‘If National Socialism had not come into existence’, Joseph Goebbels wrote in July 1942, ‘there is no way [Sepp Dietrich] would have made it further than sergeant. It is our regime that has made him into one of the crucial leaders of troops on the eastern front.’ This undoubtedly accurate observation touches on one of the central questions posed by Sepp Dietrich's journey from petrol station attendant to a senior military command. As a member of Hitler's entourage without any formal officer training whatsoever, Dietrich experienced a meteoric ascent within the Waffen-SS. The propaganda of the regime celebrated him as the embodiment of National Socialist soldierly virtue, establishing him as one of the most popular military commanders of the later war years. This chapter explores a career that was driven by the volatile relationship between personality and political structure.

This chapter is dedicated to my friend and former doctoral supervisor Jonathan Steinberg. Jonathan was a brilliant, charismatic lecturer and a perceptive, generous critic with a sharp eye for the textures of individual personalities, in the past as in the present. Some of the most compelling passages in his first book, Yesterday's Deterrent, a study of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, architect of the German pre-war naval programme, were focused on the character and inner life of the protagonist. In All or Nothing, Jonathan's contrastive study of German and Italian policy vis-à-vis the Jews in adjacent occupation zones during the Second World War, the utterances of specific actors were made to carry explanatory weight, a window into the motivational dynamics and attitudes that drove behaviour. He noted that whereas one could find among the Italian sources the voices of officials protesting to their superiors that the Jews in their zone appeared to be ‘decent fellows’ and expressing puzzlement about the German policy of deportation and extermination, no such voices were heard in the German sources. What did that mean? Had these people been educated differently? Was this about divergent features of German and Italian nation building, or did it reflect variant institutional and educational structures? Whatever the answers one found to these questions, the avenue of enquiry began with the behaviour and speech of individual actors. Jonathan often said in conversation: ‘Our work is completely unlike that of the physicists, geologists and molecular biologists, because our subjects talk back at us!’