Let's write about Adolf Hitler's proof of death

Hitler’s End book review- The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History, review written by Neal Ascherson
After the fall of Berlin, the Soviets concealed their discovery of Hitler’s remains, leaving the Western Allies scrambling for evidence that he died❗☠️

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.

Three years after the end of World War II and almost fifty years after William Hughes Mearns wrote those lines, a man who wasn’t there was offered a chair. In 1948, officials in Munich arranged for Adolf Hitler to face a denazification tribunal. The judges considered the empty chair’s responsibility for the murder of millions, declared its nonoccupant a “major offender,” and confiscated part of his property.

“I wish, I wish he’d go away,” continues the rhyme. 

But, tragically, he wouldn’t "go away". 

Because no death certificate had been issued for the Führer, his sister Paula could not receive items he had bequeathed her in his personal will. Beginning in 1953 a court in Berchtesgaden labored through bundles of testimony, and finally, on December 3, 1956, a death certificate issued by the exhausted magistrate became legally valid. “Eleven and a half years after the Second World War, the ‘mystery’ of Adolf Hitler’s fate appeared resolved,” writes Caroline Sharples in The Long Death of Adolf Hitler. But incredibly, it wasn’t. There was plenty more to the story.
What does it mean to be officially dead❓ This is what Sharples considers in her cleverly researched and sometimes unnerving book. She records the facts, uncertainties, deceptions, and on occasion shameless fictions that have attended efforts to resolve the question of how Hitler died and what happened to his remains. 

Sharples’s account of successive versions is roughly chronological. But it’s helpful to first set out a summary of what we think we know today. On April 29, 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker. They then committed suicide: he shot himself in the head, and she took cyanide. Their bodies were carried upstairs to the Reich Chancellery garden, doused with gasoline, and set alight. Soviet forces found the remains a few days later and took them away for autopsy. Hitler’s jaw and teeth were removed and kept in Moscow. The other remains were dumped in a river near Magdeburg in 1970 by a KGB unit. Almost all these details have been challenged or are at least not irrevocably confirmed.

As Sharples suggests, the best proof of death is a corpse ❗—an identifiable body—and failing that, a body part, but on two conditions. First, it must be scientifically shown to have belonged to the presumed subject. Second—and this became relevant in the Hitler case—its removal from the body must have either caused death or been performed after death. Hitler’s ear would not have proved much. But his jawbone, complete with elaborate fillings and crowns matching his dental records, would be conclusive. And that Führer fragment, severed from the corpse dug up and forensically examined by SMERSH (Soviet military counterintelligence), was in Russian hands. Unfortunately for British and American researchers, the Russians refused even to admit that they had found a body. The jawbone, stored in an old cigar tin lined with red satin, was consigned to a secret Moscow archive.

As the Soviet troops approached the bunker, the world’s first question was: Where is Hitler? His death had been announced, without details, by his chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz. But was it true? It became apparent that the British and Americans were much more worried about the possibility that Hitler might have escaped than the Soviets were. In Berlin, Soviet intelligence officers at first gossiped to their Allied counterparts that they had found Hitler’s remains, only to go silent when they heard that Stalin had just told Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins and US ambassador Averell Harriman that no body had been found and that Hitler was probably at large somewhere in Germany.

The Western Allies were convinced that a Nazi revival was still possible and that the Führer might emerge from hiding to lead it. 

This worry was groundless, but it contrasted with the relaxed attitude of the Soviet authorities. No wonder—they had found the corpses of Hitler and Braun almost at once, fire-damaged but recognizable, in a shell crater grave. Witnesses to the cremation among the bunker staff had been arrested and locked up in Russia. As the cold war took shape, Moscow encouraged rumors that the British were hiding Hitler in a castle in their occupation zone or that the “imperialists” had helped him reach Latin America.

The Russians secretly held the direct physical evidence of Hitler’s death. The West, by contrast, soon possessed the bulk of indirect evidence in the form of witness statements. The British insisted that this uncertainty was intolerable and dangerous, and they asked the young historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to prepare a report.

On November 1, 1945, Sharples writes, the “bespectacled, thirty-one-year-old Oxford don stood before the assembled Allied press corps” and outlined the results of his inquiry. Hitler was dead, Trevor-Roper confirmed, having committed suicide by gunshot, and his body had been immediately incinerated in the Chancellery garden. He added more details in the next few months, but his 1945, report, later expanded into the best-selling book The Last Days of Hitler (1947), became the accepted account of Hitler’s end for many years. Its weaknesses, such as they were, became clear only slowly. Trevor-Roper did not know, of course, that the Soviet authorities had disinterred Hitler’s body and stored what was left of him. He broadly accepted the varying recollections of bunker survivors that the bodies of Hitler and Braun had been burned to unrecognizable remnants and ashes. It was not until 1956 that a former SS bunker guard, Harry Mengershausen, stated that the flames had left Hitler’s corpse recognizable and confirmed growing suspicions that the Soviet authorities had found and removed his remains. Trevor-Roper acknowledged that this was probably true.

The first witness statements were unreliable. Some of the SS staff who had watched the cremation disagreed about whether Hitler’s face had been uncovered or recognizable when he was laid on the pyre but conceded that some body parts and clothing were still visible after the flames had died down. These were not voluntary witnesses but Allied prisoners half expecting to be shot out of hand, so they may simply have been distancing themselves from any helpful knowledge. Bunker staff under interrogation at first said that Hitler had shot himself while Braun took poison. (A shot was heard, but no one else was in the room when the pair killed themselves.) Over time some of them began to change their stories: one or two asserted that Hitler, too, had swallowed cyanide. There was nothing to confirm this except rumors that glass splinters from a poison phial had been found in his mouth. But there was a motive. The Russians and their collaborators were determined to show the world that Hitler had died “a coward’s death” by poison instead of choosing a soldier’s final act of defiance.

In November 1945. a man detained by the British for giving a false identity had an extra stroke of bad luck. A corporal searching him had worked for the menswear brand Aquascutum in London before the war, and something about the prisoner’s bulky coat seemed wrong to him. He ripped it open and found a sheaf of papers. 

