GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY: Part II

As I speak about the genocide of the Jews—murder of six millions human beings—I’ll use two terms. The first is the Holocaust. The second is The Final Solution, shorthand for the Nazi’s terminology: the ”Final Solution to the Jewish problem.”

Let’s enter the strange world of Hitler’s thought and Nazi ideology. As I share these ideas, you may think to yourself, “This is unbelievable. No one could believe such bizarre ideas.” Well, the ideas of the Nazis were only as bizarre as the reality these ideas brought into being.  We’ve grown too accustomed to the face of the Holocaust, forgetting what a strange, weird, grotesque event it was.

My task today is to explain or reveal the thought processes that led to the Holocaust, the ideas and ideology that generated the behavior. What were the underlying motives—fantasies—that gave rise to this extraordinary project resulting in the murder of six-million Jews?

The objective of the Final Solution was to remove Jews from Germany, Europe and the Soviet Union. However, apart from killing Jews, the Nazis also tortured and brutalized them. I won’t beleaguer you with details. Documentaries are available on the Internet. What needs to be explained is not only why the Nazis thought it necessary to exterminate the Jews, but the reasons for the extreme acts of violence and sadistic forms of behavior inflicted upon Jews throughout the Final Solution.

Let’s establish at the outset that everything done by the Nazis to the Jews—was done for no reason at all. This fact is hard to accept. People assume Jews must have done something to elicit such intense hatred, sadism, and murderous acts. There must have been a reason. Perhaps they were too rich, too successful, or whatever. Neither Hitler nor Himmler nor Goebbels---the architects of genocide—ever thought or spoke in these terms. What’s more, the vast majority of Jews killed were impoverished peasants—no threat whatsoever.

I often ask educated people to guess how many Jews there were in Germany in 1933 out of a population of 73 million. I get estimates of two million, five million, ten million. One well-known anthropologist guessed twenty million. The actual number of Jews in Germany in 1933 was 550,000, less than 1% of the population.

Despite 120 years of Freud, people continue to believe human behavior is governed by “rational” causes: The Holocaust was such a massive and massively destructive event, it must have arisen out of something real. Nazi Germany is an excellent case study showing how psychoanalysis can explain immense historical events. The Holocaust was undertaken based upon a collective delusion. Adolf Hitler, by virtue of ideas or fantasies about the Jews he shared with the German people, conveyed this delusion and enacted its premises.

Hitler’s fundamental idea was that Jews were intent upon destroying German culture, the German nation, and Western Civilization. Jews were hated and condemned by virtue of Germans’ conceptions of the nature and character of Jews—and by virtue of what they imagined Jews wanted to do to the German people.

Hitler developed a theory about the nature of Jews. He believed their destructive nature was inherent in their genetic make-up. This meant the will to destroy was contained within every single Jew.  Each and every Jew presented a danger. It didn’t matter if this Jew was male or female, young or old. Every Jew inherited traits that caused Jews to wish to destroy Germany and civilization itself. Since Jewish traits could not be altered, extermination was the only solution, which meant cutting things off at the root: killing adult Jews, but also Jewish children who otherwise would pass their genes along to the next generation. Better a final solution—eliminating Jews from the face of the earth.

There’s an extraordinary documentary on YouTube, Wannsee Conference (1984), providing insight into how the Nazis thought and spoke about the Jews. This film, based on notes taken by Adolf Eichmann, accurately depicts what took place at the meeting.

Fifteen high-ranking government officials gathered on January 20, 1942 in a villa on the shores of a Berlin Lake. Led by Nazi chief Reinhardt Heydrich, officials met to decide the fate of 11 million Jews. The files of Eichmann, the “Jewish expert,” contained voluminous statistics on Jews in every European country. Discussions centered around defining who was and was not a Jew, the precise number of Jews in each country, and the processes of bureaucratic coordination required to transport and murder eleven million Jews.

The men sat at an elegant table in a room resembling the boardroom of a major corporation. A buffet is served during the course of the day-long discussion. However, combined with a scene that could occur in any boardroom, there are endless conversations about murdering Jews. Heydrich proposes that his colleagues kill—not most of the Jews in Europe, but every single one of them, eleven million according to Eichmann’s count. The men are obsessed.

