The Nazi Genocidal and Apocalyptic Mind

After World War II, social scientists, some of whom had fled the Third Reich, sought to explain the genocidal mind. They identified an “Authoritarian Personality” — a type of person likely to obey authority generally and follow orders to harm innocent people particularly. This work, and experiments by Solomon Asch on how perception can be manipulated, undercut the complacent belief in the United States that genocidal obedience was a German aberration — that a holocaust “can’t happen here.” (In fact it had already happened here, when President Ulysses Grant sent an army to exterminate Native Americans. United States soldiers carried out their mission obediently, and their command-

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er, General William Tecumseh Sherman, perhaps a reader of Martin Luther, wrote home that he was proud to participate in “the final solution of the Indian problem.”) Most shocking were Stanley Milgram’s experiments (Obedience to Authority, 1974), showing that ordinary citizens in Connecticut obeyed orders to harm innocent people, even to a lethal extent. His experiments so disturbed the psychological community that Milgram was condemned and his findings only poorly integrated into social science.

Outbreaks of “ethnic cleansing” contrib-

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uted to the growing realization that civilization had a long way to go before holocausts might stop happening. In recent years, explaining Nazi genocide passed from social psychologists to psychohistorians. Jay Gonen opens his book, The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler’s Utopian Barbarism (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000, ISBN 081312154X, pp. 224, $25.00), with Karl Mannheim’s words, suggesting that psychohistory “is the tearing off of disguises — the unmasking of those unconscious motives which bind the group existence to its cultural aspirations” — to its ideology. In ideology and its mythical sources, Gonen finds the mental mechanisms on which messianism and particularly genocide are based. For genocide to end, destructive messianic figures need to be unmasked so well that they lose the mantle of legitimacy to which they lay claim. In the search to understand the genocidal mind, Gonen’s book is a major step, and a vital part is his analysis of messianic leadership and the role followers play.

In times of despair, the ancient yearning for a messiah wells up, opening the door to a charismatic figure with an apocalyptic vision — the most destructive of leaders. Messianic leaders ask sacrifice of their followers, offering them redemption and a new world. The destructive ones ask followers to give their lives — the most redemptive sacrifice, insuring them a place in the pantheon of national heroes — in fighting a fiendish enemy who must not only be beaten, but also exterminated. Gonen’s probing of unconscious mechanisms in such thinking by Hitler and his followers is impressive.

Mutual needs combine into an intense love-faith relationship — a transcendental relationship — between messianic leader and followers, which empowers both. The leader becomes godlike; the followers, transfigured. Gonen brilliantly paints the process: the ideology in Hitler’s offer of deliverance and the acceptance by Nazis of his offer of a new world, which was a return to the Eden of individuals’ infancy and of the mythical Germany of the ancient, sacred past. It was to be a world in which their desires would be gratified, in which the nation’s afflictions would be made to disappear, and in which prostrate Germany would rise to destroy her enemies and rule the world. As such movements do, Hitler’s embraced scapegoating, became genocidal.

Explaining the process requires blending individual and group psychology, and that is where Gonen excels, enriching his analysis with Freudian insights. He provides a masterful picture of the mythical and mystical in Hitler’s ideology. In my judgment, The Roots of Nazi Psychology is by far the best book on the irrational, regressive, magical thinking by which Nazis overcame self-hatred and despair and set aside individual and social restraints, moving toward genocide and apocalyptic war. For example, the sense of justice which carried Nazis along — obviously grotesque, yet typical of messianic movements — was essentially restorative and retributive. That which has been stolen from us must be restored; that which has been inflicted on us must be undone; the pollution we have suffered must be cleansed; and the perpetrators must be made to pay. The restoration, undoing, purification, and punishment were seen as absolutely necessary, constituting primordial justice, which by regressive thinking is the highest justice. I would add that on this basis, Nazis’ stealing, beating, and mutilating (notably by involuntary sterilization) of innocent people were justified not only by the perpetrators but also by German courts. These courts became agents of primordial justice and exempted Nazis from punishment.

