Illuminating the Nazi Mind

...In all thrce, the s t a t e d e l i b e r a t e l y tried to e x t c , m i n a t e vase groups of people whose very existence, it was claimed, was not ill tile s t a t e ' s interest...

...on the other, they are satanically clever...

...The lesson of the Nazis is the same lesson we are currently learning from Cambodia: Lurking in the wings of all nations are furies filled with disinterested hatred, furies calling for a new society based on a selfless concern for the health of the nation, furies bent on destroying everything that in their eyes prevents the realization of such a society...

...Ironically, those political and economic thinkers who are being called neoconservatives are much closer to a traditional conservative view of what political economy is about than is "arch-conservative" Friedman...

...they were exercising it in a vain attempt to increase both prosperity and equality at the same time...

...In short, they were doing good...

...It was the latest thing as well as the oldest thing...

...According to Walter Laqueur, Hitlerian fascism "far from recognizing its own class interests, even acted against them...

...some were brave, some were cowardly, most were stunned by the horror of it all...

...Yet i n t e l l e c t u a l s continually inveigh against commerce...

...The SS man," Himmler says, "is to be guided by one principle alone: honesty, decency, loyalty, and friendship towards those of our blood, and to no one else...

...most gnostic sects on other grounds...

...What the Nazis did was abnormal, psychologists often argue, therefore they were sick...

...otherwise the SS troops could not be called brave and daring, and yet he cannot call the Jews courageous, for that was a trait that only Aryans possessed...

...Himmler admits that the final solution is an unpleasant task: "I can tell you, it is hideous and frightful for a German to watch such things [executions] . . . . It is, and if we would not find it hideous and f r i g h t f u l , then we should no longer be Germans...

...The debate about the normality of the Nazis seems beside the point...

...Was Stroop lying - - f o r he knew that resettlement meant extermination at Treblinka or some other death camp--in order to protect himself in case the Nazis lost the war...

...Nazi doctrine is, of course, banal, but that is probably the least interesting thing we could say about it...

...They were true b e l i e v e r s , profoundly committed to the Nazi world view...

...Although all those who attack "commercial rapacity" are not, of course, bent on destructive transformations, by doing so they make it more likely t h a t such d e s t r u c t i v e forces will gain ascendancy...

...For tile policies of the Third Reich have much in common with the policies of other modern regimes--the Soviet regime under Stalin and the Cambodian regime under Pol Pot...

...They want to make it clear that those whose task it was to "solve" the Jewish problem, as Stroop puts it in his report, were normal...

...Slince the Nazis, as Bracher makes clear, did not act out of self-interest, it is difficult to understand them by invoking Marxian notions...

...Insofar as Nazi doctrines were concerned with the "blood" of peoples rather than with their beliefs, it was less a pseudo-religion than a pseudo-science...

...The Third Reich has not gone unexplored, yet comparatively few books ask what surely is a compelling question: What made many Germans become a r d e n t Nazis...

...And yet in the United States much more attention has been paid to the victims of Nazism than to the Nazis themselves...

...The report also reveals another characteristic of the Nazi regime: their tendency to resort to language that veils the reality of what was happening...

...In contrast, to most gnostic sects, the Nazis wanted to transform the world utterly--transform it in ways that had never been attempted in r e c o r d e d history...

...The .Jewish victims, we might say, behaved" naturally," whereas the conduct of the Nazis was truly unnatural in the extreme, insofar as it did not accord with the self-inlerest of the Nazi regime...

...But if the phrase itself makes no sense, it is reasonably clear what most writers have in mind when they invoke it...

...They cannot tell us why so many Germans worshipped this man, why they thought his understanding of the world was profoundly right...

...The Jews destroyed by the Nazis were ordinary people shipwrecked in a maelstrom the ferocity of which was beyond their imagining...

...Yet if gnosticism explains the dedication of the Nazis, it tells us little about the peculiar content of Nazi doctrine...

...The Nazis used such veiled phrases to deceive their enemies and also to deceive less zealous Germans, but I suspect that they also used such phrases to deceive themselves--to make it easier for them to carry out their Great Idea...

...He has to argue that the Jews put up a good fight, for ]'Pantheon Books, $10.00...

