The Third Reich revisited.

Does the world really need any more books on this evil empire? When they are as good as the following three books, the answer has to be yes. All these books came out over the past decade.

APOLOGY: I can’t do an umlaut on this computer. The a of Wachter and the o of Rohm should have one and so should Goring, which I’ve spelt in the Anglo way as Goering, and Ravensbruck should have one over the u, und so weiter.…

Philippe Sands always writes brilliantly and beguilingly about memory and family history, and his The Rat-line: love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive, is a multi-dimensional look at the Nazi era and its aftermath, viewed through the story of one family. The Vatican was the locus of one ‘rat-line’, or escape route for Nazis, after the war, and it helped, among others, Otto Wachter. Wachter was a relatively important actor in the Nazi expansion eastwards – not a supremo by any means, but significant and authoritative.

Those of us who know about Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty’s underground heroism saving Jews and partisans in wartime Rome (most recently explored by novelist Joseph O’Connor) will find it disappointing to be confronted with evidence that he and his associates were in a minority, though this makes their bravery all the more noteworthy. Ever since John Cornwell’s book on Pius XII there have been murmurings about the Vatican’s failure to do more to protect Europe’s, or even Rome’s, Jews. Some argue that the Pope’s hands were tied, and there is no question that he ever supported the Nazi regime, but such supporters were tolerated in the Vatican. One was German archbishop Alois Hudal, who lobbied (unsuccessfully) for the Vatican to recognise the Anschluss (the takeover of Austria by Germany) in 1938. After the war, Hudal and a few others helped some notorious murderers to escape, including Franz Stangl, the ‘butcher of Treblinka’, who was later brought to justice. Another who was helped to escape was Otto Wachter, the subject of this book, who found a safe haven in a monastery in Rome, where he said his rosary and went to Mass regularly.

Wachter and his wife Charlotte had renounced their Catholicism in the 1930s – religious people didn’t rise very high in Hitler’s hierarchy- and because the career trajectories of Nazi men are all drearily similar, I’m going to focus on Charlotte. She was the prototype of the ‘New Woman’ of the interwar period, an independent textile designer who was successful internationally, and owned her own house before she married. She had a partnership with Otto that was both independent and companionate, and their strong bond survived mutual infidelities. Plenty of servants helped with her 6 children and discreet doctors helped with her 3 safe, medical abortions. (No soapy water for a leading Nazi’s wife.This reproductive freedom was denied to other German women who either could not get abortions, if they wanted them, or had abortions forced upon them on ‘eugenic’ grounds.) A committed Nazi, she wept for joy at the Anschluss, and not just because it meant she was able to steal a house in Austria from a Jewish professor who was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp. She had fully-staffed houses in Lamberg (Lviv), Berlin and Krakow, and moved around so much that I couldn’t keep up. She had a massive crush on Hans Frank, the man whose task it was to free Poland of ‘lice and Jews’, and may have had an affair with him. After 1945 Otto went on the run and she never saw him again but she salvaged some money and reputation and all her loving children supported her.

One of those adult children is Horst, who cannot accept that his beloved father had hand, act or part in some of the atrocities of the period, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he did so. Sands is gentle towards Horst, despite the fact that many of Sands’ extended family (who were Jews) were murdered by Nazis and their supporters. I suppose Sands understands Horst’s impossible position – he cannot reconcile his father’s behaviour with the warm memories he has of him. But Horst’s daughter, Magdalena, insists on knowing the truth about her grandfather and has no hesitation about speaking it.

Otto and Charlotte were charming people, with a wide circle of friends and a marriage that was only ruptured by the post-war shake-up. Charlotte had to give back that house in Austria, when the professor who was sent to Ravensbruck returned. But she was still comfortable. As for Otto, Sands’s book is as much an exploration of the stories of what happened to him as what actually happened. But you’ll be left asking at the end of this book – who is left to pay, when individuals can wriggle out of responsibility for mass murder?