Among them was the original signed copy of Hitler’s will. There was a private will and a rabid political testament, which included these crucial words: “I have decided…to remain in Berlin and there of my own free will to choose death at the moment when I believe the position of the Führer and Chancellor itself can no longer be held.” Sharples recounts Trevor-Roper’s wild adventures as he drove about western Germany hunting down the remaining two copies of the will. But the Western occupation powers now had confirmation of his earlier research: “It was the first physical, albeit non-biological, proof of death they had been looking for.”

In 1954 Hitler’s dental technician, Fritz Echtmann, was released from Soviet captivity and told a startled West German court that he had handled the Führer’s lower jaw. Soviet intelligence had shown him the relic (still in a cigar tin) and asked him to identify the complex bridgework. Echtmann’s testimony confirmed data held by the Americans, who had captured Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s personal dentist, in 1945 and persuaded him to write down a minute description of all the fillings, crowns, and cavities he could remember. Nine years later Echtmann corroborated Blaschke’s memory.

Two things were now obvious. First, physical proof of Hitler’s death did exist. This mattered especially to the British, who worried about persistent gossip that it was his double who had died in Berlin, leaving the actual Führer to escape and plot his comeback. Unfortunately Sharples doesn’t examine the “doubles” mythology of the 1930s and 1940s. Every major leader from Churchill to the emperor of Japan was assumed to have a perfect impersonator who might take an assassin’s bullet or die in an air raid. Some certainly did use doubles on occasion. As a wartime child, I remember how every visiting statesman, friend or foe, was inspected by journalists to see if he was “real.”

The second conclusion from the disclosure of the Führer’s mandible was that the Soviet authorities had been sitting on that vital information for the previous nine years. It soon became known that there was quite a little museum in Moscow with the blood-spattered sofa covering and a number of enigmatic skull fragments apparently found in the shell crater grave during a later excavation. At that time the technique of using DNA to identify an individual’s remains was decades away, and ungloved handling of the Moscow relics had by then contaminated them so thoroughly that nothing significant could be learned from them.

Then, in 1956, the Soviets finally released the last German prisoners of war, who had survived up to twelve years in the gulag. Among these gaunt Heimkehrer were members of the bunker staff, including Mengershausen. Three of them were the only men still alive who had gone into Hitler’s study after the gunshot. They had seen the bodies and the bloodstained sofa on which he lay, and they described blood flowing from a wound in his temple. Five of them had helped to carry the two blanket-covered corpses upstairs and set them alight. There were minor contradictions in their stories about whether anyone had actually seen Hitler’s face at this point and how much gasoline was used.

In 1968, there were new revelations, accompanied by clouds of unreliable propaganda, with the publication of the Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski’s The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives. To the outrage of Western scholars, he repeated the claim that Hitler had taken poison and suggested that they had been part of an anti-Soviet plot to fake evidence of a gunshot. But the book also contained the first admission by the Soviets that they had found and removed Hitler’s charred body on May 5, 1945, and—sensationally—it included in gruesome detail the full autopsy reports on all the bodies found near the bunker. As Bezymenski gleefully recorded, the postmortem confirmed a rude soldiers’ song from the war: Hitler really had “only got one ball.”

I knew Bezymenski—tiny, exuberant, merrily unreliable—when we worked as foreign correspondents in Bonn. He had been in Soviet intelligence during the war, and apart from all the nonsense he made up to annoy West German officials, he still had a direct line to the highest levels in Moscow. They could use him to break genuine news before the established Soviet media did. The publication of the autopsies finally marked the end of the “long death” of Adolf Hitler as a serious mystery: Soviet silence had been broken, and the corpse’s authenticity had been established. And yet the saga of the bunker’s last days and the missing dictator is still simply too good a story for the media to drop.

There was also the matter of the skull. At the moment of victory in 1945, SMERSH and the NKVD security police (later the KGB, today the FSB) were in vicious rivalry. A year after SMERSH found the bodies, NKVD agents went to the site and found cranial fragments, one of which had a small hole the size of a bullet exit wound. But SMERSH refused to give its rival access to Hitler’s corpse, so to this day no one can prove that the skull pieces were Hitler’s. Today, Sharples writes, they “rest in the archives of…the Russian Federation…and the teeth are held by the FSB. Access to each location is restricted and subject to political and bureaucratic whims.” Two French scientists were briefly allowed to study the teeth. They detached minute particles of plaque, which revealed nothing that wasn’t already known: Hitler had been a vegetarian, and his jaw had been discolored by a fire.

Hitler’s last command, the final Führerbefehl, had been that his body should be completely destroyed, leaving nothing for a conqueror to gloat over. His order was bungled, leaving behind an undignified but identifiable scatter of debris. Sharples gives a fascinating account of Nazi state funerals: monumental, neopagan, and ugly. Hitler liked ordering them for Nazi “martyrs” such as Reinhard Heydrich. But his own peculiar narcissism, veering between a Napoleonic self-image and an affected “little man” simplicity, suggests that he would have chosen an “ordinary German soldier’s burial”—attended by a few million mourners. The muddy mess in the Chancellery garden, followed by decades of goggling speculation about which tooth fit where, was beyond his nightmares.

According to legend, the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa is asleep under a mountain, awaiting the call to rise and save his nation. There is no such legend about Hitler. After the war, the sociologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich observed that the Germans had lost the capacity to mourn—not just the Führer but also his victims. 

Sharples is right to say that the endless squabbles over Hitler's  remains deprived postwar generations of a sense of closure. 

Those squabbles will persist as long as there are ambitious journalists and restricted archives. We will never know just what was said or done in those few minutes after Hitler and Braun closed the study door behind them and faced each other for the last time. But not long afterward, Russian soldiers in the street began to shout, “Gitler kaput!”—“Hitler’s dead❗”—and they are right.

Let's write about history that must be told regardless of how painful it might be to read- Lithuanian Holocaust

A Daring Escape a book review published in the October, 2025 New York Review of Books, by Neal Ascherson

SS Nazi guards and Lithuanian collaborators forcing Jewish men into the Ponary forest, Lithuania, 1941

A painstaking investigation into twelve prisoners who tunneled to freedom from the Nazis in Lithuania reveals how much of their story remains unknowable.

Maine Writer- Reading and reporting about this book review added to the many other echoes I have published about the Holocaust helps me to realize how there is actually no end to the horror inflicted on the Jews during this dark time and the nightmare did not just begin and end. Rather unbelieveably, the Holocaust crimes built momentum over time.

No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust.

