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Aug. 14, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:00
1126 The Childhood Origins of World War II and the Holocaust

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The Childhood Origins of World War II and the Holocaust by Lloyd DeMoss read by Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio at www.freedomainradio.com World War II and the Holocaust have been studied by historians and political scientists more than any war in history.
Their conclusions about what caused them are that Germans were simply obeying Hitler, a case of mass hypnosis by one man.
Historians are, rightly, nearly unanimous that the causes of the Second World War were the personality and the aims of Adolf Hitler.
The war Hitler started was one which he alone wanted.
Only one European really wanted war.
Adolf Hitler.
John Keegan.
No Hitler, no Holocaust.
Klaus Fischer Psychiatrists have usually followed the lead of historians, claiming, for instance, that they could find no psychopathology in the Nazi leaders who were given Rorschach tests at Nuremberg.
They were all-too-normal people, and their mass murderers were committed by, quote, well-integrated, productive and secure personalities who were merely obeying orders.
That a theory which posits millions of people choose a leader who promises them they can kill millions of other people only because they were following orders is a pure tautology never occurs to them.
When Eichmann bragged, I laughed that I have killed five million Jews, and psychiatrists claim his statement was normal, It demonstrates not the banality of evil, but the banality of psychiatry.
When states go to war because they reenact the nightmares of child abuse that are embedded like time bombs in their brains as violent alter egos, and if they usually do so when they experience growth panic following an historical period of dangerous new freedom and growth, Then each phase of going to war should betray historical evidence of real childhood traumas being re-experienced.
In order to understand the traumatic nightmares being acted out in World War II and the Holocaust, we will have to first understand in detail the nightmarish terrors of German, Austrian, and Japanese child-rearing at the beginning of the 20th century.
Because more psycho-historical research has been done on Central European child-rearing than on Japanese, we will begin with a detailed description of early child-rearing in Germany and Austria.
We will then more briefly describe Japanese child-rearing and finally show how both nations went to war in the seven group fantasy phases described above, aided by similar sacrificial actions by the Allies that helped produce the war and genocide.
Late 19th Century German and Austrian Child Rearing The first decision German and Austrian parents had to make when an infant was born was whether it should be killed.
Newborns were not in most cases considered human since they did not yet have a soul and so could be killed in a kind of late abortion.
Mothers often, quote, had their babies in the privy and treated the birth as an evacuation, a bowel movement, killing their children by smashing their heads like poultry.
Even the underestimated figures given by officials showed German infanticide at the end of the 19th century as 20%, half again higher than France and England.
Infant mortality in Bavaria, where breastfeeding was rare, was given as 58% and was probably closer to 75%, which means almost every child watched their mothers strangle or otherwise kill their siblings when born.
Mothers were described as being without remorse as they killed their newborn, quote, having their babies in the privy and treating the birth as an evacuation.
Children routinely saw dead babies in sewers, on roads, and in streams as they played.
From early childhood on, German children experienced in direct form the terror of seeing babies killed without remorse by their killer mothers, Imagining that, quote, the babies must have been bad to deserve their fate and embedded in their immagdalen networks both a killer mother alter ego and a bad baby alter ego vowing to always obey their parents and any other authority so that they would not also be killed.
Dix found that Nazis had, quote, particularly destructive mother images And the Oliners found German rescuers of Jews had families that showed them more love and respect than Nazi parents.
Pauls of Germans, at the time, show the majority were also routinely beaten by their fathers, and considered him, quote, absolute law in the family.
We feared him more than we loved him.
That real mothers regularly killed their newborn infants saying they were unworthy of living formed the main source of later German delusions that Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, French, British Americans, and other neighbors were, quote, unworthy of living and must be killed by the millions.
Fifty million, in fact.
An act embedded in their right brains as they watched their killer mothers murder their siblings.
When Hitler said that France, the mortal enemy of our nation, inexorably strangles us, he was not, as most historians assume, just being colorful.
