“The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle”, by Anthony Read

984 pages, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393048001

As the Götterdämmerung for Hitler’s Germany approached in April 1945, the surviving members of Der Führer’s inner circle of bureaucrats and lickspittles were still competing for his favor and conspiring, each in his own furtive way, to succeed him – although why anyone aspired to preside over the ruins he had wrought is less a mystery after reading Anthony Read’s The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle. From the unpromising beginnings of Nazism in the 1920s, ambitious misfits gathered around Hitler, whose demagogic genius in exploiting the humiliation of WWI’s defeat seemed likely to propel him to power. Each was, in Read’s words, “totally besotted” with Hitler and “bitterly jealous” of his attention to others. Not all survived the Darwinian struggle for favor and succession: Ernst Röhm was murdered by fellow Nazis; Rudolf Hess took a solo flight to captivity; Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated. But three of the original disciples – Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler – all remained to the end, competing for power even when, with defeat imminent, the prize had lost all possible value. Four latecomers also hung on for dubious glory: foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; chief architect and war production genius Albert Speer; Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann; and Admiral Karl Dönitz, whom no one expected to be anointed Hitler’s successor. That the internecine rivalries persisted beyond the end suggests the warped minds of Hitler’s crew of bureaucratic criminals. Despite his penchant for cliché – ahem: “the ripest of plums suddenly dropped into the Nazis’ laps, completely out of the blue” – Read tells the story of two decades of assiduous jockeying for power in luridly absorbing if overwhelming detail.

As somebody once pointed out – okay, you got me, it was Bertolt Brecht – the prominent figures in the Nazi elite were like the members of a street gang whose leader was Hitler. No one was allowed to get in his way and, by and large, the members accepted this, with anyone who rebelled being thrown into the gutter. The most notable of these was the head of the Sturmabteilung, Ernst Röhm, who aspired to put himself and the SA in the engine-house of the German military apparatus. For Hitler, this was one radical move too far, and in 1934 he ordered the Nacht der langen Messer (Röhm was offered the chance to commit suicide, but when he refused, he was shot). While Read gathers much information about these hopped-up hooligans together between covers, there really is nothing new here; it has all been written about before. There were parts of the book – portions regarding the Battle of Stalingrad, for example – where it felt as if I had read it all, exactly as is, before. Also, I question how thoroughly Read investigated the secondary sources he relies so heavily upon, as there is a lot of hearsay in the book and the retelling of anecdotes that may or not be true, such as the story of Himmler’s attic with no mention that some of these conversations and incidents have been questioned by historians. Yet, Read presents them all as unquestioned fact (I understand that this is essentially a popular history and perhaps not the place for that sort of debate). Not a bad book, really, just not an original one, but well worth the read if you are new to the Nazi upper echelons.