Hitler’s Self-Hatred and Anti-Semitism

Review of George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil. Herndon, VA: Brassey’s, 1998. ISBN 1574881329, 263 pp., $24.95. [Material from this book has been previously discussed by Paul Elovitz and George Victor in Clio’s Psyche, December, 1997.]

George Victor, a psychologist and psychotherapist for over 30 years, has written a psychobiography of Hitler that is distinguished by its broad research and original ideas. Along with studying most of the psychological, biographical, and historical publications about Hitler and forming his own opinions on the factual veracity of many controversial biographical events, Victor has used data and concepts from behaviorism, child development, experimental psychology, psychoanalysis, social psychology, and sociology. He has also read the unpublished manuscript, Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler, by the eminent psychologist and psychiatrist, Henry Murray; and he has talked about his work with Rudolph Binion, author of the influential 1976 psychobiography, Hitler Among the Germans.

Drawing on this research, Victor has suggested several new psychological explanations for Hitler’s beliefs and actions, most notably for the origins and development of his anti-Semitism which may be summarized as follows. When Hitler was a boy, because of being severely beaten by his father, he began to experience himself as evil and worthless. As an adult he formed the delusions that a Jew had impregnated his paternal grandmother and that, therefore, his father was part-Jewish and he himself possessed Jewish blood — blood which he regarded as “toxic” because it was poisoned by its genetic roots (and by syphilis), “demonic”, and “an evil force controlling him.” This accentuated his previous negative self-image into feelings of self-loathing. Because of these feelings, after he became Chancellor of Germany he attempted to diminish Jewish blood among Germans not only by forcing Jews to emigrate and by banning marriages among Aryans and Jews but also by controlling marriages and sexual behavior between individuals with smaller fractions of Jewish ancestry and by planning to sterilize Germans (perhaps numbering over 3,000,000) who may have had Jewish ancestors going back at least three or four generations.

In thinking about all of the above measures, I believe Hitler was projecting his negative image of himself onto Jews. “But,” writes Victor,

Hitler’s self-loathing was extreme and he was troubled by more than a trait of his, by more than a few traits. The evil that haunted him seemed to be at the core of his being. Projecting his traits onto Jews was hardly enough. He was driven to get rid of Jews — to obliterate the hated images of himself. That set him apart from most anti-Semites.

One of Victor’s most original contentions is that several of Hitler’s World War II military decisions — to allow the English to escape at Dunkirk in May, 1940; not to invade England in October, 1940; and to prevent the capture of Moscow in August, 1941 — were really decisions meant to prolong the war so that Hitler could begin to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Once this extermination had begun, in the summer of 1941, Victor argues that Hitler “stuck to it at the expense of other goals.” So that the way he conducted “the last two years of the war and the priority he gave the Holocaust showed that…. To him it was literally worth the sacrifice of millions of Germany’s soldiers, loss of the war, and destruction of Germany in order to exterminate Jews.” Throughout the war Hitler adroitly concealed his extermination motives and acts from most of the leaders that he daily worked with; General Alfred Jodl, his chief of operations staff, observed that “Nobody really knows what went on in his mind.” But near the end of the war, Hitler remarked to Himmler, head of the SS, which was implementing the Holocaust, “should we lose, then we shall at the very least have hit decisively those subversives [Jews]…. I am determined, out of higher responsibility, to translate this recognition of mine into action, whatever the consequences.”

While the above explanations are interesting and plausible, they should have contained fuller discussions of three aspects of Hitler’s psychopathology. 1) The Pathology of Evil mentions briefly that the contemporary psychiatric diagnosis that best applies to Hitler is that of borderline personality disorder, but then no description is given of the diagnostic criteria for this disorder, which comprises clusters of many psychiatric manifestations (a pattern of unstable

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interpersonal relationships, identity disturbance, impulsivity, recurrent suicidal behavior, chronic feelings of emptiness, affective instability, inappropriate intense anger, and stress-related paranoid ideation) that strikingly fit the psychiatric manifestations shown by Hitler. 2) More could have been said about the nature and clinical course of Hitler’s variform psychosomatic symptoms that were present for most of his life, involving his skin, stomach and intestines, head, and nervous system; frequently caused him severe abdominal pains, headaches, and insomnia; and exacerbated his feelings of self-loathing. At the end of his life, when he told his secretary that since his youth “misery and anguish have been my constant companions,” he was referring not only to adverse events, but to the impacts on his mind and body of his psychosomatic symptoms. 3) No mention is made of Hitler’s 1936 to 1945 relationship with his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell (although David Irving’s book on Morell, The Secret Diaries of Hitler’s Doctor (1983), is cited in The Pathology of Evil’s bibliography). There need to be adequate explanations for how Morell secured Hitler’s confidence and why his treatments — of pills (that sometimes contained emulsions of intestinal bacteria) and of frequent intravenous injections of glucose and vitamins — sometimes relieved Hitler’s psychosomatic symptoms. A question that never seems to have been asked is what Hitler, who thought that his blood was toxic — and who sometimes stared at it to find the toxin — thought about receiving intravenous injections from his doctor.

Despite psychiatric limitations, The Pathology of Evil breaks new ground in Hitler biographies by its view of the history of its subject’s pathological thoughts about Jews, especially the origins of these thoughts in delusions of having Jewish blood, and then of their influence on the making of important military decisions — a view that will probably be opposed by the eminent Hitler biographer John Lukacs, who in his 1997 The Hitler of History stated that “the real sources” of Hitler’s anti-Semitism “are not ascertainable” and that only the evidence of Hitler’s “expressed purposes” are discernible. For this reviewer, who has been reading Hitler biographies since Konrad Heiden’s 1944 Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, reading The Pathology of Evil has sometimes been emotionally painful but almost always grimly informative.

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