kill Jewish political commissars. At the same time, however, the death squads, aided by police auxiliaries and local, anti-Soviet and antisemitic militias, began killing Jewish men indiscriminately, moving on to slaughter Jewish women and children as well. Altogether 1.5 million Jews were shot into pits which they often had to dig for themselves. The violence and brutality were almost inconceivable. The stress on the SS troops – many of whom had nervous breakdowns or began drinking heavily – prompted Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and leader of the murder operation, to take advantage of public disquiet in Germany regarding the gassing and murder of mentally ill and handicapped non-Jewish Germans. He transferred the gassing teams to the newly conquered East to set up their facilities, in a bid to make the killing process less directly personal. The death camps Over the autumn and winter of 1941, 42 camps were set up in the occupied East for the sole purpose of killing Jews. The first one, at Chelmno, began operating on 8 December 1941 by packing prisoners into sealed compartments in the back of vans into which the vehicle’s exhaust was pumped, causing death by asphyxiation. By the spring of 1942, other camps, at Treblinka, Sobibór and Belzec had been set up with stationary gas facilities using the same process. At the same time, a mass killing facility was established at the Auschwitz concentration camp, near Cracow, where hydrogen cyanide insecticide known as Zyklon-B was employed. Altogether 1.1 million victims died at Auschwitz, including more than 900,000 Jews. Initially the gas chambers were used to kill inmates of the Jewish ghettos in the East. In the spring and summer of 1942, Jews in other parts of Europe under Nazi control – already subject to severe restrictions – were rounded up and deported to the East, usually in unheated cattle trucks. In the summer of 1944, when the Nazis took over Hungary, a further 440,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, while the German takeover of Northern Italy following the country’s capitulation set off a further wave of deportations, including small communities of Jews living in Italian-ruled Greek islands such as Rhodes. The killing did not cease until the Allied victory over Germany in May 1945. Read more | How the holocaust began This programme of mass murder owed its inspiration above all to Adolf Hitler, as we know from a variety of sources including his own writings; the diaries of his close confidant and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; the appointments diary and phone log of SS chief Heinrich Himmler and many more. The co-ordination of the killings was achieved in particular by the Wannsee Conference – planned in November 1942, but not held until January 1942 – at which top representatives from a variety of German ministries and institutions agreed under the chairmanship of the head of the SS Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich, on an overall programme. As German forces swept across Europe from 1939 to 1943, they put or confirmed in power antisemitic politicians and parties who in many cases pursued their own policies of discrimination and murder against the Jews under their control. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu was one of these; the killing of some 400,000 Romanian Jews was carried out with such brutality that even the SS killing squad operating in the vicinity was moved to protest. German client states, from Vichy France to Croatia and Slovakia, also engaged in mass murder, often accompanied by actions of sickening sadism. But without the spectacular German military victories from 1939 onwards, which gave Hitler the confidence to implement his ‘final solution’, they would not have felt so emboldened to put their own murderous antisemitism into practice. Beyond this, hundreds of thousands of Germans, officials, generals, SS officers and many others, motivated by antisemitism or persuaded by the antisemitic conspiracy theories pumped out by Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry and its newspapers, films and documentaries, assisted in the mass murder in myriad ways, from drawing up railway timetables for the transport to organising the construction of gassing facilities. Few of them indeed were brought to justice after the war ended.
The liberation of Auschwitz: 80 years on
The largest camp in the entire system of Nazi concentration and extermination camps, where more than 1 million people perished at the hands of Hitler’s regime, has become one of the best-known symbols of the Holocaust. On the 80th anniversary of its liberation, Richard J Evans charts the last days and legacy of Auschwitz
On 27 January 1945, as soldiers of the Soviet Red Army advanced across East-Central Europe, driving the retreating Germans before them, they came across a large complex of facilities in and around the town of Auschwitz (now Oświęcim, Poland), in the eastern part of Hitler’s ‘Great German Reich’. After fierce fighting, in which more than 200 Soviet soldiers were killed, they entered the main SS camp. A film taken by Soviet cameraman Alexander Vorontsov marked the moment for posterity, including scenes in the prison barracks where some inmates were asked briefly to return to give world opinion an impression of the terrible conditions in which they had been forced to live. HistoryExtra Academy | Nazi Germany This six-part video course covers everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees Find out more Roaming through the camp, the soldiers discovered huge piles of clothes, including more than 360,000 men’s suits and 44,000 pairs of shoes, along with sacks of human hair, prosthetic limbs, spectacles, and stacks of empty, abandoned suitcases. The ground was littered with the bodies of the dead and dying. The squalor and filth were indescribable. “When I entered the barrack,” wrote one Red Army officer, Georgii Elisavetskii, “I saw living skeletons lying on the three-tiered bunks. As in fog, I heard my soldiers saying: ‘You are free, comrades!’ I sense that they do not understand, and begin speaking to them in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian dialects; unbuttoning my leather jacket, I show them my medals… They think I am provoking then. They begin to hide. “And only when I said to them: ‘Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of the Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you’… They rushed towards us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs. And we could not move, stood motionless while unexpected tears ran down our cheeks.” The liberation of Auschwitz did not happen overnight. It took time for the prisoners to be restored to health; a few hundred remained in the camp months later, still too weak to be moved. Many of those who had been liberated, or survived the death marches, had lost their homes and families and joined the many millions of ‘displaced persons’ who fell under the aegis of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, founded in 1943, to be repatriated or found new places to live. The Soviets cared as well as they could for the prisoners they found at Auschwitz, but inevitably many did not survive. 27 January has since become the day on which we choose to remember the Holocaust. But the camp which the Red Army liberated had become by late January 1945 a mere shadow of its former self. Only 7,000 prisoners remained, along with another 500 in small sub-camps scattered across the area. Most were sick, living in the hospital barracks, elderly, infirm, or children under the age of 15. They had been left behind when the SS had decided to abandon the camp in the face of the Red Army advance. Some 60,000 prisoners had been forced at gunpoint to leave on what subsequently became known as a ‘death march’, on the way to railheads for transportation to other camps further to the west. Several thousand had perished on the way in the extreme winter cold, or been shot by the SS if they fell behind. Read more | How did the Nazis justify the Holocaust? Originally intended for Polish prisoners, the main camp, known as Auschwitz-I, had become a centre for the mass extermination of Jewish prisoners from all over Nazi-dominated Europe after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. A second camp, Auschwitz-II, located at nearby Birkenau, was constructed for this mass murder, which was carried out in gas chambers through the administration of hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon-B). Many other victims perished through maltreatment, starvation or disease. Altogether, 1.1 million victims, 960,000 of them Jews, were murdered in the camp. Victims also included 15,000 Red Army prisoners of war, 21,000 Romani (or Gypsies), and 74,000 non-Jewish Poles. Many thousands of Jews had been transported from as far away as Nazi-occupied France or the Netherlands or, later, northern Italy, to be killed. Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi camps, with 34,000 registered prisoners being held in September 1942, out of a total of 110,000 across the camp system as a whole. Two-thirds of the regular inmates of all the Nazi concentration camps who died in August 1942, died at Auschwitz. Some 60 per cent were Jewish. In addition, huge numbers of unregistered prisoners, above all children, women, the elderly, weak and sick, were being sent straight to the gas chambers as they arrived. Again, the vast majority were Jewish. Particularly striking was the mass murder of some 440,000 Hungarian Jews, almost all transported to Birkenau after the German takeover of Hungary in 1944. This mass murder had become widely known in Europe and America, and had been publicly condemned by the Allies by the end of 1942, but ignoring this fact, the SS had attempted to destroy the evidence shortly before they abandoned the camp. They blew up the gas chambers and destroyed the crematoria at Birkenau, as well as burning the storerooms and other facilities after removing the most valuable items. Read more | A history of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp Too hastily executed and clumsily carried out, the cover-up did not deceive anyone. It was the sheer scale of Auschwitz that gave it such prominence, and the operation of an extermination camp next to the main camp at Auschwitz-I that ensured that it quickly came to symbolise the Nazi camp system as a whole. Enough former inmates survived to be able to document the atrocities that had taken place there. This was in sharp contrast to other camps purely devoted to gassing and extermination, such as Treblinka, where more than 750,000 Jews were killed, and only 11 survived. Notable accounts include Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960), Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (1947), and Otto Dov Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolosis of Death (2013). The memoir penned by Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian prisoner-doctor who was forced to assist in experiments carried out by the infamous camp doctor Josef Mengele, reveals a more compromised experience. And of course there are the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of the camp, written while he was in prison after the end of the war and published under the title Commandant of Auschwitz (1956). A fictionalized account of his life based on a novel by Martin Amis was filmed as The Zone of Interest in 2023. Höss himself was arrested and put on trial in Poland; sentenced to death for his crimes, he was executed by hanging in the camp on 16 April 1947, an event attended by around 100 witnesses, including many former camp inmates. Of the 8,200 or so other surviving SS personnel at Auschwitz, some 673 were put on trial for their crimes by Polish courts after the war, while the trial of 25 further camp officers at Frankfurt in the mid-1960s gave massive publicity to the brutal and sadistic offences they had committed. Still, far too many SS officers escaped justice after 1945. In commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January, we do not just remember the victims; we acknowledge the worst extremes to which racial hatred can reach, and remind ourselves how important it is that we do our best – despite repeated failures in recent decades – to try and ensure that genocidal atrocities do not happen again. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now
