Nazism as a Collective Fantasy

One might say that the Nazis lived within a paranoid fantasy, or were deluded. Alternatively, one could argue that Nazi ideas and actions represented a form of “enemy creation”—an extreme case of politics as usual.

However one characterizes Nazism, the important task is to understand the meaning—for Hitler, and for the people who embraced it—of the source ideology that led to monumental suffering, death and destruction. I view Nazism from the perspective of a fantasy that was conveyed and promoted by Hitler, and that came to be espoused by many Germans.
Lee Harris writes (2002):

What happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group — a sect, or a people, or even a nation? There is no doubt that for most of history such large-scale collective fantasies appear on the world stage under the guise of religion. With the French Revolution there would be eruptions of a new kind of collective fantasy in which political ideology replaced religious mythology. In this way it provided a new, and quite dangerous, outlet for the fantasy needs of large groups of men and women — a full-fledged fantasy ideology.

Nazi ideology was a collective fantasy. What were the nature, structure and shape of those fantasies that—projected into the world—came to define Nazi ideology?

What was the meaning of Hitler’s ideology—for Hitler himself, other Nazis and the German people? How are we to account for the appeal of Hitler’s ideas?

Robert Pois (1986) says that Hitler was the most popular political leader of the 20th century. Why were the Germans so excited when Hitler spoke? What did he say that caused people to rise to their feet and scream, “Heil Hitler”?

Extermination as the Fulfillment of Hitler’s Dream

People evoke “anti-Semitism” as if this is an explanation. However, as Hannah Arendt remarked, “Anti-Semitism explains everything and therefore nothing.” The question is: Why were anti-Semitic ideas so profoundly meaningful to Hitler and for many other Germans? What role did “the Jew” play within the discourse of nationalism that Hitler promoted? What did the Jew symbolize within Hitler’s psychic economy?

In Hitler’s Ideology (1975) and Nations Have the Right to Kill (2009), I show how Hitler’s ideas were enacted in genocide and warfare. In this essay, I turn to an analysis of the “endgame”: Hitler’s thoughts as the Second World War began to wind down. The passages on the right are taken from The Political Testament of Adolf Hitler, recorded by Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann during the period of February-April 1945. This document crystalizes many elements of Hitler’s thought. Did Hitler change his mind about anything at the end—when it was clear that the war was lost? Apparently not.

Passage #1 may be read as a summation of Hitler’s “life work.” He states that National Socialism had tackled the Jewish problem “by action and not by words.” From the start of his career, Hitler promised that he would be a different kind of politician. While ordinary politicians, as Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, “tinkered around on the national body,” he would work to attain the “ultimate clarity with regard to the nature of the disease,” and then “seriously try to cure it.”

The Final Solution represented the fulfillment of Hitler’s dream. National Socialism had risen “in opposition to the Jewish determination to dominate the world,” had attacked Jews “everywhere in every sphere of activity,” had “flung them out of the positions they had usurped” and had “pursued them in every direction.”

The objective of Hitler’s fantastic, fanatic project was to “purge the German world of the Jewish poison.” This was, essentially, a process of “disinfection,” which the Nazis “prosecuted to its ultimate limit.” Had the Nazis not undertaken this project, Germans would have been “asphyxiated and destroyed.”

Either Germany will destroy the Jews, or the Jews will destroy Germany

The Final Solution was not a carefully considered project of ethnic cleansing. Rather, in Hitler’s mind, he was engaged in an existential struggle of “life against death.” Early in his career, Hitler said: “Either this racial poison, the mass tuberculosis, grows in our people, and Germany dies of an infected lung, or it is eliminated, and Germany can then thrive.” Hitler maintained this “either-or” position to the end: Either Jews would be destroyed, and Germany would survive; or the Jew would triumph, and Germany would be destroyed.

According to Hitler’s fantasy, Germany could survive only if every single Jew in the world was destroyed. We imagine that Hitler strove to “conquer the world.” Yet in 40 years of studying Hitler’s writings and speeches, I have never come across “conquer” or “conquest”. In Hitler’s imagination, Germany was the weak, oppressed party—with Jews the omnipotent oppressor.

Repeatedly, Hitler speaks of the Second World War as a “life and death struggle.” He states that the German people were faced with a “struggle for their existence or their annihilation.” The question was whether Germany had the “will to remain in existence,” or would be destroyed. Yet even if Germany were defeated, the Second World War, Hitler claimed, would go down in history as the “most glorious and heroic manifestation of the struggle for existence of a nation.”

