Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He has served as Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge; president of Wolfson College, Cambridge; and provost of Gresham College in the City of London. He has received the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and the British Academy's Leverhulme Medal and Prize, awarded for a significant contribution to the humanities or social sciences. In 2000, he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defense of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War, and The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination. In 2012, he was knighted for services to scholarship.

"A fascinating and instructive book . . . elegantly written and perceptive." --Wall Street Journal

"Kaleidoscopic . . . A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context . . . Just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through." --The New York Times

"Evans has chronicled Nazi Germany before, but never with such urgency . . . His previous books . . . are models of historical writing, a combination of narrative and exploration, scholarship for the sake of scholarship and yet volumes that are immensely readable, even novelistic in style . . . Hitler's People is similar in its polish and power. But the motivation and purpose of this latest work, a sweeping examination of Adolf Hitler and his subalterns and subjects, is more utilitarian." --Boston Globe

"Evans is a wonderful stylist as well as a keen analyst, and in his latest book, Hitler's People, he deftly focuses on the personalities and temperaments of those who fell under the sway of Nazism and abetted the most evil regime in modern history. Any reader will come away wiser about the Third Reich, if still confounded that it existed at all . . . a brilliant survey of previous biographies of Hitler, each one emphasizing different factors in his rise to power." --Air Mail

"Call it a roll call of the demonic and demented. Sir Richard . . . is a vivid portraitist who manages to be both unsparing and enlightening. Dealers in death like Rohm, Himmler, Rosenberg, and Heydrich come alive . . . Sir Richard is as adroit sketching the wrecked paradigms and virulent ideologies that made Nazism possible as he is at pointillist renderings of pathologies that made mediocrities into monsters. He has a novelist's eye for detail . . . Hitler's People does for the paladins of the Third Reich what Suetonius's "Lives of the Caesars" did for the Roman Empire and Giorgio Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" did for the Renaissance--tell a story of an era by way of its people." --New York Sun

"Superb. . . Searching, humane scholarship." --Washington Times

"Important . . . Sobering and incisive commentary on the men who persuaded ordinary Germans to become mass murderers." --Jewish Chronicle

"Evans takes the time to examine these cogs in the machine and see them as people with complicated lives, which makes their choices all the more disturbing." --Parade

"Evans . . . offers these eye-opening portraits of the heart of evil in an effort to understand what kind of people fell under Hitler's spell. . . . A meticulously researched, sobering look at the Nazi era and the people who helped bring its evil intents to fruition." --Kirkus(starred review)

"Insightful . . . [Evans] strikes a reasoned balance between the need to understand societal context and building a convincing case for the importance of individual personalities . . . This is a valuable work for readers interested in history or threats to democracy." --Shelf Awareness

Publisher: Penguin Books

Pub date: 2025-11-18

Length: 624 pages