“We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers
Adolf Hitler and those at the top of the Nazi hierarchy are universally denounced as monstrous aberrations. But, as Sir Richard J Evans stresses, separating them from the lessons of human history is the last thing we should be doing at a moment when democracy is under attack
A little over two decades ago, the first volume of my history of the Third Reich was published. My aim was to produce a comprehensive study encompassing the origins and rise of the Nazi Party, the transformation of Germany under Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship, and the events and impacts of the Second World War. It was, of course, a major undertaking and, after the third and final volume was published in 2008, I moved on to other topics. But a commission to contribute to a nine-part television series, BBC Two’s Rise of the Nazis, shown from 2019 to 2022, prompted me to take a fresh look at the Third Reich and its crimes. What struck me forcibly, given the biographical orientation of the TV series, was that I knew relatively little about the individuals involved in Nazism and the Reich – and, specifically, very little about their personalities and motivations. For decades, German historians in particular had avoided biography, long tainted by its indirect association with the ‘great man’ approach to history – or, as they called it, personalisierende Geschichtsschreibung (‘personalising history-writing’). Read more | Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies The rise of ‘perpetrator research’ Yet in recent years, a massive amount of new documentation and research has been published about the leading Nazis. What historians describe as ‘perpetrator research’ has been at the forefront of scholarship since the turn of the century, and has yielded innumerable fresh insights. A 12-volume edition of Hitler’s speeches before his seizure of power was completed in 2003. The final volume of the diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels appeared in 2008. The diaries of self-proclaimed Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg were published in 2015. The second volume of SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s appointments diary, discovered in an obscure Russian archive, came out in 2020. And many other sources have come to light documenting the thoughts and actions of what one might call ‘ordinary’ mass murderers, Nazi activists, SS officers and fellow travellers. These have so far formed the main focus of ‘perpetrator research’ in the 21st century. German historians have finally overcome their allergic avoidance of biography. Volker Ullrich’s two-part life of Hitler complements the classic biography by the British historian Ian Kershaw, while major studies on Goebbels, Himmler, Rosenberg, Speer, Röhm, Heydrich, Eichmann and many others at all levels of the Nazi hierarchy have been published as well. We now have almost too much biographical material to deal with, rather than too little. Key individuals in the Nazi hierarchy The time seemed ripe, therefore, to undertake a new study of Nazi perpetrators, starting with Hitler himself and going down the hierarchy to encompass representative figures from various parts of German society. The quantitative research of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s had answered the questions of what kind of people voted for the Nazis, who belonged to their movement, and who implemented Hitler’s orders. Now it was time to delve deeper into the mentalities and motivations of powerful and representative individuals. Read more | How did the Nazi party rise to power in Germany in 1933? And what were Hitler’s motivations? In addition to all this, an important new reason has emerged for turning our attention to Hitler and those who carried out his orders. For the past few years, democracy has faced a growing threat in many parts of the globe. Would-be dictators and strongmen have emerged, undermining and attacking democratic institutions in one country after another, replacing the rule of law by the arbitrariness of their own whims, muzzling the media and curbing freedom of thought. They have millions of followers who swallow their propaganda lies and seem to care little about truth, probity or general human decency. While history never repeats itself, it does, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, sometimes rhyme. By trying to understand Hitler and the men and women who joined him in creating the Nazi dictatorship, we may perhaps help ourselves to better understand the enemies of democracy and the leaders and followers of authoritarian or populist movements and regimes in our own time. Such considerations underlie my new book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich. It was published in August, with the US presidential election campaign approaching its climax – an election in which many fear that democracy and its central institutions are at stake. In writing this book, I consciously took as my model the late German journalist and historian Joachim Fest’s pioneering and bestselling book The Face of the Third Reich, first published in 1970. Since Fest wrote, the amount of research published in this area has burgeoned almost beyond the manageable. So, while sticking broadly to Fest’s structure, I was able to replace his numerous (and not always convincing) psychological speculations with new and more persuasive material grounded more firmly in the historical sources. Demythologising Hitler and the Nazis What did I find? Before I could get very far, I needed to clear away a huge amount of invention and speculation. A nimbus of myth surrounded these people, starting with Hitler himself. Posterity had demonised them to such a degree that they scarcely seemed human any more. Writers repeatedly referred to the collapse of the self-styled Third Reich as the Götterdämmerung, the ‘twilight of the gods’, like Richard Wagner’s music-drama of that name. But Hitler and his followers were not gods. It would be more appropriate to apply the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s term Götzendämmerung, ‘twilight of the idols’, to the last days of Nazism. Read more | Bitter end: Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich I wanted, therefore, to demythologise Hitler and the Nazis, to understand them as human beings. This has proved controversial, not least in Germany itself, where many historians and broadcasters have expressed their fear that ‘humanising’ Hitler, Goebbels and other leading Nazis runs the risk of making them appear in an inappropriately sympathetic light. But calling these men and women monsters or psychopaths has the convenient implication (convenient for us, that is) of presenting them as not really human – in other words, not like us. Not only does this help us avoid feeling that we have anything in common with them, it also implies that nothing like Nazism can possibly happen again, because it is not really part of human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-541058425web-734ac75-e1731337578956.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="SS chief Heinrich Himmler (back right) with his wife Margarete, playwright Hanns Johst and propagandist Edith von Coler (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" title="SS chief Heinrich Himmler (back right) with his wife Margarete, playwright Hanns Johst and propagandist Edith von Coler (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" /> This is no help at all in defending democracy against the most violent and extreme of its enemies. To portray Hitler and the Nazis as human beings like us is really the first step in understanding their conduct, and ensuring that nothing like it happens again. Many attempts have been made to portray Hitler as a man who was personally outside humanity, rather in the way that he himself demonised the Jews and called them “bacilli” and “lice”. None of them are convincing. Too many historians have been prepared to accept his own claim that he was a “man without qualities” who had no private life because he sacrificed it in the interest of the country he led. Yet, his sex life, for example, appears to have been straightforwardly heterosexual; before spending the night with his long-term companion, the much younger Eva Braun, he took an aphrodisiac made from bull’s testicles, prepared by his doctor, Theo Morell. Hitler grew up in comfortable, middle-class circumstances, but underwent a dramatic social descent after his failure to secure a place at Vienna’s art academy, followed by the death of his parents. He was rescued from his aimless existence by service in the Bavarian army in 1914, and found his way into politics after the war ended. He could explain Germany’s defeat only through a bizarre and extreme conspiracy theory that laid the blame on a global conspiracy of Jews, who formed a tiny minority of Germany’s population. Rise of the Nazi Party Discovering and developing a talent for rabble-rousing oratory, Hitler tried at first to lead his small, fringe Nazi Party in a violent coup against the new, democratic Weimar Republic. When that failed, he combined a continued campaign of violence with a drive for votes that put him in power after the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression made the Nazis Germany’s largest political party. In collaboration with conservative elites who wanted to overthrow democracy and return to the authoritarian system of the kaiser, Hitler established a dictatorship that began to prepare for a new European war to again make Germany the