What one sees or perceives does not necessarily convey reality (the sun does not revolve around the earth). Whatever the Second World War looks like to the outside observer, this is not what it felt like in Hitler’s mind. He was possessed by a paranoid fantasy: Jews sought to dominate the world, to destroy Germany and Western civilization. This fantasy was the source of the reality that Hitler brought into being.

“Diseased Bacilli have their Breeding Ground in Russia”

Passage #2 reveals—again—the dialectic between paranoia on the one hand, and aggression on the other. Hitler states that with the “success of the operation in Germany,” there was a good chance of “extending it further afield.” Hitler appears to be saying that—having rid Germany of its Jews—he now sought to expand his accomplishment by seeking out and killing Jews in Poland and Eastern Europe. This extension of the killing was inevitable because “good health normally triumphs over disease.”

In Hitler’s Ideology, I found that Hitler’s fantasy revolved around the idea of Germany as an organism, and the Jew as a virus or bacillus that was the source of the nation’s disease. Robert J. Lifton’s book, The Nazi Doctors (1986) extended this hypothesis, providing evidence that the fantasy driving Hitler’s thinking drove that of other Nazis as well.

Lifton spent several years interviewing 29 men who had been significantly involved at high levels with Nazi medicine, reconstructing the deep-structure of Nazi ideology. The central fantasy he uncovered was that of the German nation as an organism that could succumb to an illness.

Lifton cites Dr. Johann S., who spoke about being “doctor to the Volkskorper” (“national body” or “people’s body”). National Socialism, Dr. Johann S. said, was a movement rather than a party, constantly growing and changing according to the “health” requirements of the people’s body. “Just as a body may succumb to illness,” the doctor declared, so “the Volkskorper could do the same.”

When Lifton asked another doctor, Fritz Klein, how he could reconcile the concentration camps with his Hippocratic Oath to save lives, he replied, “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”

Lifton mentioned this phrase “gangrenous appendix” to another Nazi, Dr. B., who quickly answered that his overall feeling—and that of other Nazi doctors—was that “whether you want to call it an appendix or not, it must be extirpated” (ausgerottet, meaning also “exterminated”, “destroyed”, or “eradicated”).”

Perhaps Hitler waged war against the Soviet Union for the same reason that he authorized the killing of mental patients and initiated the Final Solution. In the name of the German people’s “health,” he sought to destroy “inferior races” that were the carriers of disease. He sought to prevent the inundation of “disease bacilli which at the moment have their breeding ground in Russia” (see Hilgruber, 1981).

Hitler as Robert Koch: Genocide as Immunology

On the evening of July 10, 1941 (several weeks after Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, which occurred on June 22), Hitler declared at his table (see Hitler’s Table Talks: 1941-1944):

I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the fermenting agent of all social decomposition.

On February 22, 1942, the following statement was recorded:

This is one of the greatest revolutions there has ever been in the world. The Jew will be identified! The same fight that Pasteur and Koch had to fight must be led by us today. Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one bacillus: the Jew! We will get well when we eliminate the Jew.

So there it is: Hitler conceived of warfare within the framework of medicine (see my online publication “Genocide as Immunology”): as a researcher or doctor who had discovered the source of Germany’s suffering—the “Jewish bacillus”—and who was determined to destroy it.

Operation Barbarossa, Andre Mineau says (2012), was the ultimate fulfillment of the Nazi ideology of health, a “large-scale and multifaceted sanitary operation in the sick and evil world of Untermenschen.” Barbarossa was the Nazis’ attempt at “eliminating threats and sources of disease, the most lethal one being Jewry.” Confronted with the pervasiveness of biological evil, Nazism was the “politics of hypochondria.”

Curing the Disease: “The World will be Eternally Grateful”

Returning to Passage #2: Hitler states that he sought to destroy the Jewish bacillus in the name of “good health”—which normally triumphs over disease. However, when the Jews realized what he was up to (“realized the danger”), they decided to “stake their all in the life and death struggle which they launched against us.” When the Jews understood he aspired to kill them (in the name of good health), they then began the Second World War: the Jews were determined to destroy National Socialism “whatever the cost and even if the whole world were destroyed in the process.”

We’ve noted that early in his career Hitler insisted that it was insufficient for politicians to “doctor around on the circumference of the distress” without acting to “lance the cancerous ulcer.” On February 4, 1945, when it was clear that Germany had lost the war, Hitler declared (see Passage #3) that National Socialism had “lanced the Jewish abscess,” and that the world of the future would be “eternally grateful to us.”