This is a strange but grimly memorable book. What makes No Road Leading Back strange is that Chris Heath, an experienced English journalist, became gripped by a drive to find and check every detail of a single Lithuanian episode in the Holocaust. That drive—he calls it “relentless”—forced him on through months and years of journeying, questioning, and research. He needed to discover what happened to the survivors of that episode, at the time and in their postwar lives. What makes the book memorable and gives it such importance is that Heath finds himself not just telling a story but telling how he pursued the story. As historians have long recognized, what “actually happened” in the past is no more significant than what different people at different times believe to have happened. Why do they evolve—or invent—new versions of the past, and how are these alternative narratives created and marketed to the public? Are historical witnesses to be believed simply because they were “there”❓

The background to No Road Leading Back is the fate of Lithuania’s Jews under the German occupation between June 1941 and August 1944. The murder of almost the entire Jewish population—some 210,000 in 1941—began immediately after the Nazi invasion and was largely completed within a few months (before the Nazis had begun gassing Jews at Auschwitz and other extermination camps). The Lithuanian genocide was exceptional, even by the standards of the Holocaust, for two reasons. The first was its appalling efficiency. Between 90 and 96 percent of the resplendent community that had long made the capital, Vilnius, a center of Judaic wisdom and civilization perished—the highest proportion of any Nazi-occupied country with a significant Jewish population. The second exceptional feature was the widespread, sometimes enthusiastic collaboration of Lithuanians in rounding up and shooting Jews. Even in other occupied Eastern European countries where antisemitism was ingrained, the Nazis did not find such a high level of voluntary support.

The largest killing site was Ponary, a forest area a few miles southwest of Vilnius. The firing squads were usually Lithuanian, many of them teenagers recruited from a variety of patriotic militias. It’s estimated that they killed over 70,000 Jewish men, women, and children at Ponary, mostly from Vilnius. Some 30,000 Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others also died there. They were shot into large stone-lined pits constructed during a previous Soviet occupation to hold fuel tanks. Layer upon layer of bodies accumulated in the pits, each layer covered with a scattering of sand. Later, following their usual practice, the Nazis began a concealment operation. A team of some eighty men, mostly Jews but also a few Soviet prisoners, was ordered to exhume the dead and cremate them on huge timber pyres. The ashes were then mingled with the forest sand. The team members were housed in one special pit, accessible only by ladder, and well fed for their task. It was understood that they too would be shot when their work was completed.

But a group of them, initially about a dozen, formed an escape plan. With no tools but their fingers and a few small spoons, they sank a shaft through the pit floor and then dug a deep lateral tunnel some thirty meters long, hoping to reach the surface in a place that would be unobserved. The digging started in early February 1944; the breakout, according to most accounts, took place on the night of April 15. Almost all the eighty prisoners in the pit lined up to enter the tunnel, but only the front few—the diggers—made it to safety. Alarms and floodlights were triggered, and guards opened fire. The rest of the escapees died, killed in the open or trapped inside the tunnel. All but one of the survivors joined Soviet partisan units in the forest until Vilnius was liberated by the Red Army four months later.

Some of them soon told their stories, in Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Hebrew. But the horror of what had been done at Ponary, and even the heroic tale of the tunnel, seem to have made little impression in Allied countries. The war in Europe was still going on in August 1944. Auschwitz had not yet been liberated, British troops had not entered Bergen-Belsen, and American soldiers did not come across the camp at Buchenwald until almost exactly a year after the Ponary escape. 

More broadly, the realization that the Third Reich had been engaged in a gigantic plan for the extermination of European Jewry was only beginning to dawn.

Seventy-two years later, in June 2016, Heath read an intriguing story in The New York Times. At a place in Lithuania called Ponary (he prefers the Yiddish name, Ponar), archaeologists had discovered the tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners for their escape. The report seized Heath’s imagination:

I remember being astonished not just by the story but by the fact that I’d never heard of the place where it all happened…. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to understand better what had happened here and, increasingly, I also wanted to understand how and why what had happened here could have managed to slip the world by.

Within a few months he had visited Richard Freund, the archaeologist who appeared in the New York Times report, and had made his way to Ponary. His life became consumed by his research. He wanted “the truth” about the escape and the escapees, and about the three-year slaughter at Ponary. But he also grew fascinated by the changing ways the site had been commemorated, interpreted, landscaped, or simply neglected, first by Soviet Lithuania under Stalinism, then by the post-Stalinist USSR, and finally by the independent Lithuania that left the Soviet Union in 1990.

Seventy-two years later, in June 2016, Heath read an intriguing story in The New York Times. At a place in Lithuania called Ponary (he prefers the Yiddish name, Ponar), archaeologists had discovered the tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners for their escape. The report seized Heath’s imagination:

I remember being astonished not just by the story but by the fact that I’d never heard of the place where it all happened…. I wanted to understand more. I wanted to understand better what had happened here and, increasingly, I also wanted to understand how and why what had happened here could have managed to slip the world by.

Within a few months he had visited Richard Freund, the archaeologist who appeared in the New York Times report, and had made his way to Ponary. His life became consumed by his research. He wanted “the truth” about the escape and the escapees, and about the three-year slaughter at Ponary. But he also grew fascinated by the changing ways the site had been commemorated, interpreted, landscaped, or simply neglected, first by Soviet Lithuania under Stalinism, then by the post-Stalinist USSR, and finally by the independent Lithuania that left the Soviet Union in 1990.

Soon, though, Heath was stumbling among contradictions. He faced contrasting and irreconcilable memories of events, vanished documents, and personalities who were either martyrs of Jewish self-defense or despicable collaborators with the Gestapo—or perhaps both. Simple facts split into divergent tendrils. Who first suggested a tunnel? Who crawled out of it first? Even the handful of survivors whose widows and descendants Heath was able to meet (mostly in Israel) had left narratives that often didn’t fit together. Their very names were hard to pin down. One stout-hearted old escapee known to Heath as Motke Zeidel had nineteen different versions of his name.