continent’s leading nation. More than this, he told his followers that he would achieve “world domination” for Germany, as he proclaimed in 1930. Read more | Hitler's millionaire backers: how Germany's elite facilitated the rise of the Nazis He was neither a military nor a political nor a diplomatic genius; he was a gambler whose all-or-nothing approach, aided by circumstances, initially won him success at home and abroad. This bolstered his popularity, aided by a state-enforced, overwhelming cult of personality, the like of which the world had never seen. But Germany was only a middle-sized European power, and it could never defeat the combination of three huge empires: the British, the American and the Soviet. Hitler’s drive for world power inevitably led to disaster. In the end, suicide was the only way out. He would kill himself if he failed, he said, but “we’ll take a world with us”. The result was the most destructive war in history, and the deliberate murder of 6 million European Jews. Hitler was a fantasist from start to finish. Read more | Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “What they told us was, at the time, they felt it was the right thing to do” Why did so many Germans follow this man and stick with him to the end, as most of them did? In an effort to answer this question, I turned to his paladins – men such as Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda chief; Hermann Göring, his second-in-command; and Heinrich Himmler, his police chief. Many historians have tried to write them off as psychopaths or people from the margins of society. A Hollywood film made in 1944 to inform American troops going to fight in Europe – The Hitler Gang, directed by John Farrow and shot in the style of a 1930s gangster movie – portrayed them as a gang of criminals. Inside Hitler’s inner circle Snobs such as Joachim Fest dismissed the Nazi leaders, including Hitler himself, as “petty-bourgeois”. In reality, however, almost all of them came from a solidly middle-class background. Not one leading Nazi was working class, and none of them had ever been a socialist or a communist. They were all brought up in a conventionally conservative, German nationalist milieu. Many of them, though, had suffered a drastic social decline. Having been an air ace in the First World War, Göring then had to eke out a living as a commercial pilot and stunt flier. The comfortable existence of Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the son of a successful military officer, was abruptly ended when his father was dishonourably discharged for criticising the kaiser. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg lost everything when his privileged position as a Baltic German was lost when the tsarist regime that sustained it was overthrown, followed by the triumph of Estonian independence. Stormtrooper leader Ernst Röhm was not a revolutionary thug but a friend of the Bavarian royal family and a professional army officer whose vision of Germany’s military future eventually alienated the generals and led to his execution on Hitler’s orders in 1934. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL3405249web-0d82adb-e1731337683113.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Hermann Göring, pictured while a pilot during the First World War. He was one of many high-level Nazis who had suffered social decline (Photo by Granger/Bridgeman Images)" title="Hermann Göring, pictured while a pilot during the First World War. He was one of many high-level Nazis who had suffered social decline (Photo by Granger/Bridgeman Images)" /> Hitler’s endlessly repeated narrative of Germany’s decline and fall from 1918 onwards, and his promise to reverse the country’s fortunes, held a visceral appeal to such men, who saw in it a parallel to their own fall and rise. Once in power, their subservience to him brought huge rewards in terms of status and power, and in the very concrete form of major additions to their personal fortune. Those who formulated policy were not, of course, largely the same people who executed it. I therefore studied the leading Nazis who did so – all, of course, within the broad lines laid down by Hitler. Again, several of them found in Nazism a solution to their personal crises. Those crises included leading SS man Reinhard Heydrich’s dishonourable discharge from the navy, and the family catastrophe that befell the young Robert Ley – subsequently head of the vast German Labour Front under Hitler – when his father was imprisoned for burning down the family farm in order to claim the insurance. What was interesting about many of them was the central role that various aspects of Nazi ideology played in their allegiance, from the arch-antisemite Julius Streicher’s espousal of nature and folklore to Ley’s stress on its promise of social equality (this was, no doubt, partly for personal reasons – Ley’s family had lost its position). Hitler’s original vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, a Catholic aristocrat, was motivated by the Catholic authoritarianism and fear of communism typical of the 1930s. Far from being the politically neutral bureaucrat of legend, the young Adolf Eichmann – the principal organiser of the Holocaust – was impelled towards Nazism first as a member of the Protestant minority in Catholic Austria, then as a young man enrolled in the German nationalist youth movement, and finally as a bitter opponent of the peace settlement of 1919 implemented in the Treaty of Versailles. It is striking that these and other leading Nazis were often well educated: a number of them had studied at university and some, including Goebbels and Ley, even had a PhD. Many possessed such bourgeois accomplishments as violin playing (Ribbentrop, Heydrich, Eichmann) and mastery of the piano (Röhm and Hans Frank, the ‘butcher of Poland’). The question of complicity in Nazi atrocities All of this underlined the origins of many of them in the German middle class. An explanation of their adherence to Nazism cannot be found in social marginality or deviance. Leaving aside their perpetration of horrific crimes, they cannot be described in conventional terms as ‘uncivilised’. What ran through almost all of them was a deep and committed antisemitism – a belief that Jews everywhere were, by their very nature, subversive and engaged in a vast conspiracy to undermine and destroy German and ‘Aryan’ civilisation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/2MAP0T5web-758c9c8-e1731337751376.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Female guards pictured after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Many Holocaust perpetrators showed no remorse (Photo by Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Female guards pictured after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Many Holocaust perpetrators showed no remorse (Photo by Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> The final group of people I looked at comprised what one might call ordinary perpetrators. These were mainly exemplary figures, including a relatively little-known army general, Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who was uncomfortable with antisemitic atrocities carried out in his area of command on the eastern front by the SS, but allowed them to continue anyway, and was pacified by what was in effect a massive bribe offered to him by Hitler. It is at this level, in one of the most male-supremacist states in history, that women enter the picture, from female camp guards who maltreated and murdered prisoners without compunction, to a conventionally conservative schoolteacher who denounced her brother to the Nazi authorities for anti-Nazi behaviour. Read more | The myth of the innocent bystander: conformity and complicity in Nazi Germany Some of these figures have been demonised by posterity to an extraordinary degree, as in the largely imagined sexual deviance of women like the camp guard Irma Grese. Once again, it was women from a nationalist, middle-class background who proved most susceptible to Hitler’s appeal. One of the most striking facts at every level was the almost universal lack, among perpetrators, of any remorse for or even recognition of their crimes. Some, such as Goebbels, killed themselves at the end of the war. Some, including Eichmann, fled into exile. Some went underground and tried to make a new life in postwar Germany. Some, such as Nazi doctor Karl Brandt, refused to admit they had done anything wrong when brought to justice after the war. Modern-day threats to democracy and freedom Nazism, and Hitler, still retained their power over these perpetrators. It was only the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and 1960s, when West German democracy delivered prosperity – and when a new generation of democratically educated Germans reached adulthood from the late 1960s – that the retrospective hold of Hitler on many Germans was decisively weakened. What can we learn from this dismaying narrative? It’s clear that economic and political crisis and trauma can bring disillusionment to many and turn them against democracy and its institutions. Equally obvious is the fact that strong legal and political institutions, as those of the Weimar Republic were not, can provide a bulwark against attacks on freedom and legality. Propaganda, such as that expertly orchestrated by Goebbels – and above all when amplified by the state – can have a hugely persuasive effect on popular opinion as it ceaselessly pumps out lies and distortions of the truth. Modern-day real and would-be political strongmen and dictators may not want to militarise society or conquer the world as Hitler did, but they nonetheless pose a threat to all of our freedoms. We can learn a good deal about what makes them successful by understanding what brought their predecessors such popularity. This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
“Many, if not most, Nazi analogies are historically inaccurate”: Richard J Evans on the trouble with comparisons
In March, leading sports presenter Gary Lineker was suspended by the BBC for a tweet likening UK government rhetoric to that of 1930s Germany. Richard J Evans argues that such comparisons risk eroding the full horror of history and the experiences of those involved
