Richard J. Evans – författare

'The most comprehensive history in any language of the disastrous epoch of the Third Reich' Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler'The most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis' A.S. Byatt, Times Literary SupplementThe Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany explores how the First World War, the Weimar Republic and the Great Depression paved the way for Nazi ruleThey started as little more than a gang of extremists and thugs, yet in a few years the Nazis had turned Germany into a one-party state and led one of Europe's most advanced nations into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair. In this consummate and compelling history, the first book in his acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, Richard Evans reveals how and why it happened, questions whether the rise of Hitler was inevitable and dramatically re-creates the maelstrom of disorder, economic disaster, violence and polarization that gave rise to the terror of the Third Reich.

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERA History Today Best Book of the Year 2025‘Elegantly written and powerfully argued … it ranks among the best works on this terrible period’ Sunday TimesA biographical study of Hitler's inner circle offers a new way to understand the horrors of the Nazi regimeWhy did so many Germans take part in the crimes of Nazi Germany? How did they come to support Hitler and follow him almost to the very end? For too long, the Nazis have been presented as little more than psychopaths or criminals. In his major new work, renowned historian Richard J. Evans makes use of a mass of recently unearthed new evidence to strip away the veneer of myth and legend from the faces of the Third Reich and present a more realistic view of Nazi perpetrators as human beings who were disturbingly like us.Evans offers rounded, fresh and often startling new portraits of the men and women who created and served Nazi Germany, beginning with Hitler himself and going on to encompass leading figures like Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, enforcers of Hitler’s orders such as Eichmann and Heydrich, propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl, low-level perpetrators such as the notorious Irma Grese and unknown sympathizers and fellow-travellers who helped the regime in myriad ways.Hitler’s People is a chilling, brilliantly written work which allows the reader to understand the texture and values of the Third Reich and just how far individuals will go when so many normal moral constraints have disappeared.

The second book in his acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich in Power: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a Nation explores how Hitler turned Germany from a vibrant democracy into a one-party state.Before Hitler seized power in 1933, Germany had been famous for its sophistication and complexity. So how was it possible for a group of ideological obsessives to re-mould it into a one-party state directed at war and race hate? How did the Nazis win over the hearts and minds of Germany's citizens, twist science, religion and culture, and transform the country's politics to achieve total dominance so quickly?From the Nuremberg Laws to the Olympic Games, Kristallnacht to the Hitler Youth, this gripping account shows how a whole population became enmeshed in a dictatorship that was consumed by hatred and driven by war.'Impressive ... perceptive ... humane'Ian Kershaw'Excellent ... powerful ... it makes an indelible impression'Robert Service, Sunday Times'Likely to be the standard work for some years to come'Spectator Books of the Year'A rich and detailed description of just what the Third Reich did in every compartment of the state and every corner of society ... Evans's magisterial study should be on our shelves for a long time to come'Economist'Written with great style and human sympathy'Daily Telegraph Books of the Year'Evans brilliantly conveys how the Fuhrer reignited Germans' pride as he led them to catastrophe'Neal Ascherson, ObserverSir Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defence of History, Telling Lies about Hitler and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich at War.

The final book in his acclaimed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster shows how Germany rushed headlong into destroying itself, shattering an entire continent.In 1939 Hitler mobilized Germany into all-out war. Richard Evans's astonishing, acclaimed history conjures up a whole society plunged into conflict - from generals and front-line soldiers to Hitler Youth activists and middle-class housewives - tracing events from the invasion of Poland and the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler's plans for genocide and his eventual suicide.'Masterly ... will surely be the standard history for many years to come ... This is a warning for the future, as much as a judgement on the past' Richard Overy, Daily Telegraph'We all know how the story ends ... but Richard Evans brings it masterfully home ... magnificent' Peter Preston, Observer'A chilling, brilliant read' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year'It is hard to do justice to the humanity and scholarly range of The Third Reich at War ... triumphant ... a masterful historical narrative and the most comprehensive account of Nazi Germany' Nicholas Stargardt, The Times Literary Supplement'It gives the reader persuasive answers to questions asked for so long, that will continue to be asked, about this most violent and inexplicable of regimes' Mark Mazower, GuardianSir Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His previous books include In Defence of History, Telling Lies about Hitler and the companions to this title, The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power.

'A scintillating, encyclopaedic history, rich in detail from the arcane to the familiar... a veritable tour de force' Richard Overy, New Statesman'Transnational history at its finest ... .. social, political and cultural themes swirl together in one great canvas of immense detail and beauty' Gerard DeGroot, The Times'Dazzlingly erudite and entertaining' Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday TimesA masterpiece which brings to life an extraordinarly turbulent and dramatic era of revolutionary change.The Pursuit of Power draws on a lifetime of thinking about nineteenth-century Europe to create an extraordinarily rich, surprising and entertaining panorama of a continent undergoing drastic transformation. The book aims to reignite the sense of wonder that permeated this remarkable era, as rulers and ruled navigated overwhelming cultural, political and technological changes. It was a time where what was seen as modern with amazing speed appeared old-fashioned, where huge cities sprang up in a generation, new European countries were created and where, for the first time, humans could communicate almost instantly over thousands of miles. In the period bounded by the Battle of Waterloo and the outbreak of World War I, Europe dominated the rest of the world as never before or since: this book breaks new ground by showing how the continent shaped, and was shaped by, its interactions with other parts of the globe.Richard Evans explores fully the revolutions, empire-building and wars that marked the nineteenth century, but the book is about so much more, whether it is illness, serfdom, religion or philosophy. The Pursuit of Power is a work by a historian at the height of his powers: essential for anyone trying to understand Europe, then or now.