Hitler remained “true to himself” from the beginning of his political career to its conclusion. His main objective—the basis of everything he did—was to cure the disease from which he believed his nation was suffering so that “Germany would live.” The cause of Germany’s disease, according to Hitler, was the Jewish bacteria or virus or cancer or parasite.

Reading Passage #3, it feels again that we are in the domain of psychosis, a step beyond delusion or paranoid fantasy: Hitler’s belief that the world would be “eternally grateful” for the Nazis’ operation of mass murder; and his conception of the killing of millions of people as “lancing an abscess.”

Even in the face of this evidence—the truth—one has a tendency to declare, “I don’t believe it.” Well, it’s hard to believe that there are billions of galaxies in the universe, each with billions of stars.

Delusion

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, 2000, cited in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”) defines a delusion as a False belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.

Delusions are beliefs “held with great conviction in spite of little empirical support.” A delusion is a “false belief based on incorrect inferences about external reality that is firmly sustained.” A person is deluded when he hold a particular belief with a “degree of firmness utterly unwarranted by the evidence at hand.”

We have observed that Hitler and the Nazis embraced a delusion about the Jews and Jewish power. They believed that Jews were acting to destroy the German people and the civilized world; they asserted that Jews were equivalent to bacteria or viruses; they claimed that “international Jewry” stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, working to unite these leaders and their nations in a conspiracy to cause Germany to disintegrate.

The term “delusion” usually refers to a clinical syndrome associated with paranoid schizophrenia. How, then, are we to characterize a delusion that is widespread within a society? What can we say about delusions that are embraced by large numbers of people within a culture?

Collective Delusion

Although Nazi leaders such as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were deluded regarding to their beliefs about Jews, they were not psychotic. Indeed, according to the conventional psychiatric definition, these men could not be considered psychotic. In response to my essay on “Social Madness/Collective Delusion,” a newsletter subscriber commented that ‘Madness’ understood as mental illness — a psychotic break from reality — does not apply in situations where a substantial portion of individuals from a given group share their beliefs, no matter how irrational or fantastic or bizarre those beliefs may seem. A common belief within a group becomes a norm, and as such, the act of believing is not abnormal. Therefore the postulate that Nazis were ‘mad’ or ‘insane’ does not apply.

In spite of this psychiatric definition, we can’t help but feel that — however “normative” their cultural beliefs or behavior — the Nazis’ ideas and actions were “mad.” Somehow, gassing people en masse, incinerating them in ovens (“the Jew goes out the chimney”), endlessly torturing and brutalizing Jews (before killing them) does not seem normal.

Yet we hesitate to apply the term abnormality to actions performed within the framework of politics and history. If the Nazis’ beliefs and behavior were mad or insane, how are we to characterize the twentieth century itself and the numerous episodes of revolution, war and genocide that resulted in the deaths of over 200 million people? On the one hand, one might say that if certain forms of behavior occur with great frequency in history — however bizarre, weird or destructive they may be — they are normal simply because they have occurred so frequently.

Or we can consider the possibility that psychopathology is contained within the political or historical process. Perhaps “madness” is a central characteristic or quality of this domain. Yet we hesitate to say that political history is a place of madness or psychopathology.

The Politics of the Slaughterhouse

Our difficulty in using the term psychopathology is related to our belief or fantasy that the behavior of political leaders is governed by “rationality.” In Terror and Liberalism (2004), Paul Berman discusses not only suicide bombers, but also Nazis and the history of the twentieth century. He points to our reluctance to say that political behaviors are irrational and manifest severe psychopathology.

Writing in a satirical tone:

It is very odd to think that millions or tens of millions of people, relying on their own best judgments, might end up joining a pathological political movement. Individual madmen might step forward – yes, that is unquestionable. The Reverend Jim Jones might lead the demented residents of his pathetic Jonestown in Guyana to their collective suicide.

But, surely, millions of people are not going to choose death, and the Jonestowns of this world are not going to take over entire societies. Is the world truly a place where mass movements bedeck themselves in shrouds and march to the cemetery? The very idea of a pathological mass movement seems too far-fetched to be believable.

I have frequently written about the destructive, suicidal quality of political behavior, for example, in my online essays “The Goal of War is Death,” “Mass-Murder by Government,” and “Civilization and Self-Destruction.” I have hesitated to use terms like pathology or psychopathology — because they are not useful from an analytic perspective.