In early March, Gary Lineker sparked a political and media storm. The former footballer, now the BBC’s best-paid presenter, said that the Illegal Migration Bill introduced by UK home secretary Suella Braverman “is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people [presented] in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the [19]30s”. Lineker’s comments were made not on a BBC channel but on Twitter, in a personal capacity. Nevertheless, the BBC suspended him from his presenting role on Match of the Day for breaching its impartiality guidelines. After other commentators and pundits declined to appear on the show without Lineker, he was reinstated a few days later. Lineker’s suggestion that Braverman’s language was “not dissimilar” to that used in Germany during Nazi rule was viewed as particularly offensive by the home secretary, who has stated that her husband is “a very proud member of the Jewish community”. But his comparison was far from unusual. It’s become increasingly common in recent years for politicians, journalists and pundits of various kinds to draw parallels between policies, language and institutions of which they disapprove, and the politics, language and institutions of Nazi Germany. Some conservative commentators have compared what they see as leftwing “cancel culture” to the censorship exercised by the Nazis. Meanwhile, leftwing commentators have likened the removal of books dealing with LGBTQ issues from school libraries in some states of the US to the book-burnings carried out by the Nazis in May 1933. The bowdlerisation of books by authors such as Roald Dahl has attracted similar parallels. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats in the US have compared Donald Trump’s rallies to those of Adolf Hitler. Russian president Vladimir Putin has been widely compared to Hitler, his assault on Ukraine seeming – in the eyes of some, at least – to echo Germany’s invasion of the country. During the Covid pandemic, some anti-vaxxers sported yellow stars to equate themselves with the Jewish victims of the Third Reich, who were forced by law from 1941 to wear a yellow star to distinguish themselves from non-Jewish citizens. Others produced posters of pro-vaccine politicians daubed with a Hitler moustache. In 2020, Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sparked a media storm by describing as “concentration camps” US immigrant detention centres set up on the Mexican border on the orders of Donald Trump. Accused of demeaning the memory of the Holocaust, she observed that concentration camps in Nazi-ruled Europe were different from extermination camps. She was right. Extermination centres such as Treblinka and Sobibór were set up during the Second World War with the sole purpose of killing Jews. That wasn’t the sole – nor even the main – purpose of concentration camps such as Dachau or Buchenwald. These were initially established during the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, when political opponents were placed in hastily improvised facilities where they were beaten up and tortured – but not killed. From the late 1930s, they were used as dumping grounds for vagrants, the “work-shy”, gay people, petty criminals and socially marginalised people. During the war, the camp system expanded rapidly, its sites acting as the main holding centres for hundreds of thousands of forced and slave labourers. Jewish inmates were singled out for particularly brutal and sadistic treatment, but at no time did Jews form a majority of concentration camp inmates. So if we (rightly, in my view) reserve the term Holocaust for the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews, concentration camps weren’t part of that murderous campaign. It was misleading, therefore, to accuse Ocasio-Cortez of insulting the memory of the Holocaust or its Jewish victims. Migrant camps on the US-Mexico border may not be, strictly speaking, concentration camps, but conditions in them are, in the view of many people, inadequate and inhumane. As was the case with the concentration camps of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, they are designed to deter. Unlike in Nazi Germany, though, inmates aren’t on the whole deliberately terrorised, brutalised, starved or worked to death – so in that respect, Ocasio-Cortez’s comparison was inaccurate. Inappropriate analogies In fact, many – if not most – Nazi analogies are historically inaccurate, to put it mildly. Lineker wasn’t right to imply that Suella Braverman was using Nazi language about asylum seekers: hardly anyone, for understandable reasons, sought asylum in Nazi Germany. Plenty of Nazi claims were made about the supposed eugenic threat of people with mental health problems or physical disabilities allegedly corrupting the hereditary purity of the German race – language that served as a justification for the murder of up to 200,000 of them in gas chambers and by lethal injection during the Second World War. But that’s not quite the same thing. Nor has Braverman come even remotely close to threatening to kill people in order to keep them out of the country. Trump’s rallies may be deeply partisan events, but they’re not orchestrated in the way that Hitler’s were. When anti-vaxxers compare themselves to the Jewish victims of Nazism, they can no more point to any real evidence that wearing a mask or being inoculated against Covid does any harm – nor that failure to do so, unlike failure to render the Hitler salute instead of saying “good morning” to people on the street in Nazi Germany, could lead to incarceration in a concentration camp. Pointing out these things doesn’t amount to any kind of justification or defence of policies that a comparison to the Nazis is intended to condemn. It’s understandable that critics grasp for such an analogy, because the Nazis were, for most people, the most evil and inhumane individuals in history. Inaccurate though it may be, this comparison seems to many the most effective way of expressing a justified condemnation of policies and actions that may seem morally reprehensible. The danger is that using this kind of language carries with it the risk of trivialising the enormity of Nazism’s crimes, and thus downplaying the experience of Nazism’s victims. Any kind of racism is abhorrent, but not all racists are mass murderers. “Cancel culture”, whether it comes from the right or the left, is a threat to free speech – but banning books isn’t the same as burning them, and censoring an author isn’t the same as putting him or her in a concentration camp. Arresting asylum seekers and illegal immigrants and incarcerating them in degrading conditions without checking the validity or otherwise of their claims is a cruel violation of basic human rights, but it isn’t the same as working them to death or sending them to the gas chambers. Describing Vladimir Putin as a 21st-century Hitler confuses his drive to extend Russia over the territory of the former tsarist empire with the Nazi drive to conquer the whole of Europe – indeed, ultimately the entire world – potentially fuelling what could be a deadly escalation of the current conflict in eastern Europe. Historians aren’t going to be able to stop these analogies any time soon. But we can point out that some of them, at least, are dangerously misleading. This article was first published in the April 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Conspiracy: Hitler’s escape to South America
In our new series delving into historical conspiracy theories, Richard J Evans considers the idea that the Nazi leader escaped and led a long life in South America
Did Adolf Hitler really make it out of the bunker alive at the end of the Second World War? In the first episode of our new series on some of history’s most well-known conspiracy theories, we explore the idea that Hitler outlasted the downfall of the Third Reich in 1945 and began a new life overseas in South America. In conversation with Rob Attar, historian Professor Richard J Evans explains the origins of this theory and reveals why it continues to have adherents today. Read more about whether Hitler could have escaped the bunker Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually pen his works? And did aliens build the pyramids? Find out more in our conspiracies series
Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies
From the ‘stab in the back’ to Hitler’s escape from the bunker, conspiracy theories swirl around the Nazis. But how far do they really help us understand the Third Reich? | By Richard J Evans
Listen to this article: The idea that nothing happens by chance in history is as old as history itself. For a significant number of people, nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight; everything that occurs is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating events from behind the scenes. Conspiracy theories seem to be growing more popular and more widespread in the 21st century: powered by the rise of the internet and then social media; enabled by the declining influence of traditional gatekeepers of opinion such as newspaper editors and book publishers; and encouraged by the spread of the uncertainty about truth and falsehood encapsulated in the perverse concept of ‘alternative facts’. Go on to social media and you will quickly realise how widespread conspiracy theories about key events in history have become. They have even found their way into television programmes, not just in fictional form, but in presentations that claim to pursue the ‘real’ truth that has up to now been suppressed by ‘official’ historians, or in other words, those who teach and research the past as a profession at universities and historical institutes. Few topics in history have attracted more conspiracy theories than Nazism. Conspiracists have focused on events such as the Reichstag fire in 1933, the flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941, and the death of Hitler in Berlin in 1945. And it is often claimed that the Nazis themselves were influenced by conspiracy theories such as the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory of Germany’s defeat in World War I, or the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But, broadly speaking, the Nazis were not particularly obsessed with conspiracy theories themselves. Compared with Stalin, who saw plots and cabals everywhere and manufactured fake conspiracies supposedly hatched by some of his closest ‘Old Bolshevik’ comrades so that he could rid himself of potential rivals, Hitler was relatively disinclined to believe in conspiracies. He was, in 1944, forced to admit that Colonel von Stauffenberg’s unsuccessful attempt to blow him up on 20 July 1944 was part of a wider conspiracy, but this was something of a unique occasion. While Stalin had many rivals in the Communist party before he took supreme power, Hitler was unchallenged within the Nazi party from the outset. He enjoyed the unconditional allegiance of the second rank of Nazis, including Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. True, the stormtrooper leader Ernst Röhm did aim to push on for a “second revolution” against Hitler’s wishes after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but far from being a conspirator, Röhm was quite open about his intentions. This was why Hitler could dispose of him so easily in the infamous Night of the Long Knives in 1934 by having him arrested and shot. However, Hitler did, of course, subscribe to one major conspiracy theory: the conviction that Jews, everywhere, were intent on destroying Germany and indeed the ‘Aryan race’. Students of conspiratorial thinking have termed this kind of belief a systemic conspiracy theory, in which a single secret organisation carries out a wide variety of activities with the