'Brilliant, a 5 out of 5 masterpiece' Evening StandardThe renowned historian of the Third Reich takes on the conspiracy theories surrounding Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, in a vital history book for the 'post-truth' ageThe idea that nothing happens by chance in history, that nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight, that everything that occurs is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating everything from behind the scenes is as old as history itself. But conspiracy theories are becoming more popular and more widespread in the twenty-first century. Nowhere have they become more obvious than in revisionist accounts of the history of the Third Reich. Long-discredited conspiracy theories have taken on a new lease of life, given credence by claims of freshly discovered evidence and novel angles of investigation.This book takes five widely discussed claims involving Hitler and the Nazis and subjects them to forensic scrutiny: that the Jews were conspiring to undermine civilization, as outlined in 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'; that the German army was 'stabbed in the back' by socialists and Jews in 1918; that the Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to seize power; that Rudolf Hess' flight to the UK in 1941 was sanctioned by Hitler and conveyed peace terms suppressed by Churchill; and that Hitler escaped the bunker in 1945 and fled to South America. In doing so, it teases out some surprising features these, and other conspiracy theories, have in common.This is a history book, but it is a history book for the age of 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts': a book for our own troubled times.

COPYWRITER - Modern History section for 1996 catThe state has no greater power over its own citizens than that of killing them. This book examines the use of that supreme sanction in Germany, from the seventeenth century to the present.Richard Evans analyses the system of `traditional' capital punishments set out in German law, and the ritual practices and cultural readings associated with them by the time of the early modern period. He shows how this system was challenged by Enlightenment theories of punishment and broke down under the impact of secularization and social change in the first half of the nineteenth century. The abolition of the death penalty became a classic liberal case which triumphed, if only momentarily, in the 1948 Revolution. In Germany far more than anywhere else in Europe, capital punishment was identified with anti-liberal, authoritarian concepts of sovereignty. Its definitive reinstatement by Bismarck in the 1880s marked not only the defeat of liberalism but also coincided with the emergence of new, Social Darwinist attitudes towards criminality which gradually changed the terms of debate. The triumph of these attitudes under the Nazis laid the foundations for the massive expansion of capital punishment which took place during Hitler's `Third Reich'. After the Second World War, the death penalty was abolished, largely as a result of a chance combination of circumstances, but continued to be used in the Stalinist system of justice in East Germany until its forced abandonment as a result of international pressure exerted in the regime in the 1970s and 1980s.This remarkable and disturbing book casts new light on the history of German attitudes to law, deviance, cruelty, suffering and death, illuminating many aspects of Germany's modern political development. Using sources ranging from folksongs and ballads to the newly released government papers from the former German Democratic Republic, Richard Evans scrutinizes the ideologies behind capital punishment and comments on interpretations of the history of punishment offered by writers such as Foucault and Elias. He has made a formidable contribution not only to scholarship on German history but also to the social theory of punishement, and to the current debate on the death penalty.

When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg. That's Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He's right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did what we've seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we've seen in the past year. Mayer, an American journalist of German descent, traveled to Germany in 1935 in attempt to secure an interview with Hitler. He failed, but what he saw in Berlin chilled him. He quickly determined that Hitler wasn't the person he needed to talk to after all. Nazism, he realized, truly was a mass movement; he needed to talk with the average German.He found ten, and his discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

Through the means of four powerful and extraordinary narratives from the nineteenth-century German underworld, this book deftly explores an intriguing array of questions about criminality, punishment, and social exclusion in modern German history. Drawing on hitherto unexplored legal documents and police files, Richard J. Evans recounts the epic adventures of an art teacher imprisoned for forging bank notes, then transported to Siberia with a gang of violent Prussian felons in 1802; the tragic sufferings of a drunken female vagrant whipped repeatedly by the authorities in Bremen in the 1820s and 30s; the comical and fantastic deceptions of a con man arrested in the 1860s for not paying his hotel bill; and the ironic career of a young woman who drifts into prostitution after bearing an illegitimate child and discovers the underworld to be much less cruel and immoral than the "respectable" society from which she has been rejected. Each of these narratives sheds light on German penal policy in the nineteenth century, when a regime of public and often symbolic physical punishment was transformed into one of silent, regimented incarceration. Using these fascinating cases as starting points for a wider consideration of crime and justice, Evans investigates the complexity of the relations between deviance and control, the ambiguities of criminality in modern German history, and the ways literary models influenced perceptions of—and behavior in—the criminal underworld.

