Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans, is a useful book. Reading it, I thought of it as a sort of Plutarch’s Lives of the Nazis. In the ordinary course of reading history, we are obliged to compose, in our own mind, the full story of each leading player’s career (in this case, from 1918 to 1945), as it unspools alongside all the others’ lives. Here, conveniently, we are given a set of detached, complete biographies that does the job for us. There are 22 chapters, covering 24 lives. The chapters are grouped in four sections: The Leader, The Paladins, The Enforcers, and The Instruments. (Two of the chapters in the final section are split between two subjects.) The seasoned reader will be familiar with all or most of the names in the first three sections. The characters singled out as Instruments are meant to be representative: thus Karl Brandt stands in for medical doctors who rationalized atrocious experiments by claiming that their victims were not human, and Leni Riefenstahl sees herself as an artist who intended no one any harm, notwithstanding intense collusion in the creation of the Reich’s image — the mistress of the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth, the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred, could have served the same purpose.

The Leader, Adolf Hitler, gets about a fifth of Evans’s attention; while most biographies here range between fifteen and  twenty-five pages, Hitler’s goes on for a hundred. It functions as a pocket history of the rise and fall of the Reich at its core. Unappeasable resentment and uninhibited violence were its perpetual engines, always churning behind appearances, such as the hearty revival of the Fatherland and the pretended normalization of diplomatic engagements; and activities, such as the bold (or rash or reckless) conduct of the war and the methodical extermination of undesirable people. Given Hitler’s complete lack of capacity for painstaking planning, the core was bound to explode sooner or later; Evans is very clear: after 1941, Germany was at war with enemies that, owing to their vastly superior resources, it could never hope to defeat.

It is interesting that almost everyone in Hitler’s People comes from what in English is called the lower middle-class but is more appropriately thought of as the petite (or petty) bourgeoisie, educated but neither professional nor academic. This class was particularly bedeviled by the hyperinflation of the early Twenties and the loss of respectability (or caste) that it threatened. In any case, education did nothing to inspire Nazi sympathizers to transcend the sentimental nationalism that was humiliated by the peculiar outcome of World War I. There were a few semi-plausible aristocrats among the Paladins and the Enforcers, such as Ribbentrop and Papen, but no workers. Workers, drawn on the whole to the Left, could not compete with the Nazis’ pretenses to cultural vitality; it has not been forgotten that Hitler and his entourage drew great strength from their prim distaste for the experimental and the outré. Theirs was a regime of insufferable Babbitry.

I have two quibbles with Hitler’s People. The minor one is with the book’s lack of an independent time-line, a handy list of the the inflection points to which Evans refers again and again, such as the Kristallnacht of 1938, This would save the reader a fair amount of repetition and a good deal of authorial heavy-breathing. It serves no purpose to be reminded that these events, which range from the Reichstag Fire to the Wannsee Conference were horrific and/or had horrific consequences.

My major quibble is not unrelated to the minor one. There is a lot of scolding in this book. This is tedious of course, but also questionable. Human-rights violations may be unconscionable, but in the context of war, who is to say that their perpetrators are punishable? Several conflicts in the world today suggest that such violations may be tools to victory, or at least to quiescence. Ever since the dawn of Western imperialism, European minds have been addicted to imposing their provincial mores on the rest of the world, as if channeling a “greatness” of ancient Greek and Roman thought that often turns out to be spurious. I find that it behooves the historian who would influence intelligent minds to curb the impulse to sermonize.

As I say, though, Hitler’s People is a useful book, and genuinely useful books are as rare as great ones.