He was expressing his and his fellow Germans' experience of actually seeing their killer mother strangling their infant siblings.
Most of Germany agreed with him that their 1939 attack on Poland that started World War II was defensive, since they were, quote, faced with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation.
The killer mother memory may have been totally in their heads rather than in reality, but it seemed more real than anything outside could be.
And that Jews were for centuries really killer motherists was proven by German convictions since the 13th century that Jews drained children's blood and killed them, called the blood libel by historians.
Luther reflected the widespread German group fantasy by calling Jews, quote,"...thirsty bloodhounds and murderers of children." And German social Darwinists revealed the maternal model for the murder of millions by saying that they were, quote,"...only imitating mother nature who weeds out the weakest ones." Again, a description of the actual German mothers who weeded out some of her newborn infants.
It should not be thought that the killing of newborns was mainly a result of poverty.
In fact, my lengthy study of boy-girl ratios as a revealing index of infanticide, since little girl babies were more unworthy of living than boys, shows more infanticide in wealthier families, and visitors to Germany in the late 19th century reported,
quote, It is extremely rare for a German lady to nourish her own children, and, quote, It would have been very astonishing indeed if a well-to-do mother had suggested suckling her own baby, saying, it is too messy, or they didn't want to ruin their figures, or breastfeeding was inconvenient.
Wet nurses were commonly given the newborn, and more often than not they were killing nurses, termed engelmheren, angel-makers, who were paid to kill off the children sent to them.
The children of the wet nurse would watch their mother briefly, give the new baby her breast, saying,"'Poor, poor little one, soon you will go, soon, soon,' and see the child was dead by morning.
German children who watched their parents send their newborn siblings off to wet nurse Implanted this image in their violent alter egos and repeated their actions in the, quote, resettlement of millions of Jews and Poles and others when they became adults.
Even if the mother breastfed her baby, it was only a few times a day, and the rest of the time it was abandoned to the cradle in a dark room, wrapped in tight swaddling bandages with their mouths, stuffed with Zulp, a linen bag filled with bread and alcohol, so those dying of neglect and starvation ranged from a quarter to a half in their first year of life.
Infants were so routinely hungry that, quote, one rarely encounters a German infant who is fully breastfed.
Those poor worms get their mouths stuffed with a dirty rag containing chewed bread so that they cannot scream.
Children simply were not felt to be human like adults.
Even when they were infants and little children their parents constantly told them that they were just useless mouths to feed.
Rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father's comment that we did not merit it.
Indeed fathers were competitors to their babies for their wives' breasts.
In Bavaria, for instance, where breastfeeding by the mother was uncommon, A man married a woman from northern Germany, and when she had her baby the jealous father told her that nursing her child was swinish and filthy, and that he himself would not eat if she did not give up this disgusting habit.
The phrase applied to children, useless mouths to feed.
It was widely repeated before and during World War II to apply to the wish of Germans and Austrians to kill 30 to 50 million useless mouths in Europe, from Jews to any outside enemy who was attacked.
Their need had nothing to do with anything economic.
As Hermann Göring put it in 1941, This year, 20 to 30 million people will starve in Russia.
Perhaps this is for the best, since certain nations must be decimated.
The same infantile starvation fantasy was evident in many other Nazi notions, such as their supposed need to kill others to obtain more Lebensraum, more room to grow food to prevent imminent starvation, a situation that simply did not apply to Central Europe, which had plenty of resources to increase their supply of food.
Hitler's conviction that Mother Germany did not have enough Lebensraum to properly feed the nation came directly from his memory of his infantile hunger, since mothers in Branau, where he was raised, rarely breastfed their infants.
The shortage of Lebensraum, room to live, had a second source in childhood.
Upon birth, quote, The wretched newborn little thing was wound up in ells of bandages, from the feet right and tight up to the neck, as if it were intended to be embalmed as a mummy.
Babies are loathsome fetid things offensive to the last degree with their excreta.