Still, there is value to the term pathology — lest we begin to conceive of episodes of mass murder as normal simply because they occur frequently. Berman writes again satirically:

Is the world truly a place where mass movements bedeck themselves in shrouds and march to the cemetery? This seems unthinkable. And, all over the world, the temptation becomes great, irresistible, to conclude that, no, the world remains a rational place, and pathological movements do not exist.

Finally, Berman concludes that, yes, “from time to time, mass political movements get drunk on the idea of slaughter.”

The evidence of the twentieth century suggests that Berman is correct: Societies frequently get “drunk with slaughter.” Indeed, why should he — we — hesitate to draw this conclusion? Simply because we would prefer not to acknowledge or look closely at this reality: the political history of the twentieth century as the politics of the slaughterhouse.

Normality as Pathology

In THE ‘EVIL’ MIND: Pt. 1: GENOCIDE AND MASS KILLINGS, Johan M.G. van der Dennen says:

We may imagine that so-called normal people could never believe in anything as ludicrous as the delusional systems of the insane. Yet, historical evidence suggests the opposite. Whole societies have been persuaded without much difficulty to accept the most absurd calumnies about minority groups (e.g., witches, heretics, Jews, ‘enemies of the people’) portrayed as enemies of the majority. Such accusations originate from a particular type of fantasy which is comparable with, indeed equivalent to, paranoid delusions of the kind found in psychotic subjects.

How may one characterize beliefs or delusions that seem fantastic and generate destructive acts of extraordinary magnitude — but that are embraced by many people within a given society? When an entire culture embraces a massively destructive ideology that seems bizarre, one can’t call the people who embrace this ideology psychotic. On the other hand, certain ideas embraced and actions performed by cultural groups do possess a psychotic quality.

We aren’t used to saying that ordinary forms of political behavior are pathological. Psychiatric institutions are ready, willing and able to classify the behavior of individuals as disordered, yet hesitate to identify collective forms of behavior as manifestations of psychological disorders — even though the cost of these episodes of political destruction and self-destruction have probably been greater than the costs of individual disorders.

By gentleman’s agreement, we decide that only individuals can suffer from psychopathology — not entire societies. We have created a sphere of reality — the domain of international relations — where human beings are released from the rules and laws that govern behavior outside. In this privileged place, strange and crazy things occur, but we agree not to call these forms of behavior strange or crazy — much less to characterize them as psychopathology.

International politics and “history” constitute domains where the massive acting out of fantasies occurs. Humans collectively release their despair, anger, violence and self-destructiveness here — knowing that behavior in this realm will not be labeled pathological. The political sphere allows the enactment of psychopathology — while simultaneously denying psychopathology. How can things that occur so frequently be pathological?

Many people deeply identify with the political world in which “nations” play a leading role. We don’t want to abandon our identification with this world (it is the place where “immortality” occurs). If we were to acknowledge that this domain is the site of profound, destructive pathology, we might be tempted to abandon our identification… We simply prefer not to do so.

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

Why do the photos, video, and tweets out of Kiev have such mythic power? Why do demonstrations, and barricades, and people shot down, young and old, men and women alike, wring such enduring emotion (like Les Miserables)? Why do citizen risings in big, capital cities have such a hold on us?

For a start, citizen-risings in cities are not war. Even when there is lots of fighting, it is never a fair fight, and we are rooting for the underdog, where the force against them is always unfairly superior, professional, and heavily armed. Plus a group of poorly armed citizens are unlike an army in almost every way. But especially this way — Together, they are the whole community: Men, women, and children fighting together. Their backs are against the family hearth itself. Nothing could be more existential, or more motivating.

Hence their entire defense is an improvisation that seeks survival in destroying the very appearance of what they fight for, as they willingly demolish their homes (cutting passages and loopholes in their townhouse rows), their streets (ripping pavers and dragging their own vehicles into barricades), their centers of civic life — thus their very way of life — to resist the invader. Yet the material things of life mean nothing now compared to the preciousness of community and identity.

Because their defense is always existential — victory or death, freedom or slavery — and their enemy is always implacable and sure to win: If only they can kill enough.

Yet the mission of the citizen rising, though existential, is never hopeless, because the citizens know they can win through martyrdom.

The operational goal of the barricades is to successfully repel the armed might of the state — but the strategic goal is to overturn (or at least compromise) the very legitimacy of the state by forcing it to kill large numbers of its own citizens. This is why putting down a citizen rising is so risky for a state regime.