The slow acceptance that history can be dismayingly plural, that contradictory and even apparently untrue accounts all have a certain validity, is the most impressive element in this long book. “We must trust that [the tunnelers] all spoke their own truth,” Heath writes. He goes on to explain why he resisted the temptation to rely on only one voice in recounting the heroic episode of the Ponary tunnel:

We want to bind our empathy to one or more of these people whose actions will transcend adversity…. But to that end…I would have silenced the dissonant voices of those who were actually there whenever those voices proved inconvenient for the narrative. (hmmm....not sure I understand this❓😕)

About what was done at Ponary, however, there was less ambiguity. The first part of No Road Leading Back is, to put it mildly, a difficult read. It recounts in unsparing detail how, between July 1941, and August 1944, the population of the Vilnius ghetto and other settlements was murdered there. At first the Jews were marched several miles to the site; later they were brought by rail or road. On arrival they were stripped to their underwear, sometimes blindfolded, and then herded to the edges of the forest pits. There they were shot, each group falling onto the layer of fresh corpses in front of them. Nearby villagers patronized a lively market selling the heaps of clothing, shoes, and valuables the victims had left behind. Payment went either to the young Lithuanian executioners or to a Polish wholesaler. 😢😨

It was not until the winter of 1943, that the SS launched its routine cleanup operation, although executions were still taking place.

Weighed down with leg chains, savagely beaten, and urged to work faster, the exhumation squad was sent into action. Layer by layer, they dug up some 68,000 bodies rotting in the pits, extracted gold teeth or jewelry, then dragged them to the towering pyres that blazed and smoked day and night. Several of the men came across the bodies of their own families, although at the bottom of the pits the corpses were flattened beyond recognition. The overpowering stench penetrated the men’s clothing and skin. Months after their tunnel flight, Soviet partisans could not bear to stand near a Ponary escapee for long.

Immediately following the liberation of Lithuania by the Red Army in 1944, many eyewitness accounts emerged, although not yet in English. A Soviet special commission arrived almost as the last German fled and produced a full, shattering report about Ponary, complete with forensic examination of corpses found in pits as yet unopened. There were lists of clothing recovered (“French gray plaid knitted blouse, crepe de chine dress”). A few years later, as Stalin’s antisemitic paranoia reached its peak, it became the rule to call the victims “Soviet citizens,” suppressing the fact that most of them were Jewish.

After these first revelations, interest in Ponary went quiet for decades. The atrocities were nevertheless on record in the West as well as in the Soviet Union. The special commission’s report had been followed by several publications, among them a book in Yiddish by the poet Abraham Sutzkever and the report Ponary: Baza (Ponary: Base of Operations) by the Polish writer Józef Mackiewicz. 

By chance, Mackiewicz had been cycling past Ponary when a trainload of Jews was massacred as they tried to escape. Heath comments, “Between them, the bold and assertive writings of Sutzkever…and Mackiewicz about Ponar constituted a stirring, detailed, and authoritative first draft of this history.” And yet “those first voices turned out to be, for a long time to come, pretty much the only voices.”

For the world’s indifference, he offers a string of acid explanations. 

For example:

• These were “the wrong kind of deaths” (i.e., not in the gas chambers the public came to know about). 
• They happened “at the wrong time,” in the first months of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, before the world knew of the Holocaust. 
• They were “in the wrong place,” in obscure lands liberated by the Soviets rather than by the publicity-conscious Americans, British, or French. 

Heath could have added another factor: the cold war. In the West, stories from authorities behind the Iron Curtain were soon discounted as Communist propaganda. And for the few who understood anything about Lithuania, there was embarrassment. How could sympathy for a small nation imprisoned and brutalized within the USSR be reconciled with evidence of its widespread participation in Nazi crimes? By then many of the Lithuanian perpetrators had reinvented themselves as refugees from “Red tyranny” and settled in West Germany, Canada, or the United States.

Ponary was designated as a memorial. At times it was almost abandoned; at others it was radically “restored” in ways that bore little resemblance to the original ground plan. 

Meanwhile the myth of the “double genocide” took root in the country. Immediately after the war, the vengeful Soviet Union had deported to the gulag about 130,000 Lithuanians, the majority of them women and children—about 5 percent of the population. Nearly 30,000 of them died. This crime was held to “balance out” the murder of Lithuania’s Jews. (I remember vividly the bewilderment of Jonathan Miller, the opera and theater director, when he returned to London after visiting the land of his Jewish ancestors. In Vilnius he had gone to the museums, only to find that it was the sufferings of Lithuanians under Soviet rule that dominated displays of “genocide,” rather than the fate of the Jews under the Nazis.)

But by the 1980s, and especially after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990, new generations were becoming aware of the real history of their country during the Soviet and Nazi occupations, and some of them were determined to confront it. Honor had been paid, starting in Soviet times, to Lithuanians who had risked their own and their families’ lives by hiding Jews. But free Lithuania now also honored heroes of anti-Soviet resistance, some of whom, it was suggested by a few bold voices, had also supported the Nazis in their onslaught on “Jew-Bolsheviks.” Heath tells the story of the well-known writer Rūta Vanagaitė, who in 2016 published Mūsiškiai (Our People), an exposure of Lithuanians’ antisemitism and participation in the atrocities, which to her astonishment sold out in a day. Times had changed: now everyone wanted to read and argue about the book, even if they hated its content. But the next year, when she dared to hint (without much proof) that a certain anti-Soviet “hero” had another past, her books were pulled from stores.

Well before independence, Lithuanian academics had begun working diligently to draw up precise records of Ponary and other mass-murder sites—research that remained obscure to the media and most of the public. But the outside world, especially historians of the Jewish experience, was regaining interest in wartime Lithuania. In 2015 the ebullient Richard Freund, an ex-rabbi and professor of Jewish history at the University of Hartford in Connecticut (known to local newspapers as “a real-life Indiana Jones”), became involved in excavating the ruins of the Great Synagogue in Vilnius. While there, he visited Ponary and became excited by the thought that the famous escape tunnel might still exist underground.

Freund assembled a team that included a retired expert on prison escape tunnels and several geophysicists with sophisticated equipment; Heath devotes many pages to explaining the ground-penetrating technology known as electrical resistance tomography (ERT) that they used. A film unit from NOVA, a scientific documentary series, recorded proceedings. World media, including (Fake❗) Fox News and The New York Times, were alerted to stand by for the big story when the tunnel was found.

In the end the results didn’t match the publicity. The ERT indicated plausible though not quite conclusive routes for the tunnel, but an excavation to reveal it was ruled out as impractical. American media proclaimed the “discovery” of a “forgotten” tunnel. In fact it had never been forgotten and had been “discovered” twelve years earlier. In 2004 the Lithuanian archaeologist Vytautas Urbanavičius had thoroughly excavated the vertical shaft and the first yards of the horizontal tunnel beyond it. (He also found a bucket in the entrance containing seven antitank grenades primed to be detonated by wire—one of the remaining mysteries of the story.)