aim of taking control of a country, a region or even the world. Conspiracy theories of this type are often hatched over a long period of time – sometimes centuries. The systematic conspiracy theory found its classic expression in the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This text emerged in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and was widely translated and reproduced in the explosion of anti-Semitic propaganda that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the defeat of Germany in the First World War. The Protocols have been accorded an extraordinarily powerful, demonic influence in the 20th century. They have been described, as in the title of the classic study by Norman Cohn, as a Warrant for Genocide, inspiring Hitler to launch the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Yet anyone who takes the trouble to read them will quickly realise how intellectually and rhetorically feeble they are. The Protocols purported to be the minutes of a meeting held by a secret cabal of Jews to plot the takeover of the world through ideologies such as liberalism and socialism, anarchism and Freemasonry, and the destruction of the social order. They contain neither the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism, such as the supposed ritual murder of Christian boys or the desecration of the Host (the wafer that Catholics believe contains the body of Christ), nor the racist clichés of modern anti-Semitism, with its hate-filled diatribes against racial mixing. They were exposed in 1921 by the Constantinople correspondent of The Times, Philip Graves, as a clumsy plagiarism of a 19th-century French satire and other sources. None of this mattered very much to hard-core anti-Semites, though. Hitler dismissed the question of the genuineness or otherwise of the Protocols as irrelevant. Rather than confront the evidence head-on, he declared the fact that the “Jewish press” (by which he meant, rather strangely, The Times; for Hitler, all liberal newspapers were ‘Jewish’, since liberalism itself was ‘Jewish’) had tried to discredit them proved they must be genuine. And even if they were forged, they all the same revealed a deeper truth about the Jews. “What matters,” he announced, “is that they uncover, with really horrifying reliability, the nature and activity of the Jewish people, and expose them in their inner logic and their final aims. But reality provides the best commentary.” The key fact was that they purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish elders in 1897, and so emanated from what anti-Semites understood to be the Jewish community itself. This enabled anti-Semites to cite them as “proof” of the Jews’ subversive intent. Few people probably bothered to read the actual “protocols”; insofar as they were relevant to modern anti-Semitic beliefs at all, it was because of the chapter headings, commentaries and explanatory notes added by later editors. From the point of view of their actual content, as officials in the ministry of propaganda advised their boss, Goebbels, they were “not suitable as propaganda on the issues of the day”. The Protocols were too closely tied to the state of politics and the economy in early 20th-century Russia, too rambling and incoherent, and too far removed from Nazi ideology. Goebbels concluded: “One can’t speak of a conspiracy of the Jewish race in any straightforward meaning of the term; this conspiracy is more a characteristic of the race than a case of intellectual intentions. The Jews will always act as their Jewish instinct tells them.” In the end, therefore, the impact of the Protocols would seem to have been seriously exaggerated by historians. Nor, contrary to what one might have expected, was another, somewhat more focused and coherent conspiracy theory – the stab-in-the-back myth championed by the ultra-right – particularly central to Nazi ideology. According to the nationalist ultra-right in Germany, their country had been defeated in the First World War because of the subversive actions of socialists and revolutionaries. These groups had apparently undermined the German army’s will to fight and destroyed their chances of victory by overthrowing Kaiser Wilhelm II in the German Revolution of November 1918. It was of no matter that the army was militarily defeated weeks before the revolution; or that it lacked the supplies and munitions needed to fight on; or that Germany had lost its key allies, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary. For military leaders such as General Erich Ludendorff, it was an easy way of shifting the blame for the defeat away from themselves and on to the democrats and socialists they so bitterly hated – the people who had brought the democratic Weimar Republic into being. In the most extreme version of this myth, the socialists had been working to defeat Germany because they were themselves part of the purported global Jewish conspiracy that the Protocols were supposed to have uncovered. But, contrary to what one might have expected, Hitler consistently failed to make significant use of this version of the stab-in-the-back legend – or indeed any other iteration. There was no doubt, of course, about the visceral anti-Semitism of the Nazi party, and of Hitler himself, from the very beginning. But neither Hitler in his speeches, nor the Nazi press in its propaganda, made more than very occasional mentions of the supposed stab in the back. They preferred to concentrate their fire instead on the ‘November criminals’, the men who had (in their view) cravenly accepted the armistice terms and therefore betrayed the German race in the peace settlement. It was the weak will of the kaiser and his regime that had lost the war. In their early propaganda and in the official Party Programme promulgated in 1920, the Nazis focused on what they portrayed as the economic criminality of Jewish “war profiteers”. But even this propaganda line faded, as the Nazis came closer to power in the early 1930s. Rather than continuing to attack the old imperial elites for their supposed lack of willpower in 1918 – a line that would have alienated them at a time when he needed their support – Hitler preferred to instead pull them along with him in the drive towards war and conquest. The stab-in-the-back myth represented a step along the road from a systemic to a more genuine type of conspiracy theory: the event conspiracy theory. Germany’s defeat in the First World War was more a bundle of events than a single occurrence. On the night of 27–28 February 1933, however, something happened that immediately became the object of two diametrically opposed conspiracy theories: the German national parliament building, the Reichstag, in Berlin, burned down. Hitler had only been Reich chancellor for a few weeks, as head of a coalition government in which conservatives held the majority of posts. He saw this as the opportunity to seize quasi-dictatorial powers and, declaring that the arson attack marked the beginning of a communist coup, persuaded Reich President Paul von Hindenburg to promulgate a decree suspending civil liberties. Nazi stormtroopers subsequently rampaged across Germany suppressing opposition, often with extreme violence and brutality. Communists across Europe had repeatedly tried to seize power by force, from Russia in 1917 to Hungary and southern Germany in 1918–19. During the time of the Weimar Republic they had been remarkably successful in winning votes, increasing their representation in the Reichstag in November 1932 to 100 seats. The Nazis, conversely, in the grip of a deep political and financial crisis, lost heavily in this, the last free election of the Weimar Republic, although they did remain the largest party. It was not wholly implausible to suggest that the communists were launching a bid for dictatorial power in Germany in February 1933. But in reality, the Communist party of Germany, well-organised and supported though it was, expected the Weimar Republic to collapse of its own accord, as the capitalist system, in the middle of the Depression, proved unable to reproduce itself. In the autumn of 1933, the Nazi leadership arrested several leading communists for the destruction of the Reichstag building and put them on trial along with one non-communist: a young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, who was caught at the scene. In a humiliating defeat for the Nazis, the Reich Supreme Court, which had not yet been fully Nazified, was forced to acquit them for lack of evidence: only van der Lubbe, against whom alone the evidence was overwhelming, was convicted and executed. In the meantime, the communists developed a rival conspiracy theory, alleging that the fire had in fact been started by the Nazis themselves in order to provide an excuse for seizing dictatorial power. The communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg staged a counter-trial in London, at which, not surprisingly, the Nazis were found guilty of the crime. For decades, this view was widely shared, including among historians. But in 1959 a German civil servant, Fritz Tobias, published research, which subsequently appeared as a formidably lengthy and deeply researched book, arguing that van der Lubbe had burned down the Reichstag on his own. The young Dutchman was an ultra-left anarcho-syndicalist who had already tried, and failed, to burn down other public buildings in Berlin in protest against what he regarded as the shameful treatment of the unemployed by the German government. But with the Reichstag building he got lucky: breaking in through a window just after nine in the evening of 27 February, he rushed through the corridors with a blazing torch and fire-lighting equipment. Curtains and wooden furniture caught fire, and updraft spread the flames into the dome above the debating chamber. Soon, the building was in ruins. For more than 60 years, communists and their sympathisers have tried to shake the evidence presented by Tobias and discredit him as an old Nazi. In fact, he was a lifelong Social Democrat who blamed his own and his father’s dismissals from their jobs on the measures introduced by the Nazis after the fire. Many of the communists’ arguments are characteristic of conspiracy theories in general: key documents have disappeared or have been destroyed; key witnesses have been murdered; minor discrepancies in the actual evidence prove it was falsified; critics of the conspiracy theory are politically motivated or perpetuating ‘official’ lies. Above all, their central belief – that whoever benefits from an event must have caused it – is also one of the central beliefs in conspiracy theories of many kinds. Similar allegations can be found in the burgeoning literature concerning another celebrated incident in the history of Nazi Germany: the unexpected flight of the Nazi party’s deputy leader Rudolf Hess from Germany to Scotland in the middle of the war, on 10 May 1941, armed with a “peace offer” for Churchill’s government. The offer was rejected – it would have