Gonen follows Erikson and Binion in explaining the most destructive messianic movements as a match between the leader’s pathology and the people’s, resulting in mutual reinforcement. When that happens, the leader and the people tend to repeat earlier traumas, with resultant catastrophe. Germany’s recent trauma — the destructive terms imposed at Versailles, ruining her economy and fostering widespread despair — was analogous to Hitler’s childhood trauma. The match facilitated acceptance of Hitler’s delusion that Germany was being destroyed by disguised Jews, who were directing the nations oppressing Germany, and other disguised Jews in the German government, cooperating with them in the destruction. To many — especially those who were paranoid or phobic and felt most vulnerable — Hitler’s promise of power and immortality provided their only hope. In Gonen’s words, “the fate of the folk and its blood is linked.… Either both decline … or surge together toward glorious omnipotence for all eternity….”

In exploring Hitler’s messianism, Gonen often links Nazi ideology with Jewish ideology. This may trouble some readers, but is crucial in understanding Nazi anti-Semitism and apocalyptic thinking. For in both ideologies he finds “An eternal historical cycle of sin, punishment, repentance, forgiveness” to be broken by the advent of a mes-

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siah and an apocalyptic war. While identifying Jews as their principal enemy, Nazis took on quasi-Jewish identity, claiming to be “the chosen people” (as do United States Nazis today). In particular, Hitler perceived Jews as Germany’s conscience and — paradoxically — as the hated personifications of German evil. In getting rid of Jews, Nazis sought to free themselves of conscience and evil — to elevate themselves to a state above good and evil in becoming supermen — a Nietzschean ideal — by replacing ethics, morality, custom, and law with pseudobiology.

(Linking Nazi and Jewish ideologies is also useful in going beyond particulars of the Third Reich to messianic and apocalyptic movements across the world — a project beyond Gonen’s book. Japan — the other main contributor to apocalyptic war in the 20th century — was similar to Germany in having a strong cult of death, in its obsession with being victimized and polluted, and in trying to cleanse its own nation as well as to save the world. Both nations were ridden with self-hatred — the source of messianism — and in their rampages killed their own people as well as outsiders. Their ally Italy seems to have lacked self-hatred and a cult of death, to have engaged in relatively little scapegoating except when under Nazi domination, and to have had little enthusiasm for apocalyptic war.)

Charismatic leaders, especially destructive ones, have wielded a power since ancient times which is undiminished in our scientific era. (It is probably enhanced by the modern media.) Hitler was one who included a sexual-procreative message. Rape was a feature of his breeding program. Women were confined in Lebensborn (Spring of Life) centers, guarded by SS men, to engage in sex with other SS men. Insofar as they were confined and required to submit by the authority of the state, they were coerced — raped. He offered his select male followers (especially the SS) unlimited access to desirable women (notably blonde, virginal adolescents) — giving permission to rape them without punishment — and the glory thereby of becoming the progenitors of a race of supermen. He offered women the glory of bringing forth the supermen by submitting impersonally to these lords, even to the extent of rape, but with sanctification instead of degradation. Since ancient times, rape has mystically ennobled and enhanced the power of the perpetrators and — in special circumstances — of the victims, too. In Nazi Germany, they became symbolic brides of their savior, Hitler, and sacred mothers of the supermen.

Gonen’s analysis of the powerful “blood and soil” theme in the ideology of Nazism and of its precursor, the Volkish movement, is original. Nazis perceived “Aryan” Germans as growing weak when separated from their own magic soil. Consequently they believed “Aryans” needed for their survival to return to their soil, and to regain soil that had been “stolen” from them — land in the east. This obscure and obviously regressive element in Nazi thinking contributed to the Lebensraum movement. Gonen’s analysis of Lebensraum thinking is most impressive. It includes elements of birth strangulation and its remedy, a bursting-birthing expansion in the east. Hitler said, “There comes a time when this desire for expansion can no longer be contained and must burst into action.” His words also suggest violent sexual action as a remedy to confinement, as if territorial limitation were related to sexual restraint. (Hitler was sexually severely inhibited, impotent, and inactive most of his life, but also obsessed with sex. His breeding program seems a transparent vicarious expression of his desires.)

Vampirism figured predominantly in Nazi ideology about Jews — their alter egos and scapegoats. Jews, they said, sucked the blood of peoples they victimized — metaphorically and literally. In sucking blood and in sexual contact with “Aryan” women, Jews also polluted them, turning the victims and their progeny into permanently evil creatures — semi-Jews, the equivalent of vampires — who must also be eradicated.