The twelve men who escaped through the tunnel and what became of them are at the center of Heath’s book. After the war almost all of the handful of Jews still alive in Lithuania made their way to Palestine, and some later moved to America. (The small Jewish community in Lithuania today is, apparently, mainly composed of postwar immigrants from Russia.) Most of them had already given their testimony about Ponary: Shlomo Gol, for example, had been a witness at the Nuremberg tribunal, where he described how he had found his brother among the corpses. Some fought in the 1948 war that established the State of Israel. Others arrived there and faced startling hostility. Motke Zeidel was asked by a panel of Tel Aviv historians, “How did you go like sheep to the slaughter?” Heath writes, “The way he told it afterward, first he slammed his fist down on the table, then shouted ‘shame on you!’ at the historians as he walked out.” Heath notes that the accusers were using words from a famous speech by Abba Kovner, a leader of Jewish resistance in the Vilnius ghetto.

Kovner’s name, in turn, opens into the story of Jacob Gens, head of the Vilnius Jewish council. In an excruciating tragedy repeated in other Nazi-organized ghettos, Gens had to choose between sending a regular quota of Jews to their doom at Ponary or facing the immediate murder of the entire population under his charge. In the end the Germans shot him, too. He left behind a speech: “In order to save even a small part of the Jewish people, I alone had to lead others to their deaths. And in order to ensure that you go with clean consciences I have to forget mine and wallow in filth.”

In late 2016, Gens’s formidable ninety-year-old daughter Ada and his granddaughter Irene agreed with Freund to search the area of a Vilnius prison for relics of him, using ground-penetrating radar. Nothing identifiable was found. But another agonizing dilemma of wartime collaboration surfaced when Irene denounced Kovner for organizing resistance and thereby provoking the liquidation of the ghetto. All over occupied Europe, and not only in ghettos, resistance movements were blamed for causing German retaliation: the killing of hostages or the burning and massacre of entire communities.

The Ponary tunnelers were at least clear of these moral pitfalls. Heath was fairly quickly able to identify eight of the twelve escapees and to speak with the relatives of all of them except one, Konstantin Potanin, a Russian soldier captured by the Germans (and wrongly designated as Jewish) who gave a Lithuanian newspaper an outstandingly eloquent interview about Ponary within weeks of the liberation. He was killed in a traffic accident a few months later. Heath was able to track seven others to Israel. They had since died, but with tact and patience he persuaded their families to repeat once more what they had been told, often unwillingly, about Ponary and the escape.

Heath learned that a few of the escapees had formed the custom of meeting on April 15, the date of their breakout in 1944. Their children remembered the reunions as occasions not of mourning but of cheerful memory-swapping at which drinking went on far into the night. It was cognac, one relative recalled. No, it was vodka, said another. But they agreed about the old men’s laughter. In old age, Motke Zeidel returned to Ponary with a film crew and entered the pit that had once held the escapees and those who didn’t escape. He ordered vodka, cured herring, and cucumber to be brought down to him, and in that place he ate and drank. That was his triumph and his revenge on those who had tried to kill him, and on death itself.

In their last years the survivors were constantly sought out for their memories. But their experience with Claude Lanzmann, the director of the towering, nine-and-a-half-hour Shoah (1985), was not happy. Two tunnelers, Yitzhak Dogin and Motke Zeidel, featured prominently in it. But, they soon came to realize that Lanzmann was interested in them only insofar as their recollections fit into his immense project, a film about the Holocaust “with no archival footage at all, just artfully juxtaposed testimony from those who were there.” Lanzmann wrote afterward, in his imperious, dramatic style, “It’s not a film about survival and survivors. It’s a film about death.” Shoah included terrible memories of the killing at Ponary, the exhumations, and the pyres, but nothing about the tunnel. When they saw it, Zeidel and Dogin felt hurt and manipulated. Angry on their behalf, Heath lists gross errors of fact in reviews of Shoah and in the published scripts.

At least one of the escapees, Shlomo Gol, later moved to the United States. Heath spent much time—typical of his lust for verifiably accurate data—trying to reconcile Gol’s various dates of birth. With the same energy he dug through Yad Vashem and Lithuanian ghetto archives to establish whether David Kantorovich had an earlier family lost in the Ponary killings. Four of the twelve escapees seemed to have vanished altogether, but Heath, through incredible persistence, managed to unearth at least traces of all of them in Europe or America. The last to be glimpsed was Lejzer Owsiejczyk, once a butcher. Heath pursued his shadow through ships’ passenger lists and newspaper clippings until he stood at last before the gravestone of “Louis Offsay,” who had drowned in Lake Erie sixty-three years earlier. Beside the English inscription were three words in Hebrew: “Leyzer, son of Abraham.”

Heath’s almost obsessive drive to chase down and record details in long narrative sequences and footnotes would be dismaying if he were not such a gifted and imaginative writer, self-critical and alert to intelligent discussion of his doubts and methods:

There’s always more, if you keep looking. Even after this book was more or less completed, I kept trawling—whenever I landed on some remote museum website to check a fact, I’d invariably stay for a while, reflexively peppering its database with search terms, just in case.

But earlier in his book, Heath reflects memorably on what he failed to find out:

I think there’s also value in being confronted, over and over, with just how little is knowable. Every barren search felt like a useful rebuke…. The truth has holes in it, and the more we cover them up, the less real the world becomes.

Neal Ascherson is an Honorary Fellow of University College London. (October 2025)

Let's Write about how ordinary Germans became Hitler's Nazis

Ordinary Germans Neal Ascherson

Published in The New York Review of Books:

We know who the Nazis were and what they did. In Hitler’s People, the distinguished historian Richard J. Evans seeks to explain what made them capable of doing it.

We know who they were, these men and women who served Adolf Hitler. We know what they did, because the ashes of so many millions lie under the fields and pavements of Europe, and because the words “Western Civilization” are still too charred to read. The thing we don’t know is what made them capable of doing it.

A master historian like Richard Evans, the author of three deservedly famous books on the Third Reich, must turn first to what the Nazis did and what the consequences were.
But he evidently remains tormented by the simple, nonacademic questions that twenty-first-century people still ask. 

