The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees: How to stop the rise of the NEXT HITLER
The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees (Viking £25, 448pp)
Earnest millennials like to warn us that President Trump is ‘literally just like Hitler’. Rubicund golf-club types opine that Sir Keir Starmer is a fascist dictator, and others say that Mr Putin’s Russia is behaving more and more like the Nazis – to Russian fury, given the colossal scale of suffering they experienced at Nazi hands in the Second World War.
Who is right? Anyone? Or does such hysterical ‘just like Hitler’ rhetoric cheapen and trivialise one of the greatest horrors of the 20th century? Does anyone today truly resemble Hitler, and if so, how?
To answer these burning questions, Laurence Rees, a long-time scholar of the Nazi period, has produced an invaluable new book on the ‘Nazi mind’, and in particular what he identifies as 12 key traits: genocidal racism, of course, but also the spreading of dark conspiracy theories, a talent for cultivating young people, a control of the ‘narrative’ and the media, and a hypnotic personality cult around a political leader.
Along the way he throws up some bitterly uncomfortable truths. Did you know that more doctors joined the Nazi Party than members of any other profession?
Just as shocking, in 1934 the president of the American Olympics Committee, Avery Brundage, toured Germany and was unfazed by the burgeoning persecution of the Jews, noting that back in Chicago his own gentlemen’s club excluded Jews, too. Re-casting the Second World War as a simple war between ‘racists and anti-racists,’ as in some bad Hollywood movie, is sheer bunkum.
The southern States still had segregation in these years, a system the Nazis specifically admired. On the other hand, when the great black athlete Jesse Owens won his four gold medals in Berlin in 1936, Goebbels insisted that ‘special care should be exercised not to offend Negro athletes,’ and the largely German crowd cheered him to the rafters.
It is grim to be reminded how often during their conquest of Eastern Europe the Nazis found locals only too happy to assist in attacking and murdering the Jews. In Kaunas, Lithuania, German soldiers looked on as a local man enthusiastically beat a group of Jews to death with an iron bar, then climbed on top of the pile of corpses and proceeded to play his national anthem on an accordion.
Death of Free Speech: Adolf Hitler making a speech
On another occasion, one German general actually lodged a formal complaint about how savagely the Romanians were treating the Jews. As Rees says, such horrors occurred not because the Nazis were Germans, but because they were human beings.
He gives detailed consideration to the evil mesmerism of Hitler’s oratory, without which it is impossible to imagine the Nazi phenomenon. One of Hitler’s opponents astutely analysed his speeches as ‘the day-dream of this mass soul [ie the German people]… Hitler has given speech to the speechless terror of the modern mass…’
Hitler never bored his audience with statistics or carefully researched facts. ‘The receptivity of the great masses is very limited,’ he said. ‘Their intelligence is small but their power of forgetting is enormous.’ Goebbels added: ‘The masses don’t understand irony.’
Instead, the Fuhrer kept it simple, emotional and repetitive. He evoked fear, whipped up anger, drew stark contrasts between Them and Us, thrilling his audience with a kind of electrifying terror that They meant Germany tremendous harm: the Jews, the Bolsheviks, the French, whoever. It didn’t matter, as long as there was a terrifying enemy facing them all.
But fear not – Hitler himself would save them! His speeches climaxed with images of triumph and glory, of ‘overjoyed redemption’ in the analyst’s words. It made for an emotional roller-coaster of a speech – like a great rock concert.
And just as with rock concerts, German youth responded with adoration. The chapter on how the Nazis drew young people to them is riveting. The Nazis, says Rees, were racist, nationalist, socialist, yes – but above all extremist.
The simple, brutal solutions they offered appealed deeply to the bored, frustrated, impoverished and impatient young of inter-war Germany, longing for something more promising, more exciting.
Rees also argues that the Nazis’ pseudo-Darwinian ideology – ‘an eternal victory of the strong over the weak’, as Hitler put it – appealed to the young and healthy, all those clean-limbed marching boys in the Hitler Youth, all those German girls doing their callisthenics in the League of German Maidens, the BDM.
Long jump of a member of the ‘League of German Girls’ at a national sports festival of the Hitler Youth
Rees quotes a psychologist’s shrewd observation that while you’re most likely to commit murder in your teens, you’re also most likely to dedicate your life to Mother Teresa. Such youthful passion and vehemence was ruthlessly exploited by the Nazi Party. And of course, young people being what they are, ‘after a large group of BDM girls camped out near the Hitler Youth at the Nuremberg Rally in 1936, many of them became pregnant.’
One absolute bulwark against a dictatorship such as Nazism is free speech, says the author. When the state starts to control films, theatre, the press and the education system, as the Nazis did, then warning sirens should start wailing loudly.
Meanwhile, a fertile ground for such extremist ideology is a miserable, downtrodden and impoverished populace. Rees vividly sketches the absolute chaos and penury of pre-Nazi Germany, the desperation and relentless political violence throughout the 1920s, without which one can never understand the rise of Hitler.
One survivor of these terrible years recalled receiving 30 marks a month in government assistance. His rent cost 15 marks, and with the remaining money he could buy 15 meals at the soup kitchen. That’s one meal every other day.
After the Wall Street Crash and rampant inflation, suddenly it cost four billion marks for a sausage roll. No wonder the German people longed so deeply for order and prosperity again. And then a certain Adolf Hitler steps forward with his simple solutions and golden promises…
One final point in favour of this superb, complex study: at no point does Rees tell us exactly who today, if anyone, resembles Hitler or the Nazis. He has confidence in his readers’ ability to do that for themselves, thank goodness.