The rise of the Nazis and the importance of heeding warnings

My 1997 BBC documentary The Nazis: A Warning from History drew on the German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ injunction: “That which has happened is a warning.” I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of history as a source of warnings, not lessons. Lessons suggest rigid rules – such as the claim that Winston Churchill’s opposition to Adolf Hitler proves that appeasement is always wrong. Yet Churchill appeased Stalin, so are there in fact occasions where appeasement is permissible?

• Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War?

Warnings, however, are clearer. They function like a doctor’s advice that if you keep smoking, you’re more likely to develop lung cancer. It’s not a certainty, but it’s a valuable caution. This approach has guided my study of history – seeking warnings that can illuminate the human condition and help us navigate the present.

When trying to understand the mentality of past eras, are eyewitness testimonies more helpful than archive research?

I wouldn’t say that one approach is necessarily more valuable than the other. Having started in television, I always wanted to make history documentaries. I never aspired to be an academic historian but was inspired by shows such as The World at War [1973].

In documentary-making, there’s a clear divide between talking to people who experienced events first-hand and dealing with the more distant past. That divide fascinates me. I’ve always been particularly interested in talking to people with direct connections to history.

One of the first films I made, many years ago, was about Rasputin. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we were the first foreigners to visit his home village in western Siberia. There we met two incredibly old women who had known Rasputin as a young man. One of them vividly described him as a nightmare – always drunk. That kind of personal connection brings history to life in a way other sources can’t.

The Second World War holds a particular resonance for me. My father was in the RAF, and my uncle, whom I never met, was killed while serving on a convoy ship sunk by a U-boat. This gave me a visceral connection to that period. Over the years, I’ve talked to people who met Hitler, survivors of Auschwitz, and others with direct links to pivotal moments in history. That immediacy and connection makes the subject deeply compelling for me.

Though I wouldn’t claim that oral history is more important than other sources, it’s the excitement of those personal connections that drove me to dedicate 35 years to this work. But ultimately, as a historian, you’ve got to be sceptical about every source, haven’t you?

In the book, you recount a conversation with a former member of the Waffen-SS in the early 1990s. Can you tell us more?

While researching a documentary in Austria, I met someone who had served in the Waffen-SS and remained committed to the Nazi regime. It was my first encounter with someone like that – and it was extraordinary. After the war, he had become a senior executive at a German car company; he was retired when we met but still sharp and articulate.

When we discussed the war, he expressed shocking views: lamenting that Britain and Germany hadn’t teamed up to rule the world, blaming Winston Churchill for the conflict, praising the Third Reich as a “golden era”, and describing the Jews murdered during the Holocaust as a problem that had to be dealt with “one way or the other”. His perspective was a complete fantasy – a revisionist view of history.

What struck me was the duality: here was a successful businessman who seemed outwardly ordinary but still held such abhorrent beliefs. It challenged my assumptions about what a former committed Nazi might be like. He wasn’t monstrous in appearance or demeanour, yet his views were chilling. That encounter began a journey towards understanding how someone could maintain these beliefs even long after the war and the full exposure of its crimes.

Do you see parallels between the Nazi regime’s use of manipulation and entertainment as tools of power and that of present-day political movements?

Yes – all over the place. But in the book I’m careful not to say: “This is what X, Y or Z is doing.” That’s deliberate. The examples I use, including Mao and Stalin, are historical figures whom you can clearly examine.

I did this for two reasons. First, I’m writing a history book occasionally informed by psychology, not a modern political treatise. I’ve spent years trying to understand the Second World War and the Nazis, and I’m still learning. Who am I to claim expertise on current political situations or to draw exact parallels?

Second, I believe it’s more powerful if readers make those connections themselves. In my experience with films and books, it’s more profound when someone reads something and thinks: “This reminds me of X or Y.” Some readers have told me that the book made them think differently about modern events. That’s more impactful than me spelling it out for them. My goal was to provide a framework – a set of templates – to help people think critically about the world today.