How could the Nazis, as members of the human species, have done what they did❓ Could they be explained away as freaks, moral perverts, sadistic psychopaths, or war-crippled spirits driven by masochistic obedience or fantasies of vengeance❓

Evans does not waste much sympathy on those thoughts, which lead toward an absurd guilty-but-insane verdict. He is, of course, too young to have lived in Hitler’s time. But an example of what lies before his eyes as he writes is what British soldiers saw when they entered the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945:

Some 60,000 starving and disease-ridden inmates were found inside, with another 13,000 lying dead and unburied around them; 14,000 of the survivors were so weak that they died within a few weeks of liberation.

Irma Grese (center) an SS officer at Ravensbruck, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and the Bergen Belsen, at her trial for war crimes Luneburg, Germany.

The young camp guard Irma Grese was still there when the British arrived. She was “seemingly unaware that she had anything to fear from the representatives of the Allies.” The press went wild about her during her trial, creating a monster of sadistic sexuality that went far beyond her provable crimes of revolting cruelty and murder. 

But Evans doesn’t diagnose her as a monster: “Grese came across…as a rather immature, simple young woman who had little idea of why she was being demonized”—an unquestioning Nazi to the end. They hanged her eight months later.

During the war, people in Allied countries (and occupied ones too) generally assumed that there was something deviant, aberrant, about the Germans and their leaders—a deformity, in fact. As a wartime child I listened to English soldiers singing as they trampedpast in the rain: “’Itler’s only got one ball. Göring’s got two but ver-ee small. ’Immler…” and so on. (If they marched through a village, the sergeant made them change to “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”) Twenty years later, before the Frankfurt “Auschwitz Trial,” journalists were taken to view the accused camp personnel in a dim basement under the Paulskirche. Seeing the terrible face of the torturer Wilhelm Boger—the yellow eyes and boulder skull—I felt for a moment that I was looking at some throwback hominin, not a twentieth-century Homo sapiens. But that thought had to be shaken off.

It was more challenging to face up to the notion that the low-level perpetrators and their commanders were just “ordinary men.” Christopher Browning’s 1992, book of that title broke the hearts of many who believed in humanity. It showed the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, often middle-aged family men with no fanatical Nazi views, shooting naked and defenseless Jewish villagers and their children into pits day after day, a total of some 38,000 victims. They were not even under compulsion. If a man said that he had had enough and asked to be withdrawn from execution duty, he was not punished. Since then, as Evans shows, research has weakened some of Browning’s conclusions. The policemen were volunteers, not conscripts; “they were carefully selected according to ideological criteria…. Their training included heavy doses of Nazi ideology and antisemitic indoctrination.” In short, they were not quite “ordinary men,” or a random sample.

But Evans writes later in Hitler’s People that the “hundreds of thousands of Germans [who] committed unspeakable atrocities” acted with free will and often with enthusiasm. They “positively enjoyed what they were doing.” That leads back toward Daniel Goldhagen’s spectacular claim in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) that “exterminatory” antisemitism and a yearning for dictatorship had long been integral to the German sense of identity: the nation as collective monster, indeed. Evans dismisses some of Goldhagen’s arguments (“an updated version of the wartime propaganda”) and offers a more nuanced reflection: Nazi perpetrators and leaders were not freaks, but they had been brought up in a culture of rancid, self-pitying national paranoia after the defeat of 1918. Almost all the prominent Nazis came from middle-class families with right-wing values—patriotism, antisemitism, fear of “Bolshevism”—for whom righteous violence seemed a sign of manliness.

Evans is attempting, in his own painstaking and carefully judicious way, to answer those two indelible popular questions about Nazi leaders and perpetrators: How could they have? Were they abnormal? His answers could be summarized as: the Nazis were not ordinary people; they were ordinary German people, living in the firestorm of hatred and delusion ignited after World War I.

"Hitler’s People" is divided into four parts: “The Leader,” “The Paladins,” “The Enforcers,” and “The Instruments.” 

Evans starts with a ninety-page essay on Adolf Hitler, a full, elegantly written account of the Führer’s life that uses the new research of the past few years to update older narratives. As he does throughout the book, he corrects some venerable myths and false details that have fossilized into accepted fact. The story that Hitler was psychologically crippled in his early years by a sadistic father and the death of his mother is ill-founded: “He did not…grow up in poverty; nor does his father Alois seem to have been an alcoholic.” He did not acquire his overwhelming antisemitism in Vienna but much later in Munich, after he emerged from World War I. It was not “big business” that financed and propelled him to power; many leading industrialists were repulsed by Nazi violence and disorder in the 1930s and backed other parties. He was not a drug addict in his last year, which ended in the Berlin bunker; his medication was “conventional,” and he was a wreck mainly because he was suffering from Parkinson’s. And Hitler was not invariably “cold” and “unemotional” or lacking a private life. He sought the company (though rarely more) of a series of pretty women, and at home with friends in the Bavarian Alps he could seem jokey and entertaining. But nothing now remains of the myth that he possessed Napoleonic military genius (the “greatest general of all time,” as the German media called him). The only mystery is how German armies survived to fight so long and so stubbornly under the disastrous orders he screamed to his generals.

Historians have held contrasting views on how Hitler came to exercise such absolute power after 1933. Evans notes that “the conservative German journalist” Joachim Fest concluded in 1973, that Hitler somehow expressed the general disorientation of the German people. 

Ian Kershaw, in his two-volume biography in the late 1990s, “portrayed Hitler as in part the creation of a ‘charismatic community’ of enthusiastic disciples whose adulation pushed the Nazi leader into an ever-stronger belief in himself.” The German historian Peter Longerich rejected this: Hitler was nobody else’s creation, and he alone achieved his total dominance. By 1940, after his conquest of France and much of Central Europe, he reached a frenzied peak of self-assertion, spraying Germany with Trump-like superlatives. The invasion of France was “the greatest battle of all time,” and the conquest of other European states was the “mightiest series of battles in world history.” Most recently scholars have grown interested in the practice by senior Nazi officials of “working towards the Führer,” that is, anticipating how the erratic Hitler might have carried out a policy he had left unexplained or uncompleted. It’s argued, not very convincingly, that this guesswork led to continual radicalizations of policy that he might not initially have intended.

