Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Why were so many Germans prepared to participate in the terrible crimes of the Third Reich?

It's a question that has exercised historians and the wider public for decades.

And now, in his new book, Hitler's People, Professor Richard J. Evans seeks to provide an answer.

Richard's written a piece on this subject for the November 202424 issue of BBC History magazine. And for this

episode, he spoke more to Rob Atar about the inner lives of Nazi perpetrators. In your

forthcoming piece for BBC History magazine, you mentioned that your involvement in a BBC TV series

recently prompted you to look afresh at Nazi Germany. What did you discover from that

looking again? Well, it was a series I was asked to take part in called Rise of the Nazis, and it

focused on individual actors who were as well represented by a mixture of specialists like myself and lay people who could be thought to be in some ways, though not always similar to them.

And I, I am afraid, was representing Hitler, and then we had people representing Goebbels and Goering and so on.

And it was very, very carefully prepared by 72 films made for BBC 2.

And what we had to do was to say, well, on the 3rd of May, 1933, Hitler would have been feeling this and thinking that and so on.

So we had kind of had these individual perspectives on the rise of the Nazis from the 20s

through to the end in 1945.

And I got me thinking about individuals.

And I realized that since I wrote my three-volume general history of Nazism from 2003 to 2008, it was clear that it had been an enormous amount of additional research.

A lot of documents had been published, which wasn't available to me when I wrote my three volumes.

And in addition, historians, particularly in Germany, been very wary of biographies, the biographical

approach, obviously because under the Third Reich from 1933 to 45, there had been a massive

cult of personality, not just Hitler's, but others too.

And so German historians in particular were rather wary of focusing on individuals.

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