Your book contains a chilling chapter on how the Nazis targeted young people. What made young minds particularly susceptible to Nazi ideology?

I’ve loved working on this book, particularly because of what I’ve learned about neuroscience. One highlight was interviewing Professor Robert Sapolsky from Stanford – someone I’ve admired for years. His undergraduate lectures on neuroscience, available online, are brilliant, and I highly recommend them.

Sapolsky shared a fascinating insight that I hadn’t considered before: targeting individuals under the age of 25 is enormously effective – something that dictators have understood well. This is because of how the brain develops, specifically the prefrontal cortex – the part responsible for impulse control and long-term reasoning. Until around the age of 25, this area isn’t fully developed, which explains why younger people are more prone to risk-taking, idealism and even fanaticism.

Sapolsky illustrated this using the example of explaining social nuances to a young child – for instance, asking them to pretend to be surprised about receiving a duplicate gift they already own. The subtleties are often too complex for the young brain to compute.
This immaturity in the prefrontal cortex also explains why younger people are more easily drawn to highly emotive causes, whether positive or destructive.

As Sapolsky puts it, those under 25 are in the ideal period of life for fostering fanaticism. It’s when individuals are most likely to become either fascists or saints. This developmental window has been historically exploited by regimes ranging from the Nazis to Mao’s during the Cultural Revolution, which relied heavily on student fervour.

How crucial was the support of the wider German population to the Nazi regime?

As early as 1933, Goebbels called for the “mobilisation of the mind”. By this, he meant influencing the majority of Germans who hadn’t voted for the Nazis. Even in the highly pressurised 1933 election, after Hitler became chancellor, a majority of Germans did not vote for them. It was only later, under the pressure of plebiscites and Nazi rule, that large numbers began voting in favour.

Goebbels understood the importance of winning over those who hadn’t supported the Nazis, and worked to do so. After setbacks such as Stalingrad in 1943 and Mussolini’s downfall in Italy, terror came to the forefront, and Goebbels noted approvingly in his diary how Himmler executed deserters and those who spoke out against the regime. But terror had limited success, and Goebbels believed it was less effective than fostering the Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’ – the idea that everyone was united in a shared national purpose as defined by the Nazis.

Following Germany’s defeat in 1945, how did the leading Nazis attempt to rationalise the regime’s crimes – and their own part in them?

The responses of individual Nazis to their actions varied. Some accepted responsibility, while others denied or deflected blame. A common excuse was ignorance: many claimed that they were unaware of the atrocities, believing that Auschwitz was merely a camp or that Jews were being sent east to work.

Another approach was deflection, akin to modern ‘whataboutism’. When confronted with the Holocaust they voiced a series of blatantly false equivalences, such as the firebombing of Hamburg or colonial injustices, dismissing the charges as ‘victor’s justice’. This allowed them to label the Allies as hypocrites, reinforcing a belief in their victimhood.

This sense of hypocrisy was rooted in three key events that took place in 1938. First, Germany’s annexation of Austria in March led to widespread persecution of Austrian Jews. Then, in November, Kristallnacht escalated antisemitic violence, including the destruction of synagogues, mass arrests and killings.

In between those events, in July, the Évian Conference exposed the international community’s indifference. Convened by US president Franklin D Roosevelt to address the Jewish refugee crisis, it was largely symbolic, with countries offering little action. Hitler’s reaction was to lambast democratic nations as hypocrites. He offered to help Jews leave Germany if other nations agreed to take them – but no country accepted his offer. This deepened Nazi contempt for the west, seeing it as morally duplicitous.

Psychological research shows that hypocrisy is often more reviled than outright dishonesty. And the Nazis invoked this global hypocrisy to justify their actions. After the war, many former Nazis clung to this narrative, framing themselves as victims of a hypocritical world order. That sentiment was also linked to colonialism. Nazis pointed to Britain and argued: “You condemn us for wanting an empire while refusing to relinquish your own.”