...As Elie Kedourie has said: " I t is quite obscure what is achieved by qualifying evil as banal...

...Certainly economic factors played an important part in the Nazi rise to power: In 1928 the Nazi party received only 2.6 percent of the vote whereas in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depressiola, it received 36.8 percent...

...As Karl Dietrich Bracher has said in his magisterial work, The German Dictatorship: "practical considerations connected with the need for slave labor played only a minor role...

...Innumerable writers-including historians, novelists, philosophers, literary critics, and sociologists-have accepted it without question as a profoundly accurate description of the soul of man under Nazism...

...Did these true b('lievers also support all aspccls ofl [itler's ideology, including tile final solution...

...Finally, Freudian explanations, like Marxian explanations, are unsatisfactory because they enable us to dispense with the content of Nazi doctrine--a tempting strategy, since Nazi doctrine is boring as well as loathsome...

...Were they normal...

...Does not Kazin know that Hitler said much the same thing...

...As Sheldon Wolin has said, summing up Arendt's work in tl'ie New York Review of Books: "Her most original and stunning use of Nietzsche was her portrayal of the Eichmann phenomenon as 'the banality of evil.' It challenged one of the most widely accepted interpretations of Nazism as the product of 'demonic' urges and perverted minds, so exceptional and g r o t e s q u e as to exempt ordinary human beings from complicity in the 'final solution.'" The phrase speaks volumes to Wolin and innumerable others, yet its meaning is far from clear...

...Such explanations, moreover, do not tell us why such a neurotic or even psycho-tic individual managed not only to become head of an advanced industrial society, but also to beguile many supposedly shrewd European statesmen into believing that his concerns were honorable and reasonable...

...The original report, as Andrzej Wirth says in his introduction, was a commemorative album, a volume bound in black pebble leather that was a gift for Himmler himself...

...And Freudian explanations are usually reductionist: Hitler was a classical Oedipal character, one writer suggests, who projected his hatred of his father onto the Jews...

...they were p e t t y b u r e a u c r a t s , thinking mainly of advancing t h e i r c a r e e r s . For them Nazism was an opportunity, nothing more...

...F u r t h e r evidence of the enthusiastic--in all the meanings of that word--mentality of the Nazi elite comes to us from The Stroop Report,~ which is the republication of a report by Juergen Stroop, the SS commander in charge of the destruction of the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw, which took place from April 20 to May 16, 1943...

...It explains, I think, the peculiar zeal and dedication with which leading Nazis, especially those who joined the SS (a voluntary organization until the closing days of the war), carried out their duties...

...They were ridding Germany of the forces of corruption, materialism, Marxism, whatever...

...In brief, gnosticism was an early Christian heresy that has continually cropped up, under various guises, in Western history...

...In "Burnt Norton," T.S...

...The Nazis wanted to rid Germany of corruption, wanted to create a new man purged of hatred, envy, jealousy, avarice, lust, and greed...

...Whatever the weaknesses of gnosticism as an explanation of Nazism--weaknesses, I should add, compounded by a certain heavy-handedness on Rhodes's part when he applies the grid of gnosticism to Nazi doctrine--it is a good antidote to the view of the Nazi elite that has gained the most currency in the intellectual world, a view that is best summed up by Hannah Arendt'-s celebrated phrase, "the banality of evil...

...Only the elect--those who have been vouchsafed a special understanding of this crisis---can save themselves, either by removing themselves from the world or by destroying the cause of this crisis...

...And the conclusion he has come to is that "the National Socialist ideology should be seen as a more or less coherent, millenarian and gnostic world view that must be taken seriously if the Nazis are to be understood...

...I n some ways, I think it does...

...What does this explanation, so to speak, explain...

...In The German Dictatorship, Bracher tells the following story: In the Crimea, SS troops came upon the Karaimes, a sect of practicing Jews but not, supposedly, of the Jewish " r a c e " ; they also came upon the Krimtschaks, another sect which did not a d h e r e to the Jewish faith but were said to be "unquestionably of the Jewish r a c e . " The l a t t e r were exterminated, the former were not...

...The victims have been accorded so much attention in part because the story of the Third Reich has come to be seen as a story of interest mainly to Jews...