Babies simply could not move for their first year of life.
A visitor from England described the German baby as, quote, a piteous object.
It is pinioned and bound up like a mummy in yards of bandages.
It is never bathed.
Its head is never touched with soap and water until it is eight or ten months old.
Their feces and urine was so regularly left on their bodies that they were covered with lice and other vermin attracted to their excreta, And since the swaddling bandages were very tight and covered their arms as well as their bodies, they could not prevent the vermin from drinking their blood.
Their parents considered them so disgusting that they called them filthy, lice-covered babies, and often put them swaddled in a bag, which they hung on the wall or on a tree while the mothers did other tasks.
The fear of being poisoned by lice was daily embedded in the fearful alter ego of the baby, and was, as an adult, re-experienced as a fear of Jews being, quote, filthy lice who attempted to infect the pure German blood, and who had to be exterminated to cleanse the German bloodstream.
Germany, Hitler said, had to restore its 1914 borders, quote, to get an influx of fresh blood because the Polish corridor is a national wound that bleeds continuously.
Infancy in swaddling bands was re-experienced.
Poisonous bacilli were sucking out our blood and injecting a continuous stream of poison into our blood vessels.
Nazi house-cleaning of the unfit began early on, with 800,000 children having their blood taken to analyze its purity, and over 70,000 children were exterminated in the first gas chambers and crematorium ovens before any Jews were sent to gas chambers to cleanse and disinfect the nation.
Eventually, Jews and other useless eaters were sent to gas chambers run by doctors claiming they were filthy lice who attempted to infect the pure German blood, who had to be exterminated to cleanse the bacteria that brought about infection.
Himmler explained the childhood origin of the Jewish bacteria delusion as follows, quote, Anti-Semitism is exactly like delousing.
The removal of lice is not an ideological question, but a matter of hygiene.
Hitler himself used to watch for hours, as his own blood was being sucked by leeches, to rid it of poison.
Jews were rounded up and made into bad selves, shit babies.
Putting them into overcrowded death camps and telling them, you'll be eaten by lice, you'll rot in your own shit, all are going to die.
Jews were called pestiferous basilisk carriers, Made to live like lice-covered babies, forced to lie in barracks, like they themselves were forced to live in their swaddling bands, awash with urine and feces, forced to eat their own feces, and finally dying in showers covered with their excrement.
Repeating their parents, curses at them as shit babies.
Their guards told them, you'll be eaten by lice.
You'll rot in your own shit, you filthy shit face.
As they killed Jews, guards told them what they imagined their mothers felt as they killed their newborn siblings.
Because you're dirty, you have to die.
They were all bad shit babies.
They had to die.
If they were not killed, Nazis said they would gobble up the breast of Germany.
The abandonment of children was not limited to sending them to wet nurses.
Children were given away and even sold to relatives, neighbors, foundling homes, and even traveling scholars to be used as beggars with the rationalization that this was so they could be drilled for hard work and learn discipline.
If German newborns were allowed to live, they were then subjected to the most horrifying, traumatic tortures that can be inflicted upon children, every detail of which becomes indelibly imprinted on their early amygdala fear system and then re-inflicted upon, quote, enemies during the war and the Holocaust.
The restrictions of the first year of tight-swaddling were continued in subsequent years by putting them in various restraint devices, steel-stayed corsets worn by both sexes, steel collars and backboards strapped to the waist, all to ensure they would not become tyrants.
The endless encirclement fears of childhood were implanted in German alter egos and re-experienced in the constant fears of Germany itself being encircled by enemies, even when, as with the British and Soviets in the interwar period, they, quote,"...continually denied all charges of encirclement." Hitler, from the first, used swaddling-slash-restrained language all the time to describe Germany's emotional plight.
Germany is bound head and foot by peace treaties, and they must go to war in order to breathe more freely.
Restrictive, abandoning, German child-rearing guaranteed sacrificial war when they were adults.
