Early research on Hitler and Nazism focused on the personality (and psychopathology) of Hitler. People preferred to believe that what occurred in Germany grew out of the "madness" of a single individual.

We now know that Nazi ideology was shared by millions of individuals. It is not necessary to postulate "German anti-Semitism" as the causal variable (and in any case, as Hannah Arendt has observed, "anti-Semitism explains everything, and therefore nothing").

The central question we need to pose is: "What, precisely, was Hitler saying that so excited the German people? What was the message--contained within the words he spoke--that caused so many people to stand on their feet and to yell, "Heil Hitler?" Deciphering Nazism and the Final Solution requires understanding what bound the German people to Hitler.

Joachim Fest (1973) frames this issue as follows:

Were it not for the congruence between the personal and the social-pathological situation, Hitler could never have wielded such hypnotic power over his fellow-citizens. He could not have bewitched the masses if he had shared their secret emotions and incorporated all their psychoses into his own psyche. When he spoke, the masses met, hailed and idolized themselves. An exchange of pathologies took place.

Ronald Aronson (1983) put it this way:

What is most remarkable about (Nazism) is that it became enough of a mass outlook for a movement, and then a society as a whole to be organized around it. In power, the Nazis were able to reshape reality until it conformed to the distorted fantasy.

In achieving his position, wasn't Hitler giving voice to the malignancy, the irrationality of the social forces that brought him to power? It distorts the course of events to describe the locus of the Final Solution as being Hitler. Among Nazis, there was general agreement about the "Jewish Problem:” how could it be solved?

I suggest we conceptualize what occurred in Nazi Germany through the concept of shared fantasy. In his study of Al Qaeda, Lee Harris distinguishes between a fantasy held by an individual and one embraced by a group.  

What happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group — a sect, or a people, or even a nation? There is no doubt that for most of history such large-scale collective fantasies appear on the world stage under the guise of religion. With the French Revolution there would be eruptions of a new kind of collective fantasy in which political ideology replaced religious mythology.

The ideas put forward by Hitler resonated with many Germans. Hitler was exquisitely tuned in to his own politics fantasies--and was able to share these fantasies with others. Somehow, Hitler's fantasies--conveyed by the words he spoke, resonated with many Germans. The German people were moved by the fantasies that moved Hitler.

Hitler's ideas excited the German people. They were turned on when Hitler spoke.  Hitler and many other Germans were dreaming the same dream. Hitler was director of an enormous drama—a passion play enacted upon the stage of reality.

Nazi Faith

The core Nazism fantasy--from which everything arose--was nationalism, patriotism—devotion to Germany. The Nazis embraced the ideology of nationalism more deeply than it had ever before been embraced, and enacted its basic premises.

Nazism represented radical identification between self and nation, insisting that there could be no separation between a human being and his nation:

Our Nation is not just an idea in which you have no part; you yourself support the nation; to it you belong; you cannot separate yourself from it. Your life is bound up with the life of your whole people. The nation is not merely the root of your strength, it is the root of your very life.

For the Nazis, the German nation encompassed everything. Hitler said that if each individual thought only of himself and his own interests, then “no community of the people" could come into being.” Volksgemeinschaft meant overcoming bourgeois privatism, “unconditionally equating the individual fate and the fate of the nation.”

According to Hitler, no one was exempt. There could not be a “single person who excludes himself from this joint obligation.” In Constitutional Law of the Third Reich (see Murphy, 1943), political theorist Ernst Rudolf Huber stated that according to National Socialism there are “no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside the realm of the state.” The “member of the people organically connected with the whole community, had replaced the isolated individual.”

Nazism grew out of profound idealism revolving around loyalty and devotion to Germany. The evil of Nazism arose out of this quest for absolute goodness. Goebbels (in Rhodes, 1980) stated that to be a socialist meant to “subordinate the I to the Thou, sacrifice the personality for the whole.” National Socialism, he said, is “service, renunciation for individuals, fanatic love, courage to sacrifice, resignation for the Volk.”

Hitler spoke endlessly of his faith in the Reich:

Our future is Germany. Our today is Germany. And our past is Germany. Let us take a vow this morning, at every hour, in each day, to think of Germany, of the nation, of our German people. You cannot be unfaithful to something that has given sense and meaning to your whole existence.

Nazism was an orgy of nationalistic self-exaltation. "The community of the people," "the community of the people"—this was Hitler's battle cry. His mission was to overcome "divisions,” and to unite his people into a single, unified body.

Hitler demanded that everyone embrace the Nazi faith. No one was excluded from the obligation to serve Germany. Hitler’s insistence—that no one was exempt—turned idealism into a rage of destruction. “We are fanatic in our love for our people,” Hitler declared. “We can go as loyally as a dog with those who share our sincerity, but we will pursue with fanatic hatred the man who believes that he can play tricks with this love of ours.”

Fred Alford (1988) defines "narcissistic rage" as “aggression in response to threats to the grandiose self and omnipotent object.” Narcissistic rage “denies separation and otherness,” rather it is activated when separateness and otherness impinge on narcissistic grandiosity.

Hitler’s rage was directed against whatever called into question his fantasy of a grandiose self—embodied in the German nation. Calling into question the goodness of Germany—doubting the nation's greatness--required the extermination of doubt.