Understanding the Rise of Fascism
Popular accounts of Nazism often claim that Hitler rose to power democratically. But, historian Richard J. Evans argues, German fascism relied on armed militias, made up of disaffected veterans inspired by antisemitism, to crush communists and socialists.
Not only right-wing veterans from World War I but also men from right-wing backgrounds who were too young to have fought in the war joined the Nazis in order, as they saw it, to restore Germany to its former glory and destroy its enemies, within and without. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
Historian Richard J. Evans is the author of eighteen books including his three-volume Third Reich trilogy — The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War — which cover the rise and fall of fascism in Germany. His most recent book, Hitler’s People: Faces of the Third Reich, focuses on Adolf Hitler’s inner circle and attempts to understand the psychology and lives of the cast of figures that would lead the Nazi party to power and Germany to disaster. He spoke to Jacobin about the political forces that enabled fascism’s rise in Germany, as well as the role of antisemitism and anti-communism in the Nazi worldview.
Aaron J. Leonard
In your introduction, you lay out why you took the tack you did with this volume: “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime, and by doing so, perhaps learn some lessons for the troubled era in which we live.” What led you to this approach?
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.
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