Even monkeys who are reared in isolation and restriction grow up vicious and self-mutilating.
The traditional German obsession with children's feces continued after swaddling ended by the regular use of enemas as a maternal domination device.
A fetish object often wielded by the mother or nurse in daily rituals that resembled sexual assaults on the anus, sometimes including tying the child up in leather straps as though the mother were a dominatrix, inserting the two-foot-long enema tube over and over as a punishment for There were special anima stores that German children would be taken to in order to be fitted for their proper size of animas.
Mothers had, quote, an intensive fear of the notorious smell of the small child, which made them give daily animas, quote, to prevent them from becoming a relentless house tyrant.
The ritual, stab in the back, was a central fear of German children well into the 20th century, and they learned never to speak of it, but always to think about it.
Enema fears, of course, were re-experienced in the stab-in-the-back group fantasy that Germans kept referring to when they imagined the Versailles Treaty was agreed to by German socialists without Germany ever having been defeated in World War I. Sexual molestation of children was routine and considered normal.
When infants were removed from their cribs, they usually slept in the family bed and either were made part of the sexual act or regularly witnessed it close up.
Blach reported that the seduction of children in Germany was, quote, very widespread, And German doctors reported, quote, nursemaids and other servants carry out all sorts of sexual acts on the children entrusted to their care, sometimes merely in order to quiet the children, sometimes for fun.
Freud's patients, and Freud himself, said they were seduced by their nurses who, quote, put crying children to sleep by stroking their genitals.
Little Hans slept with his mother for four years and told Freud his mother said if he touched his penis she would cut it off.
Priests used children for sex then, too.
Both boys and girls regularly were raped in schools by teachers and older students, and there were even special schools espousing pedagogical eros, the benefits of teachers using students for sex, quote, to help learning.
Plus, of course, most young girls and boys were sexually assaulted as servants and apprentices.
There were all kinds of obedience rituals in German families that were designed to make the child always good, that were commented upon by outsiders at the time as being particularly violent.
Kind words were rare in German homes, and most Germans remembered, quote, no tender word, no caresses, only fear, during childhood.
Children were regularly placed on a red-hot iron stove, if obstinate, tied to their bedposts for days, thrown into cold water or snow to harden them, forced to kneel for hours every day against the wall on a log while the parents ate and read,
and frightened by parents dressing up in terrifying ghost costumes The so-called Necht Ruprecht, and pretending to eat up and kill them for their transgressions.
Scheck sums up the effects of these terrifying devices.
Quote, Most children had been so deeply frightened that their demons of childhood persecuted them at night, and in feverish dreams, for their whole lives.
The apocalyptic group fantasies of Nazism were direct results of these childhood nightmares.
It was brutal beating, beginning in infancy, that visitors to Germany most commented upon at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the mother far more often the main beater than the father.
Luther's statement that I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one is misleading, since it implies disobedience only was the occasion for beatings, whereas mere crying or even just needing something usually resulted in being punished.
Dr. Schreiber said,"'The earlier one begins beatings, the better.' One must look at the moods of the little ones, which are announced by screaming without reason and crying, inflicting bodily admonishments consistently repeated until the child calms down or falls asleep.
One is master of the child forever.
From now on, a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture is sufficient to rule the child.
Havridic found 89% of parents admitted to beating little children at the beginning of the 20th century, over half with canes, whips, or sticks.
The motto of German parents for centuries was, Children can never get enough beatings.
They were not just spankings, they were beatings with instruments or whippings, like Hitler's daily whippings with a dog whip, which often put him into a coma.
As Führer, Hitler used to carry a dog whip with him as he gave orders to be carried out.
It is not surprising that German childhood suicides were three to five times higher than other Western European nations at the end of the nineteenth century, fears of beatings by parents being the reasons cited by children for their suicides.
No one spoke up for the children.
Newspapers wrote, A boy who commits suicide because of a box on the ears has earned his fate.
The beatings continued at school where, quote, We were beaten until our skin smoked.