Individuals are also the focus of Richard J.Evans’s Hitler’s People: the faces of the Third Reich. Joachim C.Fest’s The Face of the Third Reich which appeared in an English translation in 1970 discussed all the major leaders of the regime and more or less suggested that each and every one of them had some kind of personality disorder or social defect. Evans’s subtitle is a direct comment on Fest’s, and sure enough, he disagrees with many of Fest’s evaluations. Evans argues that, while the Nazi leaders were a mixed bag of people, they were quite unremarkable, psychologically, intellectually, domestically and culturally. Stormtrooper leader Ernest Rohm (murdered by the SS in the purge of 1934),usually described as a mindless thug who sublimated his homosexuality in street violence, was highly-educated, and far from hiding his sexual orientation, displayed it openly in his own circles. Herman Goering, often seen as the ‘least bad’ of Hitler’s cronies because of his geniality and art appreciation, was a brute and a thug as long as his physical health allowed him, and colluded in all the atrocities of the regime. Reinhard Heydrich, who played several instruments, was reared in a family of musicians and played in a classical quartet all his violent and thankfully, shortened-by-assassination life. Himmler, described by Fest as ‘mediocre’ and by many others as the archetypal ‘grey man’, was, Evans insists, intelligent and a brilliant administrator with his own charisma – he could not have built up the SS otherwise. Hitler’s henchmen came from a broad variety of backgrounds – aristocratic, upper-middle-class, petty civil servant, Catholic, Protestant, urban, rural. Robert Ley, the labour leader, was a farmer’s son. Some had absent fathers, some had good fathers (and mothers). Some were brought up strictly, but then, so were most people at that time. Some, like Speer, were indulged. (Both Fest and Evans deplore how leniently Speer was treated at Nuremberg.) Some were faithful husbands and devoted fathers; others were not. But Evans is far from arguing that any of them was ‘Everyman’, in the sense that ‘we all’ could become Nazis given the right circumstances. These men (and some key women he mentions, like Gertrud Scholz-Klink) all had in common a fiercely strong nationalism combined with a ruthlessness that did not shrink from violence. Also, all of them, almost without exception, were fuelled by a sense of lost status (social, political, economic) in the cataclysmic post-war years, and the Jews and Communists were convenient scapegoats. In short, Evans tells us that the Nazi leaders weren’t bad because they were boring(Himmler), greedy (Goering), disabled,(it is quite disturbing to read the glee with which some historians focus on Goebbels’s club foot), vain (Ribbentrop), or silly (Hess). They were bad because they believed in and implemented (on an industrial scale) a murderous ideology.

A brilliant account of how Hitler managed to achieve dominance over Europe in such a short time, can be found in Tim Bouverie’s Appeasing Hitler: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Road to War . This book shows that the 1930s was the twilight of the imperturbably superior white/Aryan-English (Scots or Welsh hardly feature) aristocratic and upper-middle classes, who simply did not take the Hitler threat seriously enough. With a mass electorate for the first time in history (pretty much everybody over 21 had the vote from 1918 and 1928, see note below) the British ‘ruling classes’ felt, somewhat guiltily, that they should look favourably on a politician from a lower-middle/working-class background, and therefore made excuses for Hitler that they would not have made for someone of their own class. But the other side of this new ‘tolerance’ was that these grandees simply could not believe that the destiny of nations could be decided by a nondescript former army NCO, a postmaster’s son from rural Austria. When Lord Halifax and others met ‘Herr Hitler’ they were amazed at his appearance and his non-patrician demeanour. One English politician nearly mistook him for ‘the footman’. (The fact that these politicians were familiar with footmen speaks for itself). They came away thinking he was a crude but honest fellow, and that it was hard to blame him wanting the best for his people, but those clothes! That moustache! That manner! They had lots of little sniggers among themselves travelling back from Berchtesgaden or Berlin, but ‘Herr Hitler’ wasn’t laughing.

