Something in us rebels against using the term “masochistic group death” to describe the Nazi case--equating what occurred at the end of World War II to what happened to Jim Jones’ followers (please click link above on Political violence as Collective Psychology to learn more about Jim Jones and Jonestown. 

Why do we hesitate to conceive of Nazi Germany as a vast, pathological cult? Perhaps because Nazism is a subset of a wider cult in which we all participate: the cult of the nation.

Nazism revolved around worshipping the German nation.  Hitler declared to his people, “We want to have no other God, only Germany.” Everything Hitler did, he did in the name of his nation and its people. Nazism represented an extreme instantiation of the ideology of nationalism. 

As we move into the domain of nationalism, our inclination to use the language of psychopathology weakens. We hesitate to characterize a soldier’s willingness to go into battle (when national leaders ask him to do so) as “masochistic submission.” We prefer to say that soldiers go to war so out of a patriotic impulse: willingness to defend one's nation and sacrifice one's life if necessary.

The success of Hitler and Goebbels was based on their use of the language of patriotism and national honor. They did not ask Germans to “submit” to the German nation. Rather, they ordered them to become "obedient unto death."

Obedience is honorable because this form of behavior was done for the sake of the German nation. A phrase like "submission to Germany" would be unthinkable. Soldiers and civilians were asked to sacrifice their lives in defending their  country.  Death in warfare was positioned as it always has been: a praiseworthy and noble deed.

As long as we view death on the battlefield as noble, it's difficult to view warfare through the lens of psychopathology. We do not empathize with Jim Jones and have barely a clue what the “Peoples Temple Movement” was about. Therefore, when we analyze Jones and his movement—the mass deaths that occurred at Jonestown—we have no trouble using terms like psychotic fantasy, mass madness and masochistic group death.

But while we are horrified by the destruction that Hitler brought about, we nevertheless empathize with concepts such as national self-sacrifice and dying to defend one’s country. This is the language of an ideology that has dominated political life throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Though recurring political violence produces massive destruction, we hesitate to use terms like psychotic fantasy and mass madness. If we use these terms, then we must acknowledge we have been living within a psychotic fantasy; that madness permeates our normal cultural world.

Love of country and willingness to sacrifice for one’s nation remain among civilization’s highest ideals. Yet it was precisely these ideals that generated destruction and self-destruction in Nazi Germany. Warfare is not separate from civilization’s highest ideals. If we wish to diagnose the disease that gave rise to epidemics of mass murder in the 20th century, we need to acknowledge the link among societal ideals, collective forms of violence—and political self-destruction.