Children could be heard screaming on the streets each morning as they were being dragged to school by their mothers.
The schoolmaster, who boasted that he had given 911,527 strokes with the stick and 124,000 lashes with the whip, to students, was not unusual for the time.
Comparisons of German and French childhoods in the late nineteenth century found, quote, no bright moment, no sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home with mother love and care in the German ones, with, quote, sexual molestation and beatings at home and at school consistently worse in the German accounts.
Ender's massive study of German autobiographies of the time found, quote, infant mortality, corporal punishment, and cruelties against children, were so brutal that he had to apologize, quote, for not dealing with the brighter side of German childhood because, it turns out, that there is no bright side.
Other studies found most Germans remembered, quote, no tender word, no caresses, only fear, with childhood, quote, so joyless, so immeasurably sad, that you could not fathom it.
When Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the German people today lies broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world, Both he and his reading audience read this not as political metaphor, but as the real kicks of their parents and teachers and real memories of lying broken and defenseless.
The tortures of childhood were far more traumatic and constant than the later studies of authoritarianism ever imagined.
There was a good reason that Germans and Austrians spoke so often about their Kinderfeindlichkeit rage toward children.
And it is this rage that is embedded in the early violent amygdalen alter egos which is inflicted upon others in World War II and the Holocaust.
The child-hitting hand was even a symbol of Nazi obedience.
Since the Nazi salute endlessly displayed the open palm of their beating parents as they fused with them, flush with opioids.
Ghosts from the nursery, embedded by extremely insecurely attached children, were displayed everywhere in Nazi Germany.
To imagine tens of millions of people just obeying Hitler as though there were no inner compulsion to inflict their nightmarish earlier childhood tortures on others is simply absurd.
Japanese Child Rearing Before World War II All of the routine child abuse described above for Central European families was common in Japan at the turn of the 20th century.
Infanticide was so common it was accepted, quote, as a form of family planning, killing either boy or girl newborn babies in murders called thinning out.
As siblings watched their mothers bury the newborn, they, like the Germans, imagined it was because they were weak, bad babies, embedded this fear in their alter egos and revived the fear of being killed by enemies when their society was changing so fast during their industrial and cultural expansion.
Despite the fact that Japan had grown economically three times as fast as the US during the interwar period, They claimed before attacking Pearl Harbor that the attack was necessary because, quote, Japan is getting weaker and the enemy is getting stronger.
We won't be able to survive unless we attack.
Even though no nation was threatening to conquer Japan in 1941, their Amygdalen fearful alter memory of watching their mothers commit infanticide by the millions Told them, as they put it.
The very experience of weak little Japan was now a matter of life and death, and they were about to be, quote, strangled.
Japanese babies, at birth, were wrapped with a futon and encased in a restrictive Ejoko box so they could not move, and kept tied up in it much of the time for three or four years, as late as the early 20th century, producing constant fears of being restricted and encircled identical to those of Germans and Austrians.
All the other abuses described above were in constant use by Japanese parents.
Beating and the burning of incense on the skin as routine punishments, cruel bowel training with constant enemas, Frightening children with ghosts?
Oh, bucke! Kicking, hanging by the feet, giving cold showers, strangling, driving a needle into the body, cutting off a finger joint, putting the child outside the house at night, dressing up as a ghost to frighten the child, and telling visitors to, quote, take this child away.
We don't want it. But it is in the practice of the sexual use of children that earlier Japanese excelled even more than Germans and Austrians.
Imperial incest was common, and Japanese fathers until recently would often marry their daughters after the death of their wives, considering incest a praiseworthy practice.
Samurai warriors, priests, and other elite historically favored using young boys for anal-pederistic sex, finding them preferable to sex with their subordinated wives.
Boy, geishas, and prostitutes were rife until recently.
Because Japanese husbands so rarely come home at night, going to gaisha or other women for sex, the mothers are desperately lonely and so routinely co-sleep with their children, skin to skin, nude, dakinei, and co-bathing until they were grown up.
