Hatred Will Destroy You: What Nazism Teaches Us Today
We might contemplate whether hatred, like a suppressed coal fire, lies dormant in many of us, poised to erupt if given a chance.
In 1828, historian Thomas Macaulay expressed the hope that a future English crisis would be handled by leaders “for whom history has not recorded the long series of human crimes and follies in vain.”
Renowned historian Richard J. Evans has a broader objective in his latest book, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (2024). He believes everyone, not just leaders, should learn from Nazi crimes and consider why so few people resisted.
Evans uses a biographical approach. The author not only focuses on Hitler but also provides concise biographies of twenty-one individuals in his circle, from key figures like Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels, to “enforcers” like Heydrich and Eichmann, and those who served as “tools,” including filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
Evans excuses no one, including Albert Speer, who “somehow persuaded the judges at … Nuremberg after the war that he had been unaware of Nazism’s crimes.” Evans adds that Speer, who postured in his memoirs as an “apolitical architect,” supplied “a persuasive excuse for millions of Germans who had lived under the Third Reich.”
F. A. Hayek’s influential work, The Road to Serfdom, offers a critical warning that provides context for understanding Hitler’s people:
To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him.
The rogues’ gallery of individuals in Hitler’s People broke every “moral rule” to serve Hitler and behaved, in Hayek’s words, “completely unprincipled and literally capable of everything.”
In his The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained threshold magnitude, a concept in physics used for phenomena that don’t exist until a threshold is reached.
“Evildoing,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “also has a threshold magnitude.” He continued,
A human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope.”
Solzhenitsyn explained when “through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme danger or of the absoluteness of his power,” a person crossing that threshold “has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.”
Hitler’s People is the documentation of people who left their “humanity behind” with no “possibility of return.” Nazism, in the words of novelist and essayist Martin Amis, functioned by a “direct appeal to the reptile brain.”
In his historical research, Evans analyzes primary sources to reveal how the unthinkable occurred and what we can learn from the normalization of “perverted morality.”
Evans is clear about why we must learn: Hitler’s people “were not psychopaths; nor were they deranged, or perverted, or insane.”
Evans continues, “Apart from flying in the face of the evidence, thinking of them as depraved, deviant, or degenerate puts them outside the bounds of normal humanity and so serves as a form of exculpation for the rest of us, past, present and future.”
Hitler’s people were not those “who existed on the margins of society, or grew up beyond the social mainstream. In most of their life, they were completely normal by the standards of the day.” They “shared the conventional cultural attributes of the German bourgeoisie, were well-read, or played a musical instrument with some proficiency, or painted, or wrote fiction or poetry.”
If you want a historian who places all the blame on Hitler, you won’t find it in Evans. “German institutions and traditions and, more generally, the German people themselves” are examined and found responsible. Hitler did not merely “seduce people into following him: it was his followers who inspired him to lead them.”
The German people were complicit in Hitler’s hatred, not victims of it. Evans rejects “the idea that the vast majority of Germans were simply ignorant of the realities of Nazism.” He observes, “Nearly all Germans had the opportunity to observe for themselves the murderous violence of the Nazis, or to learn about the mass shootings and gassings of the Jews at Auschwitz and elsewhere from reports sent home by soldiers from the Eastern Front, or brought back to Germany by soldiers on leave.”
Evans’s damning conclusion is not conjecture. He brings to light “secret Nazi reports on popular attitudes to the Jews from 1933 to 1945.” These reports show “widespread knowledge” on the fate of the Jews and “popular approval” and Nazi policies towards the Jews.
That said, Evans’s views are nuanced. He does not believe “that exterminatory antisemitism, subservience to authority, lust for conquest, militarism and similar characteristics, were hard-wired into the Germans’ sense of national identity.”
Do not underestimate “the depth and breadth of coercion and violence used by the Nazis to bring Germans into line,” writes Evans. He reports, “Surveillance and control… was exercised not just by the Gestapo but, more importantly, by officials such as the ‘Block Wardens’, more than two million of whom were supervising their respective street blocks.”
Reading Evans, we might contemplate whether hatred, like a suppressed coal fire, lies dormant in many of us, poised to erupt if given a chance. Hitler and his minions may have set the external conditions, but the German people were responsible for their inner conditions, the coal fires simmering in their mental landscapes.
I am often haunted by the question of how Americans would handle a major economic crisis, like the 1930s. Many coal fires are simmering in the minds of Americans as understanding of and respect for the rule of law and constitutional principles wanes.
Importantly, Evans concludes, “The Nazi regime was not a dictatorship produced and sustained by popular endorsement.” Support for the regime varied by age cohort. The regime “was more popular and more widely accepted among the young, influenced by school, Hitler Youth, and the Nazi permeation of social institutions.” Less support was found among “the middle-aged and the elderly, for example, who had formed their values and social identity before 1933.”
What implications does this have for our current era? Today, in some school districts, children are taught arguably anti-American and anti-family values. Law students, some of whom will become future judges, are taught by professors who don’t respect constitutional law. Many simmering coal fires are being set.
Evans recounts, “Overcoming seemingly unbridgeable political, economic and social divisions and antagonisms by creating a genuine, unitary people’s community” was Hitler’s promise. Of course, Jews were excluded, but the point is chilling. In times of crisis, when people are not united around constitutional principles that enable human flourishing, totalitarian demagogues will fill the void.
Do we build America around the “vision” of one person and an imposed common purpose? Hayek and Evans would warn a people without purpose may find meaning in their lives by adopting the meaning of a despot.
Isn’t social cohesion better achieved, not around a common purpose but around belief in common principles that guide our actions? Without common principles, a nation carried by a current of proclaimed common purpose drifts into totalitarian rule by coercion.
Evans delivers an impactful message: The unifying meaning that the German people found was hatred. Even towards the end of the war, there was admiration for Hitler, belief in the “acquisition of living-space” and the necessity to destroy “Bolshevism” and the Jews.
Hatred fueled the Nazis and destroyed Germany. Hatred will destroy any nation that doesn’t heed the lessons of history. Hitler’s People is highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn why.
This essay was originally published at the American Insitute for Economic Research. My essay about the Holodomor may be of interest.
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A house divided against itself will not stand. That is the answer. If we throw our brothers out of Heaven, we are throwing ourselves out of Heaven. It is completely reflexive.
Was Hitler’s totalitarianism worse than others? Were these ordinary people or were they caught up in something they couldn’t control? It’s not clear to me from this review. My own bias says there was nothing unique about what happened, and given similar circumstances it could easily happen again. Of course the cause might be different, like safety, and the scapegoats might be different, like the unvaccinated. Perhaps the threshold is just the number of people willing to go along with those in charge, and look the other way when bad things happen to other people.