East he had personally orchestrated the outburst.13
Echoed by the Nuremberg judges in their verdict against the Third Reich’s leaders, Bach’s interpretation of Germany’s recent genocidal past became the paradigm for the conventional perspective on Hitler’s executioners. According to its line of reasoning, there existed a straightforward causality between Nazi racial theories on the one hand, and its racial practices on the other. Thus, as Von dem Bach suggested, the barrage of ideological propaganda of the 1930s constituted a brainwashing of the German people to the extent that many of them willingly engaged in the subsequent mass murders. Viewed from this perspective, the gas chambers and mass graves of the Third Reich were the inevitable result of ideas disseminated by its racial hate propagandists among a particularly receptive audience.
An early example of such an interpretation can be found in the study of Dutch Auschwitz-survivor Elie A. Cohen. In March 1952, Cohen earned his M.D. with a dissertation on medical and psychological aspects of the German concentration camp. His study also appeared as a commercial edition and – unexpectedly – sold out in only a few days’ time. It went through several reprints and was translated into English shortly after its first appearance.14 In his book, Cohen addressed the murderous mind-set of the SS in psycho-analytical terms:
The Super-ego, which as we know forms the introjection of the voice of the parents, the teachers and society, received a criminal contents with the SS men. From 1933 onwards, the Super-ego learned from society (radio, film, newspaper, book), from the teachers, and in many cases also from the parents: ‘The Jews are our misfortune’, ‘the Jews must be wiped out’, ‘the Russians and Poles are inferior people, and so on. In this way, the SS men received a criminal Super-ego…. (…)
Above all, it was the Super-ego which made it possible for the SS to kill Jews, Poles, Russians, and so on. One could even say: For the SS it was a necessity, for ←21 | 22→according to Nazi ideology, these people were harmful elements. To the SS their destruction was as necessary as the extermination of the Colorado-beetle in the Netherlands.15
In her widely acclaimed book The War against the Jews, published nearly twenty-five years later, American historian Lucy Dawidowicz went a considerable step further as she explained the causes of this war by way of the collective insanity of the entire German people:
Germans, otherwise individually rational, yielded themselves to pathological fantasies about the Jews. In that climate, where masses of Germans had lost the ability to distinguish between the real Jew and the mythic Jew of anti-Semitic invention, the chiliastic system of National Socialist beliefs could further influence their already distorted sense of reality. Belief in National Socialism was like belief in magic and witchcraft during the Middle Ages, similarly ruling and inflaming the minds of men. […]
In medieval days entire communities were seized with witchcraft hysteria, and in modern Germany the mass psychosis of anti-Semitism deranged a whole people. According to their system of beliefs, elimination of the Jews resembled medieval exorcism of the Devil. The accomplishment of both, it was variously held, would restore grace to the world.
As a result of this mass hysteria, the Germans considered themselves as
latter-day Laocoöns in the grip of a death struggle. In a paranoid vision they believed themselves to be innocent and aggrieved victims, outwitted by the machinations of a super-cunning and all-powerful antagonist, engaged in a struggle for their very existence. […] Consequently, in the deluded German mind, every Jewish man, woman, and child became a panoplied warrior of a vast Satanic fighting machine.16
And again twenty-five years later, another American bestselling author, political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, held out the very same message to his readers. In an extended echo of Dawidowicz, Goldhagen insisted that the explanation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews indeed lay in the delusional German obsession with the idea ‘that Jewry was locked in an apocalyptic battle with Germandom.’ Thus, as to Dawidowicz, to Goldhagen the Germans considered the extermination of the Jews necessary and justified: ‘Letting such a mortal threat persist, fester, and build was to let down one’s countrymen, to betray one’s loved ones.’17
What interpretations such as those of Von dem Bach, Cohen, Dawidowicz and Goldhagen obviously have in common is their emphasis on the ←22 | 23→ideological, and even pathological motivation of the persecutors. Their behavior is considered to have been the outcome of a perverted world-view, an extreme and compulsive form of ‘idealism’, which considered the Jews as a mortal threat to their existence; a threat which dictated (and justified) their annihilation.
The continued popularity of such ‘patho-ideological’ Holocaust explanations is undoubtedly caused by their logical simplicity. For it is indeed clear that Hitler’s terror and annihilation policies were ideologically inspired. Consequently, it also seems obvious to assume that their organizers and executors were motivated by the very same incentive. Moreover, such a conclusion appears to correspond with a rather basic view on the human condition and its psychology of motivation. Thus, we generally tend to relate extraordinary acts to correspondingly extraordinary motives. As every good deed is supposed to result from benevolent intentions, much the same applies to its opposite: bad deeds are commonly held to be caused by malignant intent. The ‘logic of evil’, therefore, requires that behind an extraordinary crime correspondingly exceptional evil motives lie hidden. Consequently, in the case of the extraordinary crime of the Nazi genocide there exists a strong inclination to rationalize the systematic physical extermination of millions of innocent and defenseless men, women and children by reference to the perpetrators’ paranoid delirium. In this way one arrives at what might be dubbed the ‘equilibrium of madness’, by applying the circular formula that insanity breeds insanity. Essentially, this way of clarifying the incomprehensible by means of the incomprehensible is what characterizes the patho-ideological perspective on the perpetrators of Nazi genocide.
In spite of its apparent appeal, however, this ‘Laoconian-style’ interpretation does not answer the question posed by Michael Marrus in any satisfactory way. Indeed, among its flaws is its very simplicity. For if the crimes and criminals of Nazism could so easily be understood by reference to its pathological ideology, the question arises why so few of their contemporaries failed to grasp the logic at the time. If, as suggested in Laoconian-type retrospection, the blueprint of mass destruction was so unambiguously present in the propaganda speeches and writings of Adolf Hitler and his likes, and if the bloodlust flickered so prominently in the eyes of their followers, how ignorant must these contemporaries then not have been to overlook the ←23 | 24→message? For obvious reasons, an explicit answer to this question is generally avoided, but it is not all too difficult to figure out that it would not be particularly flattering for the victims of Nazi persecution.
That the patho-ideological perspectives lean heavily on hindsight simplifications also becomes clear if one takes a closer look at their core arguments. In order to disclose the psychology of the Third Reich mass murderer, its advocates recruit these arguments from leading Nazi hate propagandists and simply project them – quite often literally – onto the minds of the Nazi executioners.18 But whoever considers Hitler’s genocidal collaborators as mere replicas of their Führer ignores the crucial importance of their personal motives. That these motives matter in the light of Marrus’ question can be illustrated by a closer look at the organization chiefly responsible for Hitler’s terror policies. Thus, Himmler and Heydrich recruited many of their leading Gestapo officials from among experienced CID men who had already proven their professional qualities during the Weimar Republic and who were far more concerned with the advancement of their careers than with any party-political ideology. The best known example in this respect was, of course, the infamous Gestapo chief who was to become Adolf Eichmann’s superior in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Heinrich Müller.
Müller had entered the Munich Metropolitan Police at the age of 19, shortly after the end of World War I. He rapidly advanced