Even today, many Japanese mothers masturbate their children in public, in bed, quote, to put them to sleep, and during co-bathing sometimes promising to let them have intercourse with them if they do well on their next school test.
Childhood sexual abuse, I have found, leads nations more to self-destructive than just the violent behavior instilled by beatings.
Japanese childhood therefore contained at least as much abuse and neglect as Central European, and as these two areas contained the most powerful democratizing political nations in the world in the 1920s, they experienced the most fearful growth panic by their populace in reaction to the democratic freedoms introduced by their transitional democracies, and reacted by fusing with their killer motherlands and going to war.
In the following sections, we will first explain in detail the seven group fantasy phases of going to war and creating the Holocaust for Germany and Austria, then more briefly for Japan, and then watch the rest of the world both contribute to and defend itself in the most deadly, sacrificial war in history.
American and British child abuse before World War II Although, of course, America and England had almost entirely given up infanticide and tight-swaddling, their child abuse rates for the people raised in 1900 to 1920 who fought World War II were still considerable.
The overwhelming majority of toddlers were beaten with hard objects, and teachers flogged children daily.
I detail the historical evidence for this physical abuse in my book, The Emotional Life of Nations.
But there is one aspect of child abuse that was routine in the early 20th century that must be estimated from current abuse figures, the sexual use of children.
The best U.S. studies today are those of Wyatt and Russell, based on recent face-to-face interviews which found 38% and 45% respectively of women and 30% of men had memories of serious sexual abuse during their childhoods.
UK figures for today are even higher, with 59% of women and 27% of college men admitting to being sexually abused.
Two-thirds of British parents today still hit their helpless infants in their first year, and the majority are still smacking their four-year-olds several times a week.
In addition, the routine sexual use and brutal beating of children in British schools in the 20th century are well documented.
All these US and UK child abuse rates must have been much higher in the 1900 to 1920 period for those who fought World War II, So that one must conclude that the majority of people in these nations were seriously abused as children and then, like the Germans, precipitated and fought the war for internal, emotional motivations.
Phases 1 and 2 Weimar Freedoms and Fears By the end of the 19th century, Germany and Austria began to achieve a new surge of industrialization and the beginnings of a democratic political system that were the result of improving child-rearing in a minority of their families to produce a new, more advanced psycho-class, in particular in cities where working-class and Jewish families concentrated.
German Jewish families, quote,"...constituted one of the most spectacular social leaps in European history, and produced some of the most fiercely independent minds in Europe." In the Weimar phases, therefore, Jews and workers were the most progressive in child-rearing and politically, and were therefore the target of the reactionary majority in political activity.
This reactionary majority attacked progressive parliamentary activities and whatever the authoritarian alter-egos saw as threatening to the rigid systems of domination that their parents practiced—civil rights, free press, materialism, arguing with each other in political parties, and women's rights.
Scholars like Goldhagen have assumed, without evidence, that antisemitism was somehow passed on in German genes from one generation to another.
Or they say antisemitism was somehow in German society, which is just a tautological way of saying it is common because it is common.
The most convincing study of Weimar attitudes towards Jews is Johnson and Rubin's interviews with 3,000 Germans asking about prejudice in the 1920s and 1930s.
They were surprised to find German Jews felt rather safe until quite late in the Nazi period, that they felt, quote, love and gratitude toward Germany and were, quote, fanatical patriots who were totally assimilated because, quote, There is no Jewish race, only German citizens of Jewish belief.
Hitler himself told his staff in the 1920s and early 1930s to keep their violence towards Jews at a minimum, even after his takeover in 1933, so that, quote, only 3% of Jews said that their families had unfriendly or mostly unfriendly relations with their non-Jewish neighbors until after 1935.
As we will see shortly, when Germans and Austrians needed, quote, internal enemies, in 1936 during Phase 5 and the majority switched into their violent alter egos and began shipping Jews to concentration camps, Jews said, quote, it came to us as a tremendous shock that this anti-Semitic policy was introduced.
