Politics and psychoanalysis: the sources of Hitler's political behaviour

Abstract

Since the end of World War II social commentators have attempted to explain why Germany was so susceptible to Nazi rule. One sociologist has argued that the social structure that existed in Germany at the end of the First World War made it likely that Germany would take a totalitarian rather than a democratic road to modernity. Others have argued that the breakdown of the stratification system permitted the Nazis to prey upon the fears of the newly atomized individuals who joined in the mass movement. Still other studies have focused either on the whole country or on the different regions to explore in detail how the Nazi movement grew and which elements of the population were most prone to join it. These works have ranged from descriptive case studies to more analytic, but conflicting, voting studies. But the analyses of the mass represent only one half of the equation which may explain why the Nazis came to power and, perhaps more significantly, why they managed to retain the loyalty of the populace even when it was apparent that Germany would lose the war that the Nazis initiated. The other part of the equation is Adolf Hitler whose “ability not only to win over the majority of the German people, but to lead them so completely astray, has no precedent in history”. No other revolutionary mass movement, neither bolshevism in Russia nor communism in China, has been so much the product of its leader as was national socialism in Germany.