amounted to a virtual capitulation in the long term – and Hess was arrested, tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after Germany’s final defeat, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in Spandau prison in August 1987, at the age of 93. It was obvious to most people in 1941 that Hess had acted on his own. He had lost power in the Nazi leadership and planned his harebrained flight in order to restore it. Hitler was horrified when he learned of Hess’s actions, as were all the other leading Nazis. Soon enough, however, the conspiracy theories began to multiply, and in recent years they have been propagated with increasing frequency. Hess was sent by Hitler; he was invited over by a secret ‘peace party’ in Britain; he was lured over by the British security services; he was collaborating with Himmler, or Heydrich, in a bid to oust the Nazi dictator; even, most bizarrely of all, the man who landed in Scotland was not Hess at all, but a double – but why anybody would have agreed to spend decades in prison without revealing he was not the real Hess has never been explained. Yet again, there are allegations that evidence has been suppressed or destroyed, and key witnesses murdered. As with the Reichstag fire conspiracy theories, documents have been presented that are clearly forgeries, designed to substitute for the real thing. None of this is at all persuasive. The fantasies of the Hess conspiracy theorists seem almost conventional, however, in comparison to the most widespread event conspiracy theory about the Nazis today. Namely, the idea that Hitler, his wife, Eva Braun, and in some versions Blondi the dog, did not die in the Berlin bunker at the end of April 1945 but escaped to Argentina, where they lived peacefully in retirement after the war. Newspaper and magazine articles, a growing number of books, and even a three-season television series (Hunting Hitler, broadcast on the History Channel) have presented this thesis – though without a shred of genuine evidence. Instead, all the ‘evidence’ presented is second-hand, hearsay, or, most commonly, supposition (Hitler ‘could have’ been here; he ‘might have’ been seen there). The fact is, of course, that Hitler was too ill in April 1945 to have undertaken a daring escape from Berlin, even had it been possible, and many eyewitnesses testified to his suicide in the bunker and the destruction of his corpse at the time. Common to many such theories is a counter-factual suggestion amounting, in the minds of at least some of those who purvey them, to a degree of wishful thinking: if only the Jews had not been conspiring, then, according to conservative anti-Semites, the modern evils of liberalism, equality, free-thinking and secularisation would not be with us. If only the German army had not been stabbed in the back, according to German nationalists, it would have won the First World War. If only the Reichstag had not been burned down by the Nazis, according to the communists, then Weimar democracy would have survived, and the Holocaust would not have happened. If only Hess’s peace mission had succeeded, according to British nationalists and nostalgic imperialists, then the Second World War would have been brought to an end, millions saved and the British empire preserved. If only the world had realised Hitler had escaped from the bunker, then, according to his admirers, we would know how great a genius he was – or alternatively, for his detractors, we would have been able to bring him to justice for his crimes. Conspiracists’ claims about discovering unrecognised truths are often accompanied by assertions of having realised unconsidered possibilities. Conspiracy theories present to their consumers a world of black and white: of individual heroes, usually outsiders, who strive against overwhelming odds to uncover the truth; and of collective villains, usually in positions of power, who do everything to conceal it. Against the moral ambiguities of real life, they paint a picture of moral absolutes, of good and evil – a picture that is both easier to understand and, because of this, more interesting and exciting to portray than the grey complexity of documented reality. The reader, television consumer or moviegoer can gain satisfaction from identifying with the intrepid hero as he or, less commonly she, penetrates the veil of secrecy drawn by officialdom to unmask the plotters and conspirators who are manipulating events to their own advantage. The current proliferation, and, in some cases, revival of conspiracy theories involving Hitler is part of a much wider trend, in which different influences have come together to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction; or rather, perhaps, to present alternative ‘truths’, each of which claims to correspond to reality and presents its own panoply of evidential support to back up its claims. But there cannot be different and opposing true statements about something; there can only be one truth, even if it can sometimes be very hard to ascertain. Discovering what really happened in history is difficult. It requires a great deal of hard work, it demands direct examination of the evidence, it presupposes a willingness to change one’s mind, and it involves the suspension of one’s prejudices and preconceptions. But it can be done. This article was first published in the November 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
Bitter end: Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich
The final months of the Second World War witnessed the slow strangulation of the Third Reich: while Allied forces advanced towards Berlin from both east and west, Adolf Hitler’s increasing detachment from reality condemned millions of his compatriots to death. Richard J Evans charts the bloody collapse of Nazi Germany...
In 1943 the fortunes of war began to turn against Nazi Germany. Early that year, the battle of Stalingrad – widely hailed as a turning point in the Second World War – inaugurated a long, steady advance by the Red Army on the eastern front. This was interrupted only briefly by the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, which the Germans lost comprehensively. In the south, Hitler’s Italian ally, Benito Mussolini, was deposed in July 1943 after the Allies launched their invasion of Sicily. The Germans now felt obliged to occupy mainland Italy, diverting much-needed troops from the east, but were steadily beaten back by the Allies from September onwards. The end of July saw the mass bombing of Hamburg, with the damage inflicted on German cities by Allied raids becoming ever more severe. All the while, morale on the home front began to fall, and the Nazi Party, the Gestapo and the SS started to tighten the screws of the repression that had played such an important part in creating the regime in the first place. Active Nazis rejoiced in the return, as they saw it, of the “time of struggle”, the old days before the Third Reich was securely established, when they were fighting against their enemies, real or imagined, on all sides. Read more | Should we be glad the 1944 July Plot to kill Hitler failed? By 1944 growing numbers of middle-ranking army officers, backed by a few more senior figures, had become so despairing of victory that they were plotting to remove Adolf Hitler and sue for peace – a futile enterprise, since the Allies had agreed to demand unconditional surrender early the previous year. On 20 July 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg detonated a time-bomb in Hitler’s eastern headquarters, but it didn’t kill the Nazi dictator and the coup failed. Already suspicious of the armed forces and contemptuous of their leadership, Hitler now lost all faith in them. They were either cowards or traitors. Willpower was what mattered in his view, willpower would conquer everything, and willpower was precisely what they lacked. On the podcast | Frank McDonough discusses how Nazi Germany fell from the peak of its power in 1940 to disastrous defeat A failed miracle In a desperate attempt to shore up morale, the manufacture of “miracle weapons” was trumpeted by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda apparatus, including nerve gases, flying bombs, ground-to-air missiles, rockets, air-conditioned submarines and even an atom bomb. Hitler placed particular faith in the effects of a jet-engine fighter plane, the Messerschmitt Me 262, but it had little impact on fighting before the end of the war. These projects dissipated resources too widely, and depended on supplies of raw materials that were already drying up. Hitler ordered a concentration on the V1 flying bomb and the V2 rocket, but they could not be manufactured in sufficient quantities to have a major impact. Moreover, the fact that the “V” stood for Vergeltung, “retribution”, amounted to a confession that they were unlikely to change the course of the war. For a while, however, they gave at least some encouragement to Hitler’s faithful that the tide could still be turned. The public, as the SS reported, were increasingly sceptical. Read more | Reporting on Hitler: how foreign correspondents in Nazi Germany battled to expose the truth In these final months, Hitler looked to history for inspiration. The call-up of men previously exempted from military service, above all because they were too young or too old, into the Volkssturm (People’s Storm) deliberately echoed the legendary popular mobilisation in Prussia against Napoleon Bonaparte. The official date for the launch of the Volkssturm, 18 October 1944, was the anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig in 1813. Goebbels also commissioned and released an expensive new colour movie, Kolberg, telling the fictionalised story of a decision by the people of a town besieged by Napoleon to fight on to the bitter end whatever the cost. It was an implicit invitation to the Germans of Hitler’s day to sacrifice themselves in what was claimed to be the national interest. It had little impact, since it had a very limited release. The movie also wasted precious resources of manpower for the military scenes, which involved thousands of men who might otherwise have been fighting at the front. The Volkssturm itself, poorly equipped and badly trained, was largely pointless except as a propaganda exercise: 175,000 men and boys were killed before the war came to an end. Read more | The stomach for the fight: the food policies used by the Nazis to maintain control in the Third Reich On 16 December 1944, Hitler attempted a last throw of the dice, launching a fresh offensive in the west, where he believed that he could repeat the triumph of 1940 in the Ardennes – another piece of historical wishful thinking. Some 200,000 troops and large quantities of armour and equipment were transferred to the battle of the Bulge, largely from the eastern front. When Hitler’s acting army chief of staff, Heinz Guderian, told him that the situation on the eastern front was at breaking point, and that it was folly to divert troops to the west, the dictator