Richard J Evans, a leading historian on Nazi Germany, explains why Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were able to cement control over Germany in 1933… Q: What were Hitler’s motivations? And is it true that he was a history buff? A: Adolf Hitler wasn’t really a history buff. He didn’t care very much about history, because his vision was a racist one in which the essential character of races, such as the Germans or Aryans or the Jews or the Slavs, were essentially unchanging over time. He drew his ideas from a variety of sources: from a version of Social Darwinism that saw society and international relations as a sort of struggle of races for the survival of the fittest; from Arthur de Gobineau, a French theorist who invented the pseudoscientific idea of race theory; from Russian émigrés from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, who brought with them the idea that Bolshevism and communism were creations of the Jewish race; from a certain amount of what’s calle...