Click here for information on ordering The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism A truly bold and provocative treatise. —Political Psychology (Journal)   Click here for information on ordering Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology The best critical analysis in English of Hitler's thought. —Colin Day   Click here for information on ordering Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture A thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the interplay of unconscious phantasy and cultural phenomena. —Thomas Ogden, M.D., author of The Matrix of the Mind   Click here for information on ordering Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War A psychological inquiry of great depth and tragic urgency. —Walter A. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University

When I ask educated people including scholars (non-historians) to guess how many Jews there were in Germany in 1933, their guesses range from three-million to even twenty-million (a very prominent anthropologist). In actuality, there were 550,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, substantially less than 1% of the population.

People find it difficult to imagine that the Jews were killed for no reason at all, that is, for reasons that were purely psychological.

Hitler stated that the liberal Weltanschauung in its deification of the single individual must lead to "the destruction of the people." National Socialism, on the other hand, desired to "safeguard the people" if necessary even "at the expense of the individual."

Hitler posed the question, "What is life" and responded by asserting, "Life is the Nation." Individuals had to die, but "Beyond the life of the individual is the nation."

According to Ernest Becker, human beings attach desperately to symbolic systems that contain the promise or possibility of "living on" after one dies. The ego attaches to an ideology, equating self-perpetuation with perpetuation of the ideology with which the ego identifies. Human beings bind to "immortality systems" that they defend hysterically and violently.

For Hitler, Germany was the immortal object with which he identified. Denial of death took the form of attempting to create or forge an indestructible body politic that could live forever.

We now understand what Hitler meant when he said that National Socialism strived to "safeguard the people as such, if necessary at the expense of the individual." The term "the people" has nothing to do with actual human beings.

Rather, this term symbolized the idea of a national community that could live forever. Nazism meant renunciation of individual life in the name of devotion to an immortal community. Individuals come and go, but "a people could last forever.”

Driven by the denial of death and wish for immortality, people identify with their nations as "vesture for the eternal." Human beings aspire to fuse with this object: bind their small bodies to an "omnipotent" body politic.