...Jews are continually admonished never to forget, but they are supposed to commemorate the victims rather than try to understand the perpetrators of the crimes...

...Reading such nonsense, it is easy to assume that no one, not even Himmler himself, believed it, but it would be a mistake to take such a view...

...Most Jews probably went to their deaths without fully comprehending what was happening to them...

...Gnostics are often antinomian, their sense of their own special knowledge (or gnosis) and their sense of crisis making it imperative that they disregard civil law...

...What is perhaps most modern-and most chilling--about this phenomenon is that the doomed people could do nothing m prevent their fate...

...In order to answer that, we should keep in mind a t e r r i b l y simple point: The Nazis thought they were doing good, thought they were purging the country of materialism and r e s t o r i n g spiritual values...

...In gnostic terms, the Nazis saw themselves as the *Hoover Institution Press, $14.95...

...And most Germans, I suspect, would prefer to regard the Nazis as a grotesque aberration in German history that does not bear looking closely into...

...The report,-in which Stroop praises the courage and daring of SS troops, who "tirelessly fulfilled their duties in true comradeship and stood together as exemplary s o l d i e r s , " is composed of t h r e e parts: a narrative introduction, a series of daily communiquts on the progress of the operation, and a series of photographs of captured Jews, SS troops, and the ruins of the ghetto itself...

...As Himmler said to a gathering of SS leaders in October of 1943: "We have exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it:" Himmler's speech needs to be quoted more fully because it illuminates the mentality of the Nazi zealot...

...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1980...

...In a recent essay on Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin praises her analysis of the Nazis and then goes on to complain, in an irrelevant aside, about "the mediocrity that so many of us now do accept in the face of a commercial rapacity that invades every side of American life...

...Nazism differs from...

...As we know, the Nazis exterminated Gypsies as well as Jews, and they also killed millions of Poles...

...Hitler may have been deeply neurotic, but to make such a point is to say practically nothing about the Nazi regime...

...many w'rilcrs have become preoccupied -indeed obsessed--with, the conduct of the victims themscJves, suggesting that the .Jews could have dop.e more to save themselves...

...The core of Stroop's being, Moczarski said, was ideological...

...Stroop was finally hanged by the Polish government, but Moczarski was r e l e a s e d a f t e r serving eleven years in prison, and he wrote a book entitled Conversations with the Hangman, in which he said that Stroop, as Wirth puts THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1980 21 it, "combined a puritanical devotion to discipline with an idealistic sense of mission...

...Nazism attracted many Germans because it claimed to be scientifically accurate as well as morally uplifting...

...they tend to regard the contemporary world as being in a state of extreme crisis...

...The Nazis were gnostics insofar as they were convinced that civilization, which they thought found its highest form in Germany, was in a state of collapse...

...Their plan was to enslave or exterminate all non-Aryan peoples...

...Moreover, Marxist explanations of Nazism do not shed light on the distinction between Nazism and other forms of fascism--Italian fascism, for example--that were not based on racial notions...

...We know more about Stroop from another source...

...Hideous though it is, it has been necessary and in many cases will continue to be necessary...

...Raising such questions seems essential, for [l~e phenomenon of a nation supporting or abetting (or even reluctantly going along with) policies whose loathsomeness the resources of lan,~uage cannot do justice to is puzzlingma i; --nomenon that we should at least try to understand in order to forestall its recurrence, not in Germany but elsewhere...

...Their analyses of public policy tend to focus on the balance between a large number of social values (e.g., efficiency, stability, prosperity, equality, manageability) rather than just on individual freedom...

...The unnatural conduct of the Nazis, who speeded up their efforts to exterminate Jews when they realized that they were going to lose the war, has made it easy to regard their very existence as unreal, as a nightmare that it would not be healthy to rehearse...

...therefore he finds it necessary to magnify the dangers of t h e " campaign" he has just completed as well as to lie about the number of casualties the SS troops suffered, underreporting them...

...The problem, of course, is that legitimate actions may still be stupid, and the British have again e x e r c i s e d t h e i r freedom in an attempt to get out of the terrible economic state in which they find themselves...