Almost all the biographies in this book record the overwhelming impact of meeting Hitler for the first time. Some Nazis exaggerated its force, as if to excuse their subsequent crimes. Evans cannot quite explain it. Part of it, we can assume, was a suppressed wish to be morally dominated by a convincing leader. But part was tricks: Hitler’s use of his large eyes to drill into men’s psyches; his insistence on audiences spread broadly around him, not facing him lengthwise; his demagogic oratory (first lulling them with dull, impressive “facts,” then suddenly raising his voice to a shout and bursting into rabble-rousing passion). He spread the crazy conspiracy theories that drove him—above all, the idea of the Jewish world conspiracy in alliance with “Bolsheviks”—and yet he was skeptical about mystic cultishness. Evans could have written effectively about Hitler’s scorn for the pseudo-archaeology of the German race cooked up by Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg. (It may be only a myth that he lost patience with Himmler’s excavations and exploded: “Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no past?”)

Evans does not conceal his own horror at the sheer ruthlessness of Hitlerite terror, a boundless hatred culminating in the Holocaust. Perhaps inevitably he gives only a few pages to anything worthwhile that the Nazi regime might have achieved. Yet the social welfare programs launched by Robert Ley and the Labor Front were vast and innovative, from the “Strength Through Joy” cruises and cultural activities for workers to improved, more egalitarian conditions in workplaces. All this was authoritarian, erected on the ruins of the crushed trade unions. But, for the first time the working classes could feel that a German government, even a fascist tyranny, was deliberately using its energies in their interest.

Some of that feeling survived the collapse of the Reich. It’s worth remembering that parts of Germany were scarcely affected by the bombing and battles of the war. For many Germans, the disaster came in the two years following the defeat, when millions suddenly found themselves lacking food, heat, work, and even soap. For this shame, people were disinclined to blame Hitler. The past was seen through selective tunnel vision. I remember being struck speechless when an old lady in Bonn said to me, “Say what you like about him, but in Adolf’s time at least there was no crime!”

The “paladins,” the leading Nazis who formed Hitler’s “court,” were variously explained away by their Allied conquerors. Churchill, invoking old American movies, called them “gangsters.” The Allied Control Commission observed unhelpfully that “so grotesque and preposterous are the principal characters in this galaxy of clowns and crooks” that it was impossible to see how anyone “could have taken them for rulers.” The psychiatrists appointed to observe the Nuremberg defendants asserted that they were variously psychopathic: Rudolf Hess was “a self-perpetuated hysteric”; Julius Streicher was “paranoid”; Ley had “frontal lobe damage” and “organic brain disease”; and so on. It was an English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who compared them to Roman courtiers. Evans rather agrees. It’s remarkable, he observes, that almost all of them survived to the bitter end. Unlike Stalin, who had most of his paladins arrested and shot, Hitler did not extend his paranoia to his inner circle until they began to desert him in the final days of the war.

Evans includes brief biographies of the members of that inner circle: Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Ernst Röhm, and Rosenberg. He omits Martin Bormann, the grim careerist who rose after 1942 to become Hitler’s secretary and—next to the Führer himself—the most powerful figure in the Reich. With very few exceptions (Göring’s antisemitism was “perfunctory and conventional,” while Speer exploited the enslavement of Europe’s Jews without subscribing to racial theorizing), Evans insists that most of Hitler’s paladins believed unquestioningly and passionately in a “Jewish world conspiracy” that was directing the policies of foreign powers against Germany. This belief, he implies, was the most enduring motive for their actions and choices.

But there are other ways of looking at Nazi beliefs. The late Erhard Eppler, a radical Christian who became “the conscience of the Social Democrats” in postwar West Germany, used to invoke the Roman fasces as the image of twentieth-century fascism: a bundle of quite disparate rods (or policies) held together by the strap of the leader. When the strap is cut, the rods scatter, and people could claim that “I agreed with Hitler about revising the Versailles Treaty or ‘degenerate culture,’ but I always thought the persecution of the Jews a grave mistake. So I never believed in the whole fasces-bundle. So I was never truly a Nazi!” To which Evans’s book in effect retorts: During the Third Reich, you could not pick and choose between “rods.” You either accepted or rejected the bundle as a whole.

General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commanding Army Group North in the Baltic, was revolted by the SS massacres of Jews around his units but did nothing to stop them, although he was formally responsible for what took place in his region. He and his deputy “accepted at the very least that there was a ‘Jewish question’ that was urgent enough to justify compulsory sterilization.” In his chapter on Franz von Papen, the right-wing politician who helped Hitler come to power in 1933, and in many other essays in the book, Evans reminds us how widespread a “conventional” antisemitism—no longer restricted to religious prejudice—had become in twentieth-century Europe. In many ways, the appalling experience of fascism has overshadowed the sheer nastiness of the European conservative parties it replaced: class-based, crudely patriotic, authoritarian, and clerical, often with racist colonial ambitions, and violently opposed to the political expression of the working class.

The broad notion behind Hitler’s People is that recent history requires the study of individuals. Evans is instinctively suspicious of broad-brush collective analyses. Writing about General von Leeb and the reputation of the Wehrmacht, he notes that “social-science approaches to history, dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, strengthened…anonymizing tendencies.” It was not until the 1990s that a traveling exhibition caused furious protest in Germany by demonstrating that the Wehrmacht, and not just the SS, had committed widespread mass murder and crimes against humanity during World War II. At the same time historians began to examine the choices and conduct of individual Wehrmacht commanders, such as Leeb. Ironically enough, this had already been done fifty years earlier but then concealed. The American military tried fourteen German generals in 1948, including Leeb, and gave eleven of them heavy prison sentences, “but as the Cold War got under way, the Americans came under huge pressure from West German institutions”; the West needed to revive the German army, and the generals were freed.

It’s fair to say that the lives (and deaths) of most of Evans’s subjects are reasonably well known. What he adds is twofold: first, a scrubbing away of false myths; second, a sharp-edged series of discussions about the changing verdicts of historians over the eighty years since the Reich was destroyed. Hess, for instance, was not mad, although he pretended to be at his trial. He had once been a fanatical and effective deputy führer, and his lone flight to Scotland in 1941 to find the Duke of Hamilton and make a separate peace was not crazy, in the sense that it fit into the utterly distorted Nazi view of how the world worked.