That Hitler claimed Jews were parasitic vampires, taking the blood of their hosts, is long known. But, as far as I know, Gonen is the first to identify vampirism in Nazi ideas about “Aryans.” Nazis acted metaphorically as vampires by taking the “Aryan blood” of peoples they conquered — notably Norwegians and Poles. They kidnapped blond children to raise them as Germans, thereby absorbing into the Reich their “blood” — their genetic substance. Similarly, they kidnapped blonde Norwegian and Polish women to serve as breeders, thereby obtaining their “blood” for Germany.

Insofar as these programs linked “Aryans” with Jews in Nazi thinking, and insofar as vampire myths were powerful in central and eastern Europe, a study of vampirism and its role in the Third Reich would seem valuable. The myths include an erotic theme of death and rebirth. The male vampire seduces or rapes women, and the result is a biological exchange by which his es-

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sence enters their bodies, turning them into vampires. By this kiss of death, perpetrators and victims gain eternal life. The exchange suggests a connection between blood and semen — a connection which ran through the sexual obsessions of Hitler and Julius Streicher, who was his main propagandist, along with Goebbels. Streicher wrote over and over in his Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer about how Jewish semen enters a woman’s blood, changing her and her progeny into monsters. The same theme was the basis of a Volkish novel, The Sin Against the Blood, which was a best-seller in Germany and particularly impressed Nazis.

A dominant idea in Nazi portrayal of Jews’ role was, in Gonen’s words, that “an ideal state of health (utopia), which prevailed once upon a time, has been lost because of a lethal intruder.” The intruder was the Jew who, with his unbridled sexual cravings, seduced and raped “Aryan” girls and women, bringing disease to Germany. This historical notion involved two regressive fantasies: one, of the phallic, semen-carrying serpent tempting the primordial mother, ruining the Garden of Eden; the other, of individuals’ fathers intruding into the blissful intimacy of children with their mothers, ruining their infantile paradise. In Nazis’ version of history, by his intrusion, the Jew-serpent-father brought enfeebling afflictions — both mental (national impotence, shame, and guilt) and physical (notably syphilis, but also other plagues). I would add that Hitler suffered with a delusion of having inherited syphilis from his father, whom he thought to be secretly Jewish. The father had a reputation for unbridled sexuality, for seducing young women and adolescents. Hitler believed that his imaginary syphilis ruined him forever, preventing him from having normal sexual relations or fathering normal children. He turned his delusion into an explanation for all that was wrong with Germany. In the nation’s desperate situation, his delusion caught on, not because it had any connection with syphilis or other afflictions, but because many German males shared Hitler’s experience of being harmed by a harsh father. For some of them, a bearded Jew was a symbol of severe paternal authority, because the Biblical story of the fall from grace was part of their heritage.

Hitler insisted his anti-Semitism and the rest of his worldview were based not on emotion or personal experience, but on the more solid ground of scientific observation. The authority on whom he and other Nazis relied most was Darwin. They fastened on a crude distortion of natural selection theory, using it as a basis for racial policy. Since racial policy dominated other Nazi policy, their version of Darwinism became the basis for science in general, philosophy, education, domestic affairs, foreign affairs, and war. Policy, knowledge, art, and state institutions were to be organized around one goal — advancing ruthlessly the natural selection of the best people, the pure “Aryans.” For example, art that ennobled “Aryans” was to be fostered; other art was degenerate, to be eliminated. The same standard applied to medicine, with physicians giving up healing to aid “natural selection” as instruments of genocide. This biologization of knowledge, and its application, was to provide a sure foundation for a state which Hitler promised would endure for a thousand years if not forever. Under its pseudoscientific veneer, the racial policy meant that the chosen people were to get what they desired, while the rest were either to serve them or be eliminated.

This sketch only suggests the richness of Gonen’s tapestry. I have highlighted and extended some obscure parts of The Roots of Nazi Psychology. The book also explores lodes that have already been mined by many scholars — notably anti-Semitism and Darwinism along with blood-and-soil myths and Lebensraum. When analyzing familiar as well as obscure aspects of Nazism, the book is highly original and deeply psychological. Because of its complexity, subtlety, and psychological depth, his book is somewhat difficult to read — certainly by the general reader. The interested scholar for whom it is intended — especially the psychohistorian — will find in it a wealth of seminal ideas, hopefully stimulating new research.

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