...As Bruno Bettelheim has said, most people prefer to call the final solution unspeakable or unimaginable "because only then can one avoid facing the full horror of what happened in its details...

...But Freudian explanations essentially beg the question...

...Agonizing over the c,.mduct of the victims, however, is not only unseemly, it is also unrewarding, for there is little that we can lcarn from such investigations and speculations...

...What do we make of a man who thought such a document, full of h e a r t r e n d i n g photographs of c a p t u r e d J e w s , would bring him glory...

...Rather, German industrialists sought an accommodation with him only after his party had become a leading political force...

...Fl-eudian notions can in no way make sense of Hitler's evil political genius...

...Even if we preferred to label them abnormal, the central question is: Why did millions of Germans embrace a doctrine that, among other things, is a grotesque perversion of their own Christian faith...

...But balancing economic freedom against other values within a system of political liberty does not make a nation less free, though it may make certain individuals so...

...they were guilty by virtue of their birth rather than their conduct...

...There has always been a contradiction in American conservative thinking in its attempt to preserve tradition and authority within the polity, yet maintain with Milton Friedman that there are abstract rights to individual freedom in the economy...

...The notion that the H i t l e r movement was rooted in gnosticism, as Rhodes says, helps us to understand the energy and devotion the Stroops of the Nazi regime-and there were many of them--lavished on their abominable task...

...But such facts do not explain why the Nazis preferred racist explanations of the economic crisis, nor do they explain why Nazi ideology was successful in Germany whereas it was less prevalent, though by no means nonexistent, in other countries suffering from the Depression...

...Of course they were normal insofar as they functioned in the _real world of the Nazi regime...

...These analyses are not intended to determine whether government action is theoretically legitimate, but to inform the legitimizing process of the political system on which Burke placed the highest moral value...

...Though it is not easy to sum up what makes a particular religious movement gnostic, we can say that gnostics usually possess an apocalyptic world view...

...Stroop hoped his little album would add luster to his career...

...And ultimately they too were overshadowed by the final goal--extermination...

...he believed completely in the wisdom of Hitler...

...The report unwittingly reveals the contradictions inherent in the Nazi's perception of the Jews...

...In one of his essays, Bettelheim speaks of two Nazi e n t h u s i a s t s who regarded their anti-Nazi mother as odd, uninformed, and old-fashioned...

...They were restoring the great values of German civilization...

...age-old problem of anti-Semitism, but we also need to understand the way in which Nazism is a distinctively modern phenomenon...

...Swearing allegiance to the new order did not save them...

...Thus, we should be wary of all those who attack soulless materialist societies, who yearn for consensus--yearn for a new man who is more noble than commercial man...

...It is my guess that the next decade will prove that Milton Friedman has been right on most public policy issues, but fi~r all the wrong reasons...

...Not only the .Jews themselves but virtually everyone in positions ,~f power in Europe and America found it dif}]cult to believe that the Nazis would actually hinder their war effort by killing Jews instead of using "I't{E AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUI.Y 1980 19 them as slave labor...

...By supporting Labour governments, Britons were not limiting their freedom...

...Gnosticism does not explain the Nazis' scrupulous devotion to their macabre science...

...Nazism advertised itself as a compound of the old values of the Folk and the latest scientific knowledge...

...The phrase, which Arendt used to characterize Adolf Eichmann, a man cast very much in the Stroop mold, has had a stunning success...

...Eliminating the Jews may have been a distasteful task, but for Nazi zealots it was also a grand task, an ennobling task--one that they pursued even when they knew that the Nazi regime was going to be defeated...

...The unnaturalness of the Nazismkilling Jews instead of using them to help prosecute the warmhas led many commentators to brand them as pathological...

...For these people, Freudian notions, or the language of psychology in general, provide the best way of arriving at an understanding of the Nazi mentality...

...The evil perpetrated by the Nazis was neither banal nor not banal...

...As gnostics, the Nazis r e g a r d e d the Jews as the principle of d a r k n e s s ; as racists, the Nazis regarded the Jews as but one among many Untermenschen...

...There were many Germans who were passive s u p p o r t e r s of the Nazi regime, s u p p o r t i n g it out of f e a r or calculation, but many --how many wc shall never know--were strong supporfcrs of Hi~lcr...

...Or was he trying to find a language that would enable him to convince himself that what he was doing was truly a good thing...

...The Jewish quarter was destroyed, according to Stroop, "because the Jews no longer considered voluntary r e s e t t l e m e n t but were determined to resist with all the weapons and means at their disposal...

...We need to understand the way in which Nazism is a modern version of the Stephen Milk.'r is a Resident Fellow al the American Enterprise Institute...

...B Stephen Miller ILLUMINATING THE NAZI MIND Where good is as evil does...

...James M. Rhodes's The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution" is a welcome addition to the literature on the Third Reich because the author has taken the trouble to immerse himself in the writings of the Nazis...

...But it is completely mistaken to regard the Stroops and Eichmanns of the Nazi regime in this light...

...The phrase, Kedourie implies, is not wrong so much as incoherent, for banality is a word we use to speak about the quality of a person's thought or the aesthetic quality of a work of art...

...No doubt there were some cynical careerists in the SS, as well as some criminal types, but the majority of them, I would argue, saw themselves as knights engaged in a great miss i o n - a s men who were d i s i n t e r e s t e d , disciplined, loyal, and conscientious servants of a Great Idea...

...Whatever qualms they may have had about killing defenseless women and children had to be stifled, as Himmler said, for the good of the cause...

...Gnosticism is a mansion with many rooms in it, but we can safely say that most gnostic sects-have been less interested in saving the world from contamination than in removing themselves from the possibility of contamination...

...It is no doubt true that many minor Nazi f u n c t i o n a r i e s , and perhaps some major ones, were cynical careerists, some of whom found it very easy to save their skins later by becoming ardent Communists...

...9 . . Because if we now lose our nerve, our children and grandchildren will have to pay for our loss of nerve . . . . Let us not weaken...

...To place irony upon irony, it is Milton Friedman's own work which has made the most important contribution to many of the neoc o n s e r v a t i v e positions on political and economic affairs...

...Regarding the Third Reich as a phenom(-non deeply disturbing mainly to Jews...

...Let us never become soft, but grit our teeth and carry on...

...One could as well speak of the banality of goodness, and one would remain similarly unenlightened...

...But by looking through, or "unmasking," Nazi doctrine, we lose an important aid in understanding the Nazis: their own view of themselves...

...He is right to say that we should take Nazi doctrine seriously, but does his categorization of the Nazis as latter-day gnostics help to clarify our understanding of their mentality...

...The qualification in no way elucidates the essential character of evil, or helps us to recognize evil actions, or to compare their relative heinousness...

...Eliot says that "human kind/Cannot bear very much reality," but the relative lack of interest in what made the Nazis tick suggests that human kind cannot bear very much unreality, cannot bear conduct that seems to stand outside the boundaries of human nature...

...They wanted to transform Germany into an organic society, a society without classes, without egotism, discord, and strife...

...Hitler, as many historians have pointed out, was not a creation of German industrialists...

...On the one hand, Jews are cowardly, inferior beings...

...According to its adherents, it is a scientific doctrine, one based on the latest knowledge about the differences among the races...

...Those possessing gnosis, a distinctive" spiritual" insight into reality, were certain that the Jews were, as Hitler said in 1934, capable of undermining all sound principles as well as threatening the very existence of the Aryan people...

...To deny that the Third Reich has a special meaning for Jews would bc absurd, b-ut it would be a mistake if only .Jews pondered the significance of the Nazis...

...And they were gnostics insofar as they had an all-purpose explanation of this collapse: The Jews, who were both international finance capitalists and Marxists...

...If most Germans obeyed orders because the price of disobeying them was very high, a minority obeyed orders because they f e r v e n t l y believed in them...

...After the war, he was thrown into the same cell with a hero of the Polish resistance, Kazimierz Moczarski, who had been a r r e s t e d by Polish Stalinists in 1949...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1980 forces of light chosen to do battle with the forces of darkness--that is, the Jews--in order to save civilization...

...Because they w, ere such true believers in the world view of Nazism, the men who carried out the task of extermination found it relatively easy to regard the appearance of the Jews, who were so obviously powerless and, in Eastern Europe at least, impoverished, as deceiving...