Evans’s chapter on Adolf Eichmann becomes a “trial” of Hannah Arendt and her endlessly debated concept of “the banality of evil.” He stoutly defends her: "This phrase was widely, sometimes willfully misunderstood. What she meant by 'the banality of evil' was not that Eichmann was a mere bureaucrat…. For Arendt, he was typical of the kind of person who…were the executors of regimes like Hitler’s or Stalin’s: second-rate minds, lacking the faculty of independent or creative thought."

Evans shows that, far from being a faceless operative with no opinions, Eichmann was “a deep-dyed antisemite” and “a man of overweening ambition” who “lacked any kind of moral intelligence.” Hans Frank, the Nazis’ favorite courtroom lawyer, suddenly found himself ruling the “General Government” of occupied Poland. He is remembered now for his deliberate extermination of Poland’s elites (“the Polish lands are to be changed into an intellectual desert”) and for his corruption—he looted portable treasures from all over Eastern Europe. Less well known is Frank’s delusional attempt to outflank his rival Himmler by preaching a return to the rule of law, only to be silenced by an infuriated Hitler.

Evans shows no mercy for Speer, whose personal myth of being just a nonpolitical technocrat who tried to restrain the worst excesses was swallowed whole or in part by so many biographers and historians. He joins the consensus, however, in finding no good word to say about Ribbentrop, Hitler’s abominable ambassador to London and later foreign minister. Absurdly crude and tactless, Ribbentrop greeted the British king with a Sieg Heil salute that only just missed the royal nose. He sought to keep in Hitler’s favor by pushing his policies to extremes; at the end of the war, it was Ribbentrop who organized the overthrow of the Hungarian government in order to ensure the murder of Hungary’s Jews. The terrifying Reinhard Heydrich, the expressionless Aryan “god” who was head of the Gestapo and the SS, was dogged by the false whisper that he had Jewish ancestry. From a musical family, he played the violin beautifully. His boss Himmler was only briefly a chicken farmer; Evans shows that this man, more directly responsible than anyone for the murder of millions, was intensely concerned with respectability. He forced the SS into shirts and ties and smart black uniforms, and in his 1943 “Posen speeches” to his assembled killers insisted on the maintenance of “decency” (Anstand) as they shot and gassed.

Afew women appear in Hitler’s People, in spite of the regime’s “hyper-masculine ideas of toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” and its pseudo-Germanic segregation of gender roles. Two of them—Ilse Koch and Irma Grese—were concentration camp guards, but Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was Reich women’s leader, heading the huge Frauenschaft organization. Recent research has shown that its members—and many German women who were not members—were deeply involved in many aspects of the regime, even if they did not engage directly in its crimes. 

As wives and mothers, they knew, and for the most part tolerated or approved of, and sometimes even assisted in, the crimes of their menfolk.

As for the Reich’s most famous and argued-over woman, the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the book includes the photograph of her aghast face as she watched German soldiers open fire on a crowd of Jewish civilians. Evans recognizes her astounding talent, but he is unsparing about her long, intimate friendship with Hitler and her inestimable services to the image of Nazi Germany. Demolishing her efforts to denazify her past, Evans resurrects Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” published in these pages, which demonstrated the hidden continuities in Riefenstahl’s work, from Nazi propaganda in the 1930s to her postwar filming of Nuba tribesmen in Sudan.

He follows this by reminding readers (Eppler’s fasces image again) that “there were many Germans who were not fanatical Nazis but supported Nazism because it put into practice a sufficient range of their desires and aspirations for them to discount the other aspects.” His witness for this is the decades-long diary kept by the outwardly ordinary housewife Luise Solmitz in Hamburg. Solmitz felt patriotic ecstasy when she first heard Hitler speak in 1932 and was “drunk with enthusiasm” when he became chancellor; her only reservation was that the Nazis might turn out to be too “socialist.” She even denounced her brother for “disloyalty,” saying that she preferred to betray her own sibling rather than betray Hitler: “Like many other middle-class Germans, she was willing to accept almost any measure taken by the Nazis if it could be justified in terms of maintaining order and warding off the threat of revolution.” And yet she was married to a Jew.

Her husband, Friedrich Solmitz, was a decorated war veteran whose family had converted to Lutheranism and had lost any connection with the Jewish community. But as war approached, restrictions on this “non-Aryan” began to bite on the pair and on their “mixed-race” daughter Gisela, forbidden now to matriculate or to marry an “Aryan” German. Luise raged on Gisela’s behalf and even wrote a protesting letter to the Führer, but she recorded in her diary that “we were all exhilarated by happiness and enthusiasm” after Germany’s victory over France in 1940. Then, gradually, the balance between her pride in Hitler’s achievements and her distress over gathering antisemitism began to tip. Somehow Gestapo attempts to deport Friedrich (to his death, they could guess) were fended off by reference to his medals and his Aryan wife. But as the British air offensive against Hamburg began, killing 40,000 people in a few nights of firestorm, Luise turned at last against Hitler himself: “A great man,” she wrote, “is only one who knows how to moderate himself.” After the dictator’s suicide, she called him “the shabbiest failure in world history.” But as Evans notes, she always avoided identifying herself and Friedrich with the collective fate of Germany’s Jews: “Hitler’s ultimate crime indeed in her view was that he betrayed Germany.”

To emerge from Evans’s long gallery of criminals against humanity is to feel educated but pessimistic. So many of them came from respectable middle-class families, were educated, and played stringed instruments with love and skill. Is it possible that they were not only cruel and fanatical but also stupid? Evans won’t have this: “Many Nazis were neither stupid nor ignorant, but highly educated and well informed.” Well informed? It’s almost impossible now to imagine how little nations knew about one another ninety years ago and how they filled that void with every kind of cartoonish stereotype. Germany, knocked senseless by military, economic, and political disaster, was especially delusive. And yet the evidence about international reality was available. It took genuine stupidity for Nazis of normal intelligence to believe—or choose to believe—in a world Jewish conspiracy, or that the Duke of Hamilton could pull Britain out of the war, or that General de Gaulle would join Himmler in a new war against Britain. All those absurdities arose from the same stupidity and often willful ignorance that made Irma Grese expect a friendly welcome from the Allied troops liberating Bergen-Belsen. Evans concludes that Germans in that period “exercised their own individual will when making the decisions they took.” But one of those decisions was to abandon critical reason. Gloomily, he warns that the invitation to wide-eyed stupidity, ignoring evidence and common sense, has returned to degrade politics today.