screamed: “You don’t need to lecture me! I’ve been leading the German armies in the field for five years… I’m better informed than you are!” If the troops believed in victory, Hitler told his adjutant Nicolaus von Below, then victory would be theirs. To begin with, the German armies scored some successes, enthusing Hitler with a fresh confidence, before the overwhelming superiority of the Allies brought them to a halt. The net effect in the end was to weaken the German defences in the east. After the Ardennes offensive was broken, Hitler told Below: “I know the war is lost. The enemy’s superiority is too great.” He had been let down by the Luftwaffe and betrayed by traitors in the army. “We won’t surrender, never. We can go under. But we’ll take a world with us.” Death and destruction were all he could think of in his hour of despair. Conspiracy theories As one defeat followed another, Hitler began to isolate himself from the German masses, ceasing his visits to the front and refusing to go to the cities to talk to the civilians who had been bombed out of their homes. Once more, he blamed everything that had, in his mind, gone wrong with Germany since the First World War on “the Jewish-international global conspiracy”, in which latterly Franklin D Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill had been no more than willing puppets. He still insisted on continued uncompromising resistance. When Warsaw was evacuated by the retreating German army, he lost his temper and had the staff officers who had issued the retreat signals arrested by the Gestapo. A crack SS division, the Leibstandarte, suffered heavy losses in its defence of the Hungarian oilfields, and was rewarded for its defeat by Hitler’s sending SS chief Heinrich Himmler to strip its surviving soldiers of their armbands, a very public humiliation that caused some of the troops to shoot themselves. Hitler did not care. By insisting on fighting to the end, he sacrificed the lives of millions of his soldiers. More than a third of all German troops killed during the war died in January to May 1945, when it was clear to most Germans that the war was already lost. The destruction of German towns and cities from the air was turning more and more of them into heaps of rubble. Power cuts and water shortages became more frequent with the destruction of gas and electricity generating plants, power lines and underground pipes. More than half a million civilians were killed in the raids. Living conditions began to worsen. In the autumn of 1944, for the first time, the Nazi authorities began to make serious reductions of food and other rations. The supply situation steadily deteriorated from now on, and was not to recover until many months after the end of the war. On 19 March 1945, Hitler issued the infamous “Nero order”, commanding local authorities and plant managers to destroy their facilities in the face of the Allied advance in order to prevent them from being used by the enemy. The order, however, was widely disobeyed by local authorities, encouraged by armaments minister Albert Speer. After reading a memorandum Speer had presented to him rejecting the order because the German people would need the basic necessities if they were to survive after the war, Hitler told him that it was not necessary to worry about the German people, “for the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. In any case only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/11/2FWRW8W-ed04ced.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Adolf Hitler pictured in July 1944 with his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, who stayed loyal to the führer until the end (Photo by Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Adolf Hitler pictured in July 1944 with his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, who stayed loyal to the führer until the end (Photo by Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Losing touch with reality In Berlin, the bombing of the Reich Chancellery on 3 February 1945, including Hitler’s private apartments, forced him to move permanently into the bunker he had had constructed below. To begin with, he climbed the stairs to the garden quite frequently to walk his dog, Blondi, and on 20 March 1945 he went up to inspect and decorate a small detachment of Hitler Youth who had been defending the city. But as the Red Army moved into Berlin, it became too dangerous. On 20 April, his 56th birthday, he went up for the last time; a further attempt to come out, a week later, was frustrated by Soviet shelling. Inside the bunker, the foul air and failing latrine system were beginning to make life unbearable. The celebration of Hitler’s birthday in the bunker was muted, with Hitler himself participating only reluctantly. Outside on the surface, the dull thuds of Soviet artillery fire could already be heard, the noise penetrating through the thick concrete into the room. By this time, Hitler had almost wholly lost touch with reality. He continued in his daily military conferences to move little flags representing army divisions around Berlin on a map, ordering a tank unit led by Felix Steiner, a senior SS officer, to launch a counter-attack, supported by aircraft and infantry, in which he expected that “the Russians will suffer the greatest defeat, the bloodiest defeat in their history before the gates of the city of Berlin”. Read more | "One of the most puzzling decisions of WW2": why Hitler declared war on America But the troops and the tanks simply didn’t exist. Told the attack had not taken place, Hitler lost all self-control, screaming that the army – and now, too, the SS – had betrayed him. Everything was lost, he cried, shaking with rage. Hermann Göring must negotiate a peace deal with the Allies. He would stay in the bunker and take his own life. Informed by telephone of Hitler’s breakdown, Goebbels moved into the bunker with his wife and children, determined to stay with him until the end, then create a heroic myth, just as he had tried to do after Stalingrad, of self-sacrifice for posterity. Hitler’s breakdown on 22 April 1945 inaugurated the final act in the squalid and pointless drama being played out in the bunker. At last, the spell broken, his lieutenants, with the exception of Goebbels, began to desert him. Told of Hitler’s rant, Göring sent a telegram to Berlin assuming his rights as his nominated successor unless he heard otherwise. Hitler had already lost faith in him because of the failure of the Luftwaffe, and now he reacted by instructing the Reich Marshal to resign all his offices. Within a few hours, Göring was under house arrest, an SS unit stationed outside his house. Worse than any of this, Hitler discovered that Himmler had been negotiating with neutral Sweden behind his back for Germany’s surrender to be conveyed to the Allies. Declaring this to be “the most shameful betrayal in human history”, Hitler dismissed him from all his offices. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/11/DW2XY7webready-a58745d.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Red Army troops run through Berlin during the storming of the Reichstag in April 1945 (Photo by dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Red Army troops run through Berlin during the storming of the Reichstag in April 1945 (Photo by dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Death in a bunker On 29 April 1945, after being shown photographs of Mussolini’s corpse, hanging upside-down from a petrol station gantry next to that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, Hitler told his staff over dinner that he was determined to avoid a similar fate. His body was to be burned until no trace of it remained, he said. Summoning a local Berlin official to the bunker, he now underwent a formal, legal ceremony of marriage with Eva Braun. Dictating his last will and testament, he appointed Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor, and blamed the bombing of German cities on the Jews, who he believed were steering the Allies from behind. They had been forced to “expiate their guilt, though through more humane means”. Such an admission expressed a belief that the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps were a “humane” method of killing, as well as a feeling of triumph that, with the Holocaust, he had exacted on the Jews what he imagined to be a justified revenge. Privately, Hitler admitted to his secretary Traudl Junge that “National Socialism is dead”. Unrestrained in his boundless egotism, he told her that the Germans had not been ready to carry out the tasks he had allotted to them. Read more | A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends On 30 April 1945, after saying farewell once more to his secretaries, Hitler retired with Eva to his study at half-past three in the afternoon. A few minutes later a single shot was fired. Gingerly opening the door, Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, saw the dictator’s lifeless body slumped on the sofa, blood oozing from a gunshot wound in his right temple. Eva Braun (now Hitler) was beside him, a strong smell of bitter almonds coming from her corpse. She had taken cyanide. Linge and Hitler’s adjutant, Otto Günsche, wrapped the bodies in blankets and, with the help of SS guards, carried them up the long staircases to the Reich Chancellery garden, where they doused them with petrol and set them alight. So thoroughly were the bodies burned that only the teeth remained among the ashes, later to be identified by a technician who had worked for Hitler’s dentist. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/11/GAREBKwebread-c8b9495.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The American military newspaper The Stars and Stripes announces the führer’s death on 2 May 1945 (Photo by Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo)" title="The American military newspaper The Stars and Stripes announces the führer’s death on 2 May 1945 (Photo by Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Public executions Hitler left only death and destruction behind him. Many ordinary Germans had gradually lost faith in his regime as defeat followed defeat, and life in Germany’s devastated cities had progressively become more difficult for them to sustain. Instead of being restored to greatness, as Hitler had proclaimed, the country lay in ruins. Yet there had been no general rising against the regime. By the last months, any kind of dereliction of duty, open defeatism, or attempt to negotiate a local surrender to the advancing Allied forces incurred public execution at the hands of the SS and other fanatics. Many Germans carried on resisting the enemy out of fear of what might happen to them, justified enough in the case of the Red Army, whose troops carried out innumerable shootings and rapes of civilians as they advanced into Germany. By 1945 most Germans were motivated above all by nationalism, the feeling that what they were defending was their country rather than the Nazi regime that had taken it over. Civil servants and administrators continued with their daily bureaucratic routines more out of a sense of duty or ingrained habit than anything else. Hitler’s charismatic authority endured almost to the end. More than a decade of his rule had left people unable to imagine life without him – in thousands of cases literally so, as a huge wave of suicides rolled across Germany, particularly among government ministers, generals and Nazi Party officials. When Hitler’s death became known, and the war ended, allegiance to the Third Reich among the people of Germany vanished almost overnight. This article was first published in the November 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
