In “The Cult Leader as Agent of a Psychotic Fantasy of Masochistic Group Death,” Stewart Twemlow and George Hough examine the case of Jim Jones and his followers of the Peoples Temple. On November 18, 1978, in Guyana, approximately 900 men, women and children perished after drinking from a metal vat of grape Kool-Aid mixed with poison.

The authors analyze the transcript (based on a tape recording) of the very last “White Knight” sermons delivered by Jones to his followers. As external threats against Jonestown mounted, Jones increased his demands, ultimately insisting that his followers be prepared to die for him as the “ultimate expression of their loyalty.”

As Jones expounds on why he embraces death—and why other members of the group should do so—the crowd becomes “audibly more enthusiastic.” Later in his sermon, as Jones reiterates that it is time to die, members of the community are “cheering exuberantly at the idea.” From this point forward, there will emerge numerous spontaneous exhortations by audience members—for the community to embrace its death.

In the midst of the numerous calls for their communal death, a lone female audience member raised objections. However, there were no other objections. Appeals for communal death and farewell testimonials increased exponentially. One loyal member spoke to Jones in tears: “We’re all ready to go. If you tell us we have to give our lives now, we’re ready. All the rest of the sisters and brothers are with me.”

On February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels spoke before 15,000 people at the Sportpalast. The German sixth army had just suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, and the seriousness of the war began to come home to the German people. Goebbels exhorted his flock to commit to the war effort. Please view an excerpt of the speech here.

After pointing to “rows of wounded soldiers” sitting in the front, Goebbels posed a series of questions. The audience, Goebbels said, represented the whole nation, and their answers would be “answers for the German people throughout the world, and especially for our enemies who are listening to us on the radio.”

Goebbels asked: “Are you ready to follow the Fueher and to wage war with wild determination through all the turns of fate”? And: “Is your confidence in the Fuehrer greater, more unshakable than ever before”? And: “Are you absolutely and completely ready to follow him wherever he goes and do all that is necessary”? An ear-splitting Ja! (yes) was the reply to each question. Stormy applause increased in intensity with each of Goebbel’s questions.

At the climax of his speech, Goebbels screamed: “Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, more total and more radical than we could ever imagine today”? Pandemonium broke out in the Sportpalast. “Now, Volk,” Goebbels raved, “arise and storm, break loose.” Shouts of “Heil” flowed through the hall, thousands of voices joining in as if one man. “Fuehrer command, we follow.”

“The tide had irrevocably shifted against the German war effort in the fall of 1942. The German military was perfectly aware of this situation. General Alfred Jodl: ‘When the catastrophe of winter 1941-42 broke, it became clear especially to the Fueher that victory could no longer be achieved.’

The machinery of destruction and annihilation went into high gear at the very moment the war was lost. The Wehrmacht fought for three years and the nation was mobilized in a total war effort notwithstanding the leadership’s knowledge that this war effort would not make a difference in the eventual outcome.

Death was talked up as the only way for soldiers to redeem themselves. In the cruel metaphysics of the Third Reich, the only way to be a man was to be dead. Goebbels and Hitler deliberately prepared for death—their own and that of the nation—on the funeral pyre made of the ruins of their imperial dreams.”

Michael Geyer in Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany

In their study of Jonestown, Twemlow and Hough state that a charismatic leader can “inspire his followers to actualize a psychotic and co-created fantasy of masochistic group death.” Group members may “heroically choose to die rather than to become crushed by enemy forces closing in.” The leader is like a pied piper who “leads the community of the faithful” precisely where they have “unconsciously directed him to lead them.” Joseph Goebbels was the pied piper of Nazi Germany, leading his people into the valley of death.

In subsequent speeches and published documents, Goebbels continued to exhort the German people to die. In another speech at the Sportpalast on June 5, 1943, he explains that “the laws of war are harsh. Millions of German soldiers today have to be ready to die on the battlefield for their people.” As the war on the Eastern Front progressed, he was satisfied to note that German soldiers “go into battle with devotion, like congregations going into service.”

In his pamphlet of September 26, 1943, Goebbels explained that “the duty of the individual during war extends to sacrificing his life for the life of his nation.” On a speech delivered on April 20, 1945, on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday—near the end of the war and Germany’s devastating defeat—Goebbels stated:

We will never desert him, no matter how dangerous the hour. We stand with him, as he stands with us—in Germanic loyalty as we have sworn, as we shall fulfill. We do not need to tell him, for he knows and must know: “Fueher command!—We will follow!”

What is the difference between how Jim Jones seduced and led his followers to die at Jonestown…and how Joseph Goebbels seduced and led his people to sacrifice their lives for Germany? Weren’t Hitler and Goebbels “charismatic leaders,” “pied pipers” who “led the community of the faithful” by inspiring their followers to “heroically choose to die rather than to become crushed by enemy forces closing in”?

Wouldn’t it be fair to say that Hitler and Goebbels led the German people to “actualize a psychotic and co-created fantasy of masochistic group death”? The difference between Jonestown and Nazi Germany is that Jim Jones led 900 people to their deaths, whereas the words and actions of Hitler and Goebbels led to the deaths of nearly 8 million Germans. The difference is in the number of people who participated in the social movement, and the magnitude of destruction that was generated. Yet, as I observed in a previous issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter, we rarely if ever use words like masochism and psychosis in relationship to political and historical phenomenon.

Well over 200 million people were killed in the twentieth century as a result of political violence generated by nations. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says that the twentieth century was dominated by the “politics of organized insanity.” Yet nowhere do we find a concept of psychopathology to characterize the destructive and often bizarre events in that occur on the stage of politics. Why is this the case?

Why don’t we use terms like “masochism” to describe how soldiers (and citizens) are willing to “die for their countries”? Daniel Goldhagen (1996) observes that the Nazis were in the grip of a “hallucinatory ideology” and that their writings about the Jews were so fantastic and divorced from reality that “anyone reading them might conclude that they were the produce of the collective scribes of an insane asylum.” Why do we hesitate to use a term like “psychosis” to characterize the Nazi belief system?

For further reading on this topic, please see my paper on collective psychopathology.

Despite the fact that defeat was staring the Nazi regime in the face, it persisted in its attempt to restructure Europe’s racial composition through mass murder. During the summer of 1944, after the Allied landings in Normandy, German casualties reached levels never before seen: over 215,000 German soldiers were killed in July, and nearly 350,000 in August. With defeat unavoidable, the Nazi regime persisted in sending its soldiers to their deaths in hundreds of thousands.

The result was casualties on a colossal scale—so much so that Germany in January 1945 became the site of what perhaps was the greatest killing frenzy ever seen. The last months of the war were by far the most bloody. In January 1945 alone, more than 450,000 German soldiers lost their lives (a considerably greater number of soldiers than either the United Kingdom or the United States lost during the entire war). In February, March, and April, the number of German military dead approached 300 thousand per month.

Richard Bessel (2004) in Nazism and War