That sense of double standards became a coping mechanism, allowing many to rationalise their complicity or continue justifying their actions long after the war ended. It allowed former Nazis to deflect responsibility and maintain a belief in their innocence despite the overwhelming evidence of their atrocities..

Did Allied prosecutors analyse the psychological motives behind Nazi leaders’ actions and attempt to define a distinct ‘Nazi personality type’?

Yes. [During the Nuremberg Trials] psychologists conducted Rorschach tests [using inkblots] with former Nazis. What stood out was how differently various psychologists interpreted the results. One concluded that the subjects were murderous SS ‘robots’, aligning with a view that some found comforting. Another disagreed, arguing that they were simply a collection of individuals, and couldn’t be defined by such a reductive label.

Recent literature emphasises that, though culture shapes us as individuals, there’s a vast range of personalities and behaviours within any group. It’s overly simplistic to attribute robotic tendencies to human beings.

Returning to Karl Jaspers’ warning to posterity, do you think that each new generation is truly capable of grasping this idea – especially as the Second World War recedes further into the distant past?

No, I don’t believe they are. Someone once asked me if I was pleased with the impact of my work on The Nazis: A Warning from History. I thought: are you kidding? Hardly anyone seems to take these warnings seriously.

We have a massive problem in that most people in the UK stop studying history in their mid-teens. This creates a fundamentally historically illiterate population. Before I produced the documentary series Auschwitz: The Nazis and ‘The Final Solution’ in 2005, we conducted a poll. It revealed that most people didn’t even know what the word ‘Auschwitz’ meant, let alone hold a view on it.

The idea that there’s a widespread movement to learn from history or to understand it meaningfully is false. Only small numbers of people engage with it seriously. I’ve enjoyed doing this work, but I honestly don’t know if it’s done much good. I wish it were otherwise.

Even when people engage with history, it’s often misrepresented – like the focus on Churchill standing against Hitler, while overlooking his willingness to forge an alliance with Stalin. During one interview
I gave, someone said they felt more depressed after talking to me. I could only apologise!

Does focusing so much on Nazi Germany as a cautionary tale risk reducing it to a cliché, oversimplifying the complexities of how a society descended into authoritarianism and atrocities?

Yes – but the risk is in not studying it, because that is what leads to oversimplification. Don’t you find that in life, as in history, it’s easier to hold firm views about things before knowing much about them?

Years ago I interviewed Professor Akira Iriye, a Harvard expert in Japanese diplomatic history, for a Second World War educational website. I asked him about the value of studying that period, and he said that one worthwhile outcome would be to help politicians avoid making false comparisons.

Not understanding history risks reducing it to clichés, such as ‘murderous Nazi robots’. For example, someone once dismissively said to me that the Nazis’ atrocities were the result of how they had been swaddled as babies.

Do you think interrogating the unique context that shaped the mentality of a time and place are key when studying the past?

I believe the most important line I wrote in the book is also the simplest: we must accept that we are creatures of a particular time and place. This may seem self-evident but, in my experience, it’s not. Many people say things like: “If I had been German, I would have stood up and spoken out.”

This assumption shows a lack of understanding of a fundamental truth: our thoughts and actions are deeply shaped by our context – the time and place in which we live. The same applies to people of the past. To truly understand their actions, we must first understand their world.

I once met someone who rejected this notion. When I mentioned the Aztecs and their belief in human sacrifice as essential for ensuring rainfall, he claimed he’d have started the equivalent of Aztec Amnesty International, advocating for human rights.

I couldn’t definitively say that he wouldn’t have done it, but it seems unlikely. If you were raised in early 15th-century Mesoamerica, you would almost certainly have accepted human sacrifice as necessary. Recognising this helps us grasp the profound influence of culture and context on human behaviour.

This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine