The Nazi mind

By: James Holland, historian / The Daily Telegraph (original title: The poison Hitler deployed against defenseless Jews)
Translation: Telegrafi.com

In late 1931, American journalist Dorothy Thompson had the opportunity to interview Adolf Hitler in his apartment at the Kaserhof Hotel in Berlin, where he was then living—the rising star of German politics. She had gone to the meeting expecting to meet Germany’s future dictator, but she quickly changed her mind, seeing him as a “shapeless, almost faceless” figure and the embodiment of “the little man.” She tried to reason with him, but Hitler blamed all the world’s ills on the Jews. This, she said, made no sense. “She reasoned that since she, as a seasoned journalist of the world,” writes historian Laurence Rees, “was able to see past the empty rhetoric and discern the blind prejudice behind it, others would do the same.” Parker concluded that Hitler posed no serious threat.

Read also by Laurence Rees: The dark charisma of Adolf Hitler

How wrong he was. Less than a year later, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and would soon plunge the world into a catastrophic war of unimaginable cruelty, killing tens of millions and displacing millions more. Europe, and then the entire world, found itself in the midst of a global catastrophe, the consequences of which we continue to feel today.

Ten years ago, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that another Hitler, or an equally terrible regime, could rise again in the West. But suddenly we are living in different times. What becomes clear in the book The Nazi mind [The Nazi Mind], in Laurence Rees' provocative and shocking new history of the Third Reich, is that democracy is an incredibly fragile entity. There should be no room for complacency as we reflect on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

And while the story of the rise and fall of Nazism is by no means unknown, Rees is uniquely positioned to see this cautionary tale from a new perspective: not only has he spent over 30 years studying the subject, but he is also a Bafta-winning filmmaker and has interviewed in detail many of the last surviving participants of that regime. In other words, he knows very well what he is writing about.

Rees’s approach is to examine the history of the Third Reich both chronologically and thematically. While he doesn’t draw direct comparisons to modern times, anyone familiar with the political turmoil in the West, especially America, will see much that is familiar and disturbing. Hitler understood early on that it was important, for example, to create an “Us vs. Them” sentiment—the idea that ordinary people were being victimized by dark external forces. Only by creating a sense of unity, according to this theory, could these forces be combated. In post-World War I Germany, those dark forces were the Jews and the global threat of Bolshevism.

Conspiracy theories also mattered. Lying was a systematic and deliberate practice for the Nazis; most people were – and still are – naive enough that, if something is repeated often enough, they are willing to believe it. In the late 1920s, the Nazis were not making much progress, but they were revived by the Wall Street crisis, which plunged Germany into an economic depression and prompted voters to seek alternatives to status quoHitler and his main followers had already begun the process of recruiting and brainwashing German youth, and now had an ever-growing army of disillusioned young people ready to take to the streets.

However, what brought the Nazis to power was the collaboration of elites: men who believed they were superior to this radical and could control him, or who were willing to look the other way because of greed and self-interest. Rees notes that Hitler was elected twice, only to come to power in 1933, without overwhelming support, and that political apathy was as important as his wild ideology. Most Germans were not so much concerned with democracy as with what was most likely to provide jobs and economic prosperity. Jews made up less than one percent of the German population and were easy to suppress; or, more precisely, it was easy for people to ignore their treatment in the name of profit. The cunning and manipulative use of the controlled media through repeated lies only strengthened the Nazi message.

The first half of Nazi mentality is deeply shocking reading. The Nazi plots and manipulations, and the patterns of human behavior that emerged from them, will seem terrifying to anyone who has followed the politics of recent years in the West. What follows, however, no matter how familiar the story, can be read with a horror that only accumulates. Reading about the truly horrific atrocities committed against the Poles, starting in 1939, or what happened after the invasion of the Soviet Union and the slide towards the Holocaust, suddenly takes on an even deeper meaning. And all this was achieved, as Rees shows, through the distance created by euphemism, and the collaboration of politicians and apoliticals, of intellectuals, ordinary people, opportunists – people who on the surface were no different from you or me. /Telegraph/