Hitler’s policies against the Jews were seen in England at the time as a monstrous outgrowth of a perfectly ordinary sentiment. The economist John Maynard Keynes described Nazi anti-semitism as ‘unreasonable hatred of Jews’, as opposed to everyday reasonable resentment of them. The handful of Jews in the houses of lords and commons tolerated (though they cannot have liked)such casual prejudice, and wondered if Hitler’s anti-semitism was just ‘more of the same’. Resentment of Jews continued after the war, as George Orwell tells us. When Lord Snowdon wanted to insult his wife – in the 1960s – he told her she looked like a ‘Jewish manicurist’. Bouverie himself doesn’t seem to accept that ‘mild’ anti-semitism is on a continuum from the more violent and hate-filled forms of the phenomenon. Neither does he admit that Hitler might have had a point when he compared Germany’s attitude to the Sudeten Germans to Britain’s attitude to Ulster Unionists.

It is hard not to feel sorry for Neville Chamberlain, a hard-working and honest man who genuinely believed he could avert war, and, incidentally, one of the least ‘grand’ of the politicians. Some of his contemporaries, however, cared little about anything except preserving their comfortable way of life, grumbling petulantly when a weekend’s grouse-shooting was interfered with by an emergency cabinet meeting. And it is easy to understand why people disregarded anything Winston Churchill had to say. An arrogant aristocrat who never paid (politically) for his appalling decisions which cost thousands of lives at Gallipoli in 1915, he was also an unpleasant imperialist. But he was right about Hitler. The German High Command said, after the war, that Germany would have backed down if the Munich agreement had not been signed. They said this at Nuremberg, so as to spread the blame, but maybe it was true. Bouverie explains the unfolding of political appeasement in a way that no other historian (even the magnificent A.J.P.Taylor) has ever done. An old man like King George V (who died in 1936 before the worst of the threats) could tell Stanley Baldwin, in tears, that sooner than lead Britain into another war, he would abdicate and ‘turn red’. It is harder to forgive the wilful stupidity and blindness of more hard-headed parliamentarians in the face of clearly-stated goals of political aggression.

Philippe Sands, The Rat-line: love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson 2020).

Richard J.Evans, Hitler’s People: the faces of the Third Reich. (London: Penguin Random House 2024).

Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Road to War (London: Bodley Head 2019).

Joachim C.Fest,The Face of the Third Reich (London: Pelican 1970). This is a translation of a German book, and Fest has also written a highly-acclaimed biography of Hitler. Despite the fact that I agree with Evans rather than Fest, I still treasure this fascinating book and not just because it was the first ‘grown-up’ history book I ever bought, when I was 16.

A.J.P.Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Hamish Hamilton 1961)This has gone into several editions up to the 1980s, with Penguin/Pelican,and like everything by Taylor, it is well worth reading, although his argument is controversial. He maintains that Hitler, far from having a master-plan to take over the world, was involved in a game of ‘giant-steps’ with the other powers and did what he could get away with – which turned out to be a lot, which in turn fuelled his ambition. This spreading of the blame for the Second World War did not make him very popular.

John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: the secret history of Pope Pius XII (London:Penguin 2000). I’m not sure whether to agree or disagree with Cornwell about Eugenio Pacelli, a.k.a Pope Pius XII, and his ‘complicity’ in the Third Reich, but this is an essential read for anybody interested in the period, especially for Catholics.

George Orwell, ‘Anti-semitism’ in Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg 1975).

Joseph O’Connor, My Father’s House (London: Vintage 2023). A sequel to this novel, The Ghosts of Rome, has just appeared.

NOTE:

• In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, all men over 21 and all women over 30 with certain property qualifications were given the parliamentary vote in the Representation of the People Act 1918. In 1928 women over 21 without any property qualifications were admitted to the franchise in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Constitution of the Irish Free State, which won its independence in 1922, had full voting rights for all men and women from that date forward.