Who were the Nazis? This is the opening question in Richard Evans’s important study of some two dozen key figures in Hitler’s regime. The biographical approach to history has long been unfashionable, as he acknowledges, especially as the cult of the ‘great man’ achieved its apotheosis in the Third Reich. Yet he argues persuasively that only by examining individual personalities can we understand ‘the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime’. Of course, they have to be set in context and no one is better qualified to do this than Evans himself (who is a former colleague of mine). His book is enriched by the findings of recent scholarship and his pen portraits have all the excitement of novelty. Even his depiction of Hitler feels fresh. Far from being a loner devoid of personal life and the usual human feelings, says Evans, he indulged in both society and sex, stimulated by an aphrodisiac made from bulls’ testicles.

A long opening essay on the Führer is followed by three broad sections. The first is devoted to his ‘Paladins’, among them Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and Ribbentrop. The second anatomises the ‘Enforcers’, including Hess, Streicher, Heydrich and Eichmann. And the third deals with the ‘Instruments’: Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt, who supervised a programme for killing the ‘unfit’; the diarist Luise Solmitz, who, ‘drunk with enthusiasm’ for the dictator, denounced her liberal brother to the authorities; General Ritter von Leeb, typical of senior German officers who, despite serious qualms, obeyed Hitler’s injunction to close their hearts to pity and ‘proceed with brutality’; and Leni Riefenstahl, who deified Hitler in her film Triumph of the Will. Women actually form a small minority of Evans’s cast since Hitler excluded them from political life on the grounds that their task was to bear and rear children. They did play other roles, but feminism was anathema to the Nazis, who condemned it as a Jewish device to impede the generation of the Aryan race.

Churchill referred to Hitler’s acolytes as a criminal ‘gang’ and ever since there has been a tendency to view them as a bunch of hoodlums, sadists and psychopaths. Evans paints a rather different picture, portraying them as normal people in abnormal circumstances. Most were well-educated members of the middle class: