In Pursuit of the Nazi Mind

Review of Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts, Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-954168-3, 357 pages, $35.00.

As a historian and a psychoanalyst Daniel Pick is welly qualified to study the period under consideration. This remarkable book is richly informative, profound, and its approach is not that of the conventionally trained historian. Pick begins by focusing on Rudolf Hess, the deputy Fϋhrer, moves to Adolf Hitler, the Fϋhrer or Chancellor, examines the years of World War II, the Nazification of Germany, the Allied victory, and the Cold War. This work is a close examination of Nazi pathology.

On the evening of May 10, 1941, a bizarre event occurred: Hess singlehandedly flew a plane from Germany to Great Britain, ostensibly to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain, which was then being bombarded by the German air force, a situation widely known as the Blitz. This act by Hess was both extremely dramatic and internationally sensational. What made it so remarkable was that Hess was Hitler’s deputy and a close confidant, and had no authorization from his government to do so. For flying to Britain, the German government declared that Hess had a mental disorder. He had intended to meet with Duke Hamilton in Scotland, whom he had met at the Olympics in Germany in 1936. When he was close to the Duke’s estate, he parachuted out of his fighter plane, and upon landing he was promptly arrested. Despite his prominence, he became a prisoner of war, and in line with the theme of the book, a patient as well. Britain now had a Nazi who could possibly provide insights into the Nazi psyche. This quixotic situation was summed up by Prime Mister Winston Churchill who stated in the House of Commons on May 13 that this was “one of these cases where imagination is sometimes baffled by the facts as they presented themselves” (p. 54).

Indeed, Hess was closely studied by British military psychiatrists. The lead one was Major Henry Dicks, an army officer, physician, and psychiatrist, who in civilian life had been a practicing psychotherapist, and, of significant relevance, spoke German. Based on Hess’s behavior, both German and British opinion appropriately labeled Hess as having a mental disorder. The clinical observations that were made about Hess by British analysts covered a panoply of psychoanalytic diagnoses. Hess was considered to be paranoid, masochistic, sadistic, ambivalent, narcissistic, suicidal (he had attempted to kill himself), hostile, depressed, en-

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amored by Hitler, and anti-Semitic. The aim of “treating” Hess was ultimately also to understand the “Nazi mind,” especially the motivation of this movement for being so aggressive, militaristic, and idealizing war, thereby aggrandizing hyper masculinity while at the same time denigrating women. This mentality characterized Hitler as well as Hess, and pervaded the right wing in Germany. Having Hess as captive was illuminating in many respects. With regard to sexuality, Pick says that Hess “was not in fact greatly interested in his wife as a sexual partner or a love object” (p. 83). What this pronounced male aggressive mentality and brutality reveals is that this was an unconscious defense against castration. Hess’s unauthorized flight to Britain was grandiose, and he did not anticipate being studied by psychoanalytically trained therapists, a treatment modality which was at that time not permitted in Germany. In essence, their studies revealed that Hess’s reality testing was severely impaired.

Informed by psychoanalytic theory, the many luminaries who studied the “Nazi mind” and authoritarianism were psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychologists. It is remarkable that the Allied intelligence services recognized that psychoanalysis could provide a more profound understanding of the psychodynamics of Nazism. Pertinently, they all contributed to the war effort and Freud’s influence looms large in this endeavor. Furthermore, Pick illustrates his theme with several popular films that are reflective of the “group fantasies” of this time. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), a propaganda film which prominently features Hess, admiringly introducing Hitler at a rally, is discussed early in the book. Then toward the conclusion, the book cites the film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), starring Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich, which indicates the American disappointment with the concluding trial of important Nazis, due to the Cold War. Pick’s work demonstrates that there were no redeeming features to the German occupation of European countries, as was amply established during the Nuremberg Trials of the leading Nazis in 1945.

This is a highly readable book, and it is extensively researched. However, there is a conspicuous scholarly lacuna. The author does not employ one German language source. The leading German Nazis as well as many prominent intellectual figures who fled from Germany to Britain and the United States and who played an important role in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) were native speakers of German, and so were the defendants at Nuremberg. Hitler and Hess wrote in German.

Like the British, the American OSS was interested in understanding Hitler, and in this regard requested that Walter Langer, a psychoanalytically trained therapist, study Hitler and write a secret report on him.

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He did, and decades after the war it was published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler, with much success. In this regard, Pick is aware of the field of psychohistory and in one of his chapters discusses the field, even presenting the pros and cons of the field, as it is controversial in regard to traditional history. Some traditional historians, namely Jacques Barzun and David Stannard—severe critics of our field—are cited, but psychohistorians such as Peter Loewenberg and Rudolph Binion are also mentioned. Furthermore, although there are some references to the field of psychohistory, there are no references to psychohistorical journals, which have been prominent in examining the issues of the period that Pick considers. Actually, even while recognizing that some psychohistorians have made contributions, he is somewhat dismissive of the field. He argues that psychohistorians do not have direct contact with the subjects they are studying. Paradoxically, Pick obviously did not have personal contact with the persons under consideration in his book.

Pick would be well served if he had considered more seriously what William L. Langer, the brother of Walter Langer, advocated in his presidential address in 1957, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, of which he was president. Titled “The Next Assignment,” it was a momentous and profound address made to this body of professional historians. He candidly and challengingly said to this academic group that if they wished to go further in understanding the past then they must turn to employing psychoanalysis in their historical studies. Among the many reasons he gave for recommending this pioneering approach to history is that, he said, “Viewed in the light of depth psychology, the homespun, common sense psychological interpretations of past historians, even some of the greatest, seems woefully inadequate, not to say naive. Clearly the time has come for us to reckon with a doctrine that strikes so close to the heart of our own discipline” (“The Next Assignment,” American Historical Review, 63, 1958, pp. 283-304).

Nevertheless, on balance, Pick’s work is highly readable, thought provoking, and engrossing. It also marks a major contribution to the understanding of this cataclysmic period.

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