The Nazi officials portrayed in the film seem dignified and respectable. Yet they speak without apparent shame about how they are going to accomplish the necessary and important task of murdering 11 million Jews. Indeed,  conversations are interspersed with cynical laughter and snickering—as the men contemplate the fate of the Jews.

The project was initiated and authorized by the man at the top, Adolf Hitler. His wish or desire was that Jews be removed from the face of the earth. The purpose of the meeting was to decide the most effective or efficient way of fulfilling or accomplishing Hitler’s desire.

Their behavior is not, however, a manifestation of “obedience to authority.” The men are highly motivated and committed. They share Hitler’s aspiration, embracing and internalizing his wish to exterminate the Jews. Hitler’s dream became their dream. They were determined to make Hitler’s dream come true.

One may be skeptical that intelligent men believed the fantastic ideas or theories about Jews put forward during the meeting. I’m not an expert on psychosis, but those of you who are psychiatrists may have had experience with highly intelligent paranoid schizophrenics who develop elaborate, complex theories.  Freud wrote a famous case study about one such individual.

Nazism was collective paranoia. However, although these men talk incessantly about murdering Jews, they don’t appear psychotic. Rather, they resemble business managers estimating revenue and profit for the next quarter. Revenue and profit are measured, however, in terms of the number of dead Jews they can produce rather than money.  What can one say about men possessed by a psychotic delusion yet who seem “normal?”

From the earliest days after the First World War, Hitler was haunted by the specter of Jews as a disease within the body politic that could lead to the death  of Germany. The source of this disease was the Jew, Jews, or the Jewish race. Hitler framed his ideology as "either-or." Either the "racial tuberculosis would thrive and Germany would die out;” or it would be "cut out of the Volk body" and Germany would thrive.

Given Germany’s disease, the first task of a German politician was diagnosis—disclosing the cause. In Mein Kampf (1923) Hitler wrote that efforts of ordinary German politicians were condemned to sterility because they "blindly ignored the virus." Hitler staked his claim to leadership based on his capacity to diagnosis and cure Germany's illness. People would follow a leader who "profoundly recognizes the distress of his people," works to attain "ultimate clarity regarding its nature"—and then "seriously tries to cure it."

Every distress, Hitler declared, has "some root or other." It was therefore not enough to doctor around on the circumference of the distress,” and trying from time to time to “lance the cancerous ulcer." It was necessary to penetrate “to the seat of the inflammation—the cause." Unless this cause was identified and removed, ”no cure was possible."

Richard Koenigsberg, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT OF LECTURE: "GENOCIDE AS IMMUNOLOGY."

I present a method for studying the language of political leaders to reveal the unconscious fantasies that generate destructive forms of societal behavior like war and genocide. I focus on Hitler, who conceived Germany as a body politic consisting of the German people as cells of this body. Jews were pathogenic organisms—source of a “disease within the body of the people”. Hitler claimed that Germany possessed an immune system that automatically destroyed alien or not-self cells. Jews were conceived as bacteria, virus and parasites—cells whose continued presence within the German organism would lead to its death.

The Final Solution was as a struggle to destroy Jewish pathogens, thus to save the life of the German nation. I examine the case of Donald Trump, who similarly asserted that the presence of a certain class of people within the body politic would lead to national destruction. Trump identified “Mexican rapists” as the primal danger, requiring construction of a “wall” to prevent these alien cells from entering the body politic.

hy have psychiatrists not developed a concept of collective psychopathology? Over 200 million people died in the 20th century as a result of war and genocide. One would imagine that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts would enter the arena to explore the causes and meanings of collective forms of violence and mass-destruction. There is profound resistance toward exploring pathological behavior that is “normative.” This resistance perhaps stems from our attachment to countries as sacred objects. Political mass-murder is undertaken by nations. We seem unable to face the reality that the most extreme forms of violence are performed in the name of a beloved object. If we wish to “awaken from the nightmare of history”—we need to go where human beings have not gone before by exploring the relationship between violence and love. Why are the most self-destructive forms of human behavior undertaken in the name of mother-countries?