Understanding the Rise of Fascism

Richard J. Evans

In 2003–2008, I published a major three-volume narrative history of Nazi Germany. The more I have thought about it in the years since then, however, the more I began to realize I didn’t really know these people in depth. And I was struck by the extent to which new material — diaries, letters, biographies, and autobiographies — was pouring off the presses that filled in the gaps and gave us a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of Nazism even seventy and eighty years later.

At the same time, the rise of authoritarian politicians, populists, and strongmen, actual or would-be, was raising disturbing new questions about democracy and what seemed — and seems — to me to be the growing threat to democratic politics around the world. So I began to read around in the subject and found so much new material that a new book about Nazism from this angle was justified. The biographical chapters in the book are also linked by a set of common questions, about commitment and its roots, about behavior and attitudes, and perhaps above all by the fact that these people, even Adolf Hitler himself, were not monsters or demons, but human beings like us.