It is risky on two levels. On one level, soldiers will try to break down barricaded positions by killing civilians, reasoning that bravado — and thus resistance — will melt away as people see friends and family killed in front of them.

But this is the secret of community martyrdom: It cements social bonds stronger than any glue. In Kiev we have seen acts of heroism and sheer courage that convention typically associates only with soldiers in battle. Like the woman who tweeted after being shot in the neck, we have felt heartrending moments of pathos.

Truth is, a citizen rising that survives its first casualties (or atrocities) becomes potentially as strong as any army in any prepared, defensive position. Its barricades then suddenly are splendid field fortifications, the righteously occupied city blocks and squares like immoveable castles of concrete, rubble, and rubber.

So now the state’s arm of enforcement had better be an army, because they now face an army in a fortified place, ready to fight to the death.

But remember, these are still citizens of the republic, and the army of the republic cannot escape its sworn oath to defend them. And because the assembled and resistant are men and women and children together, killing them is like killing your own community: Your own family.

Moreover, a state that would wantonly kill its own people is not simply guilty of crimes against humanity: It is guilty (at least incipiently) of attempting to kill itself.

The state regime that will crush a citizen rising will also die if 1-If the injustice of state against citizen is real and deep, 2-If violence against protesting citizens was initiated by the state, and 3-If initial waves of citizen-martyrdom begin to psychically strip the state regime of its legitimacy.

Loss of legitimacy can be tracked through 1-How a “big push” to take the barricades fails extravagantly (and is covered extravagantly), 2-The rising spreads to other cities, 3-Police (or whole units) begin to join the resistance, 4-Regime elements (most especially the leader) leave the city, 5-International condemnation and regime sensitivity to it.

But for every glorious Tahrir Square moment — where world-dappled crowds toppled a Pharaoh — there is the counterpoint of the Paris Commune, where as many as 20,000 were slain [of 1.75 million Parisians, just to give a sense of scale]. For every hero city like Sarajevo, under sniper fire for nearly four years [15,000 dead out of 525,000, far worse than Paris], finally to be freed, there is Homs and Hama and Aleppo and Damascus, whose dead will be mourned, yet not reckoned, until another time.

These examples, tragically, tell us not simply how regimes can die in the face of citizen rising, but also how they can survive and even triumph — through the worst means available to humanity. Here we must face the political utility of mass atrocity.

Mass atrocity is the only way out of the legitimacy dilemma posed by a citizen rising, fortified, in the capital city. Consider: If the state here appears to do nothing, it begins to go down. If the state accommodates, it begins to go down. If the state kills many resistant citizens, the martyrdom effect begins to take it down. If the state assaults the barricades and fails, it begins to go down.

The only alternative is to crush the insurrection. From the state standpoint, this achieves prompt good effects: 1-Citizen leadership is wiped out, 2-The main fighters are all dead, meaning that 3-All the others are left stunned and numbed into submission. Spirit broken: Goal achieved.

The last effect is the worst: 4 — The destruction of martyrdom itself. Remember that in citizen risings, it is the initial spasm of sacrifice that is politically the most powerful. Continuing mass sacrifice can also keep strengthening the cause — like the endless siege eventually forcing NATO’s hand — but citizen resistance must preserve its operational effectiveness — to show that resistance cannot be crushed.

Hence the mission of mass atrocity is to tell the citizen rising that the state no longer cares — that they are no longer considered citizens or even human. The state will kill all who resist. Effectively the state has now created an alternative basis for legitimacy, disconnected from the political compact, now forever broken, of people-to-state. Having lost the original source of its power — its own people — then that state creates a new power in its inalienable right to kill. If the state can survive its own, elective choice for mass killing, acquiescence by its people (and the international community) becomes in itself a new source of legitimacy: “Your precious martyrdom has no meaning anymore.”

Hence, a brutal-minded state regime will focus on a quick decision, like the French Republic’s slaughter of the Paris Commune in 1871. But the French people said go for it, so a new republican political compact was preserved — in a way.

A more troubling example is the Assad regime. Its initial force majeure failed, and a broad-based citizen resistance rose up in major cities. Yet powerful allies like Hezbollah, Russia, and Iran, have kept the regime alive through better, if ruthlessly inflicted, force majeure. But it is the ironical and timorous strategic reversal of the international community — calling for Assad’s ouster, and then actually working with the regime after its chemical weapons’ use — that has served to actually legitimate it.