Books interview with Richard J Evans: “For Hobsbawm, communism was a matter of life and death”
Richard J Evans talks to Rob Attar about his new biography of the world-renowned Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and discusses the legacy of his work today
In context Born in Alexandria in 1917, Eric Hobsbawm spent his youth in Vienna and Berlin, witnessing the rise of Nazism, before moving to Britain in 1933. He studied history at Cambridge and became a lecturer at Birkbeck in London. His books, notably The Age Of… series, which covered the years 1789–1991, were global bestsellers, making Hobsbawm one of the world's best-known and most influential historians. He was a lifelong communist, and his ideology infused his research and writing. Hobsbawm's other great love was the jazz scene, which he chronicled for the New Statesman under the pseudonym Francis Newton. He died in 2012 and his ashes were interred in Highgate Cemetery, close to the tomb of Karl Marx. Q: Your book is titled A Life in History. How far did Hobsbawm's life shape the history that he produced? A: One of the central arguments of my biography is that there is a dovetailing of Eric’s personal life and the subjects he wrote about. For instance, in the 1940s, when he was a very committed communist in many ways, he wrote about the rise of organised labour in the industrial revolution. But in the mid-1950s, when he broke in all but name with the Communist party in Britain and started to move in the bohemian world of Soho, he became interested in writing about deviant and marginal people in history. It was no longer about the rise of the wage worker, but about millenarians and bandits – what he called ‘primitive rebels’. Q: Hobsbawm's communism was a huge part of who he was. When did this begin for him? A: He was born in 1917 – coincidentally the year of the Russian Revolution – and grew up in Vienna. His parents died when he was quite young, so he was looked after by an uncle and aunt in Berlin. He was there in the early 1930s, when the Weimar republic was falling apart, and the choice in the high schools at that time was really between Nazism and communism. It was a much more extreme version of our own time, with the centre having fallen apart. Eric couldn’t possibly have become a Nazi. For one thing he was a British citizen, and for another he was Jewish. So he gravitated towards the Communist party and, though he didn’t actually join it until he was at Cambridge in 1936, he had become intellectually and ideologically a Marxist. I always call him a communist with a small 'c' because, despite his ideological commitment, he never did the sort of things communists are supposed to do: only write for communist journals, sell the Daily Worker on the street corner, etc. Q: Why did he decide to become a historian rather than pursuing a career in politics? A: Eric proved to be very good at history in school and then read it at Cambridge from 1936–39. He got married during the war and felt that he needed to earn a living. So he got this job as a history lecturer at Birkbeck in London. Previously he'd thought of becoming a poet, but I've read some of his poems from during the war and they are truly terrible! He also applied to the BBC for a full-time job but they turned him down. He even considered working for the Daily Mail, but thought better of it. Eric did think about working as a propagandist for the communists, but in the end he was unwilling to give up his independence of mind. So he plumped for history because he knew he was good at it and found it fascinating in many ways. Q: In the book you describe how Hobsbawm was monitored by MI5. What was it about him that they deemed to be dangerous? A: MI5 began to be interested in him during the war, when Eric served in the Army Education Corps. There, one of Eric’s jobs was to put up wall newspapers to keep the troops informed. One of his superiors read the newspapers and felt they were too leftwing: in particular, they were arguing for a second front. (One of Stalin’s demands was that the western Allies should relieve the pressure on the Soviet armies by invading western Europe.) Eric’s partisanship was felt to be inconvenient, and so he was reported to MI5 and they started their files on him. I think he suspected that somebody was spying on him, but he never really found out until a good deal later that it was MI5. Eric was a very kind man. He wasn’t a good hater, like many historians are Once MI5 had him on their radar they didn’t feel they should stop monitoring him, but he was pretty harmless really. And all the time Eric was being monitored, the Cambridge spies were literally getting away with murder. I think it’s because Eric didn’t seem quite British – he wasn’t a classic English public schoolboy like the Cambridge spies were. Q: What was it about Hobsbawm that made him a historian of note? A: I think it was his ability to develop new concepts and methods, to pose big, challenging questions and to illustrate and explain them with all kinds of wonderful detail. One example of these concepts was the general crisis of the 17th century. In the 1950s, he argued that if you looked right across Europe, from the English Civil War to the Thirty Years’ War, there was a general crisis of the feudal economy and society that caused massive disruptions and conflicts. This ignited a very long debate that is still rumbling on today. Another of these concepts was the invention of tradition: that traditions do not go back to time immemorial, but some are actually invented. Eric’s interest in this was sparked by the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Cambridge, which seemed traditional but was actually a very recent creation. In fact, we only just celebrated its 100th anniversary. Q: Hobsbawm's books were extremely popular abroad, notably in Brazil. What do you think explains this? A: I think it is because he had this British way with words. Eric approached history not just as an intellectual exercise but also as a way of making the parts come alive through literary style. And that’s quite unusual outside the UK. We have this literary tradition of historical writing that goes back to Macaulay and Gibbon, and which has stood us in very good stead as British historians making an impact abroad. Q: Hobsbawm's success meant he was able to live a very comfortable life. How did he square that with the fact that he was a man of the left? A: As a child Eric went through periods of acute poverty. He recalled, for example, how in Vienna he had had to walk through the snow in a pair of old shoes that let the water in. And in Berlin, he had been so ashamed of his old second-hand bike that he would get to school early so he could hide it away. Eric was always very conscious of economic insecurity, even in old age when he was earning a lot of money from his books. I don't think this was a question Eric asked himself very much. He avoided thinking about the fact he was a Marxist who was making hundreds of thousands from his books. The Age of Extremes sold 265,000 copies in Brazil alone, for example. There’s a nice quote I got from someone who knew Eric and was surprised at how comfortable and bourgeois his house was. She asked him how he squared it, and he said: “Well, if you’re going down with the ship, you might as well go down first class!” Q: Hobsbawm was often criticised for his communist beliefs. Was he blind to the worst excesses of communism in practice? A: Eric came to communism in Berlin, where it was a matter of life and death. Communism was something that was part of his identity: he experienced the communist movement as a substitute family. There’s a very interesting phone call recorded by MI5 in 1957, where the communists had started to threaten Eric with expulsion, and he kind of broke down and said: “Please, you can’t do that” – even though at the time he was leading a campaign for the British Communist party leadership to reform themselves and admit that Stalinism was wrong. There was a war within Eric between this small 'c' communist commitment and the recognition of the crimes of Stalin and Stalinism in particular. And I don't think this war was ever quite resolved. It's one of the fascinating things about The Age of Extremes, his history of the short 20th century. He's trying to come to terms with the evils of Stalinism, and it's quite difficult for someone who has been as committed as Eric has during his life. Q: You met Hobsbawm on several occasions. What kind of man was he? A: I only knew him in his later years, through Birkbeck, where I taught from 1989–98. I always felt somewhat in awe of him, because he knew so much more than I did about anything we could talk about. But he was fascinating to talk to, and he knew so many people and had all kinds of views which were often quite surprising. He was also a very kind man and, as far as I could see, entirely without malice. He never indulged in malicious gossip of the sort that’s far too common in universities. He wasn’t a good hater, like too many historians are. It’s striking that everybody who knew him speaks very warmly about him. Q: Is Hobsbawm still required reading for historians and students in the 21st century? A: It is remarkable that his books are all still in print. Walk into any university bookshop and you will see The Age of Revolution there on the history shelves. That was published in 1962. How many other historians' books from so long ago are still required reading on university history courses? I think the reason his books have lasted is because they have these challenging hypotheses that you can discuss in a seminar, but are beautifully written and carry the reader forward. Eric still has a direct influence on history students who read his work, and they should continue to do so. Sir Richard J Evans is regius professor emeritus of history at Cambridge University. He is the author of numerous books, including In Defence of History (Granta, 1997), The Coming of the Third Reich (Allen Lane, 2003) and The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815–1914 (Allen Lane, 2016). Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Richard J Evans (Little, Brown, 800 pages, £35) This article was first published in the February 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine