Joseph Goebbels delivered his most famous speech at the Sportpalast before a packed crowd on February 18, 1943.
Acknowledging that Stalingrad had been an “alarm call of destiny,” he incited the audience to a high pitch of excitement, challenging Germans to carry on.
He asked the hysterical crowd whether they believed in their Fuehrer and total victory. An ear-splitting “Ja!”—“Yes!”—was the reply.
Goebbels screamed, “Do you want total war? Do you want it more total and more radical than we could ever imagine today?” Whereupon pandemonium broke out. “Now, Volk,” Goebbels screamed, “arise and storm, break loose.” Goebbels asked the German people to drink the Kool-Aid, and they did.
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On November 18, 1978 in Guyana, South America, 900 people—at the behest of leader Jim Jones—drank grape Kool-Aid mixed with poison, and died. Several articles appeared in psychiatry journals after the Jonestown incident. One was called “The Cult Leader as Agent of a Psychotic Fantasy of Group Death,” another “The Group Psychology of Mass-Madness.”
Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. After initial success, historians agree that the tide of war shifted irrevocably against Germany by the Fall of 1942 and that the German military and Nazi leadership were perfectly aware of this situation.
In his Nuremberg memorandum, General Alfred Jodl summed up: “Early than any other person in the world, Hitler knew and sensed that the war was lost. Hitler, however, was unwilling to negotiate, preferring a fight unto death.
Michael Geyer states (2002) that the German machinery of destruction and annihilation went into high gear “at the very moment the war was lost.” In the last four months of the war in 1945, over 400,000 German soldiers died per month. This was one of the most concentrated incidences of mass slaughter in the history of the human race. The genocide of one's own people.
Yet in 40 years of reading, I don’t think I’ve ever heard scholars describe German participation in the Second World War with terms like those used to describe the Jonestown case—“psychotic fantasy,” “masochistic group death,” “mass madness,” and “collective pathological regression.”
Why do historians—avoid using these terms? Why is it so easy for people to describe Jonestown as a form of collective psychopathology, yet so difficult to use this term in relationship to the German case?
It is estimated that 8 million Germans died in the Second World War—military personnel and civilians—a number that makes Jonestown seem trivial. What a profound case of collective psychopathology this was! How reluctant we are to say that psychotic delusion lies at the core of the historical process; that sacrificial death in the name of the nation-state is best described as a form of masochistic submission.
Joseph Goebbels delivered his most famous speech at the Sportpalast before a packed crowd on February 18, 1943. Acknowledging that the Stalingrad debacle in 1942 had been a great “alarm call of destiny,” Goebbels incited the audience to a high pitch of excitement, challenging Germans to carry on.
He asked the hysterical crowd whether they believed in their Fuehrer and the total victory of German arms. An ear-splitting “Ja!”— “Yes!”—was the reply. Goebbels screamed, “Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, more total and more radical than we could ever imagine today?” Whereupon pandemonium broke out. “Now, Volk,” Goebbels screamed, “arise and storm, break loose.”
Goebbels asked the German people to drink the Kool-Aid and they did. A perfect example of masochistic group death or collective suicide.
The papers on Jonestown conclude that a charismatic leader can inspire his followers to actualize a psychotic and co-created fantasy of masochistic group death. Group members heroically choose to die rather than be crushed by enemy forces closing in. The leader is like a pied piper who leads the community of the faithful precisely where they have “unconsciously directed him to lead them.”
This is precisely what occurred in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. |