When it was originally published in 1982, this book presented pioneering new research into the everyday life of the German working class in the crucial decades between the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Nazi seizure of power. The authors document working-class attitudes to bourgeois convention, authority and the law in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The book includes studies of industrial sabotage, pilfering at work, working-class drinking habits, illegitimate motherhood and the violence of adolescent ‘cliques’ in pre-Hitlerian Berlin.

When it was originally published in 1982, this book presented pioneering new research into the everyday life of the German working class in the crucial decades between the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Nazi seizure of power. The authors document working-class attitudes to bourgeois convention, authority and the law in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The book includes studies of industrial sabotage, pilfering at work, working-class drinking habits, illegitimate motherhood and the violence of adolescent ‘cliques’ in pre-Hitlerian Berlin.

Originally published in 1977, this book brings together what is known about liberal feminist and socialist movements for the emancipation of women all over the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It deals not only with Britain and the United States but also with Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Scandinavian countries. The chapters trace the origins, development, and eventual collapse of these movements in relation to the changing social formations and political structures of Europe, America and Australasia in the era of bourgeois liberalism. The first part of the book discusses the origins of feminist movements and advances a model or ‘ideal type’ description of their development. The second part then takes a number of case studies of individual feminist movements to illustrate the main varieties of organised feminism and the differences from country to country. The third part looks at socialist women’s movements and includes a study of the Socialist Women’s International. A final part touches on the reason for the eclipse of women’s emancipation movements in the half-century following the end of the First World War, before a general conclusion pulls together some of the arguments advanced in earlier chapters and attempts a comparison between these feminist movements of 1840-1920 and the Women’s Liberation Movement.

In Cosmopolitan Islanders one of the world's leading historians asks why it is that so many prominent and influential British historians have devoted themselves to the study of the European continent. Books on the history of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and many other European countries, and of Europe more generally, have frequently reached the best-seller lists both in Britain and (in translation) in those European countries themselves. Yet the same is emphatically not true in reverse. Richard J. Evans traces the evolution of British interest in the history of Continental Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. He goes on to discuss why British historians who work on aspects of European history in the present day have chosen to do so and why this distinguished tradition is now under threat. Cosmopolitan Islanders ends with some reflections on what needs to be done to ensure its continuation in the future.

In Cosmopolitan Islanders one of the world's leading historians asks why it is that so many prominent and influential British historians have devoted themselves to the study of the European continent. Books on the history of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and many other European countries, and of Europe more generally, have frequently reached the best-seller lists both in Britain and (in translation) in those European countries themselves. Yet the same is emphatically not true in reverse. Richard J. Evans traces the evolution of British interest in the history of Continental Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. He goes on to discuss why British historians who work on aspects of European history in the present day have chosen to do so and why this distinguished tradition is now under threat. Cosmopolitan Islanders ends with some reflections on what needs to be done to ensure its continuation in the future.

Originally published in 1977, this book brings together what is known about liberal feminist and socialist movements for the emancipation of women all over the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It deals not only with Britain and the United States but also with Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Scandinavian countries. The chapters trace the origins, development, and eventual collapse of these movements in relation to the changing social formations and political structures of Europe, America and Australasia in the era of bourgeois liberalism. The first part of the book discusses the origins of feminist movements and advances a model or ‘ideal type’ description of their development. The second part then takes a number of case studies of individual feminist movements to illustrate the main varieties of organised feminism and the differences from country to country. The third part looks at socialist women’s movements and includes a study of the Socialist Women’s International. A final part touches on the reason for the eclipse of women’s emancipation movements in the half-century following the end of the First World War, before a general conclusion pulls together some of the arguments advanced in earlier chapters and attempts a comparison between these feminist movements of 1840-1920 and the Women’s Liberation Movement.

First published in 1991, this collection of original studies by British, German and American historians examines the whole range of modern German bourgeoisie groups, including professional, mercantile, industrial and financial bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois family. Drawing on original research, the book focuses on the historical evidence as counterpoint to the well-known literary accounts of the German bourgeoisie. It also discusses bourgeois values as manifested in the cult of local roots and in the widespread practice of duelling. Edited by two of the most respected scholars in the field, this important reissue will be of value to any students of modern German and European history.

First published in 1991, this collection of original studies by British, German and American historians examines the whole range of modern German bourgeoisie groups, including professional, mercantile, industrial and financial bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois family. Drawing on original research, the book focuses on the historical evidence as counterpoint to the well-known literary accounts of the German bourgeoisie. It also discusses bourgeois values as manifested in the cult of local roots and in the widespread practice of duelling. Edited by two of the most respected scholars in the field, this important reissue will be of value to any students of modern German and European history.

This book, which was first published in 1988, deals with the neglected history of the lowest layers of German society, of marginal, outcast and deviant groups such as arsonists, witches, bandits, infanticides, poachers, murderers, prostitutes, vagrants and thieves, from the end of the thirteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. This book is ideal for students of history, particularly the German history.