So we — meaning, the United States above all — have anointed the strategic effectiveness of mass atrocity [in a place, Syria, where we could care less], just as we celebrate from our couches the still-abiding power of urban resistance and martyrdom [in a place, Kiev, we pretend to love].

Based on Jeffrey Herf’s research, it is reasonable to conclude that the Nazis’ beliefs about the Jews—and actions that were generated based on their beliefs—grew out of a paranoid fantasy. Hitler put forth and promoted an idea about the Jews’ character—and the power and danger that they represented—that was, fundamentally, a delusion.

“The Jews” were not an organized group, had no power and constituted no threat to Germany or the German people. This is usually the starting point for my own research (see, for example, Koenigsberg, 2009). I begin with the assumption that Hitler and the Nazis were in the grip of an ideological fantasy or delusion, and then pose the question: “What was the symbolic significance of the Jew within Hitler’s mind and Nazi ideology?” Why did the word or idea “the Jew” evoke such anxiety and rage?

I’ve begun to understand, however, that a “prolegomenon” is necessary before I pose and attempt to answer this question. Many people assume that there must have been something that the Jews did—or were—that evoked such a radical response. It is difficult to imagine or conceive that such monumentally destructive actions proceeded based on nothing, or that they grew out of a fantasy.

People in Western culture are under the spell of another fantasy or delusion, namely the belief that human ideas and actions grow out of rational thought or decision-making. I often ask people (who are not experts on the Nazi period) to guess how many Jews there were in Germany in 1930 out of a German population of approximately 66 million. You—the reader—might like to guess now, before the next paragraph.

I posed this question recently to a highly intelligent, sophisticated graduate student in psychology. She estimated that there were 30 million Jews in Germany in 1930. A prominent anthropologist guessed 20 million. Even when I remind people that most of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were not Germans, I get guesses like 5 and 10 million.

According to Herf, the 1925 census identified 565,379 Jews in Germany, less than 1% of the population. Ingo Muller (1992) reports that 0.76% of Germans were Jews in 1930, substantially less than 1% of the population.

Another charge made by the Nazis was that the German government had been “riddled” with Jews. However, according to Milton Meltzer (1991), in the 19 cabinets of the Weimar Republic up to 1932, of a total of 237 ministers, only three had been Jews, while four or more were described as “of Jewish descent.” The final few governments preceding Hitler’s had no Jewish ministers.

Herf reports that in the central forum of political representation, the Reichstag, Jews were significantly underrepresented. Of the 577 members of parliament elected on September 14, 1930, 17 were of Jewish origin, and of the 608 members elected on July 31, 1932, 14 were. Herf says that the “notion of vast Jewish power had no factual basis,” and Meltzer concludes that the truth was “the opposite of what Hitler said it was.” Rather than an all-powerful threat, the Jews were the “weakest enemy Hitler could have chosen.” They had “no land of their own, no government, no central authority, no allies, no political weight.”

Despite  these facts, we hesitate to draw the conclusion: that Hitler and the Nazis waged war for no reason at all, that is, on the basis of a paranoid fantasy. Why is it difficult to embrace this truth? Because we are under the dominion of the Enlightenment fantasy of rationality—which continues to dominate the academic world. Even 100 years after Freud, we don’t wish to acknowledge that human beings are driven by irrational, unconscious motives.

One may say that the beliefs and actions of Hitler and the Nazis were irrational; that many Germans were under the spell of a paranoid fantasy. Taking this a step further, Daniel Goldhagen (1996) suggests that the Nazis were in the grip of a “hallucinatory ideology,” and that their writings about Jews were so divorced from reality that anyone reading them might conclude that they were the product of the “collective scribes of an insane asylum.”

Looking at what the Nazis believed—as well as the extraordinarily destructive, horrific things they actually did, it is not difficult to conclude that the Nazis were mad. However, we find it disturbing to say this. In his essay on Nazism (2000), Ronald Aronson reflects upon our hesitance:

The rigorous use of ‘madness’ is deeply disturbing, which is perhaps one reason why it has been so conspicuously avoided in a century rife with madness. The functionalist bias of most systematic thought assumes that there is a reason for every societal act, a more or less rational intention behind political action. It offends the intellect to suggest that there is no reason behind a major policy — or that indeed its reason is profoundly & systematically irrational. ‘Madness’ is even more unsettling in suggesting that we may be living amidst a profound and destructive irrationality.

Terms like mad, or insane, typically are used to characterize individuals. But what are we to say about madness when it takes hold of an entire society? How are we to conceptualize madness that becomes normative within a particular culture?

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com