It took us such a long time to grasp this new direction.
It was unthinkable because we were so utterly German.
Most German group fantasies during the Weimar years centered on inner emotional threats from the progress of a new generation, a new psycho class, such as from women's liberation.
Because women could vote, and many even held professional jobs, Germans began what I have elsewhere termed a purity crusade against the new woman, pictured in many Garbo and Dietrich films as phallic vampires, vamps, flappers, dressed in unisex clothing with her hair cropped short and threatening men's masculinity.
Women in Europe began saying they had rights to sexual pleasure even before marriage.
Hitler spelled out his fear of sensuality in Mein Kampf when he declared, quote, Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays in Weimar Germany must be cleansed.
Males who were dominated by killer mothers in childhood had to dominate women as adults or they risked becoming helpless children bound to predatory women again.
So as women gained new freedoms during the Weimar, men felt weak again.
Modernity was almost always represented as a woman in political cartoons.
Hitler called modern cities, quote, abscesses on the body of the people, places where all evils, vices, and sicknesses appear to unite.
Nazis were not supposed to allow their wives to work, and they dominated them like they dominated other threatening enemies, blaming, quote, the weak males of modern society who had abdicated their responsibility to rule their women with an iron fist for being infected by effeminate humanism.
Peter Gay portrays Weimar culture as producing, quote, exuberant creativity and experimentation, but also as producing, quote, anxiety, fear, and a rising sense of doom, what Erich Fromm termed fear of freedom, and what Mahler terms, quote, separation and individuation, anxiety.
Democracy was seen as a beast of a thousand heads, And Weimar Purity Crusades called for emancipation from emancipation, a restoration of authoritarian rule, a rebirth of Germany that would unify and cleanse them, a national enema that purged them of their more progressive bad selves.
The conquest of Germany by the Nazis had nothing to do with reactions to economic distress.
In the 1930 election after the Depression hit, the Nazis only polled 18% of the votes.
The poor and unemployed actually voted less for Hitler than the middle class and the wealthy.
Merkley's study of Nazi stormtroopers found, quote, that those who grew up in poverty showed the least prejudice against Jews.
In fact, the Nazis received their highest vote return before the Depression hit.
Hitler was thoroughly disinterested in economics.
Germany, both in the late 1920s and 1930s, enjoyed a higher standard of living than any other European nation.
Economics were secondary in the Nazi takeover.
German problems in the 19th and 20th centuries were those of all democratizing nations, a lagging psycho-class majority that was driven to pathological authoritarianism by too much independence.
Even the Pope backed Hitler's takeover.
It was only as Germans experienced too much freedom and their growth panic took over late in the 1920s and then occurred again During the 1930s recovery that all the ghosts from the nursery began to return and they plunged further and further into their need for self-destructive sacrificial wars and genocidal racism.
They built new highways in Germany under Hitler and invented the Volkswagen, both of which could have produced new freedoms, new trade, new prosperity.
So to avoid this dangerous individuation, They instead took the money people paid down for their Volkswagens and built tanks in the VW factories and then used the new highways to go to the borders and provoke self-destructive wars.
Phases 3 and 4 Fission and Fusion As Germany's purity crusade successfully halted women's rights and reversed political, social, and sexual freedoms, other nations began to be split off and portrayed as killer motherlands, and an all-powerful killer Germania began to be seen as fused within group fantasy.
The source of the new violent nationalism was the growing inner feelings of disintegration, due to too much freedom and independence, needing the defense of fusion with and clinging to the killer motherland.
"'You are nothing!
The Volk is everything!' became the central Nazi fantasy, and the fusion with Germania, the killer Mutterland, was so powerful that when Goebbels asked the Germans, Do you want total war?
They screamed, yes!
Yes! Nazi plans for war, with Fischendorf neighboring states preceded by years his unleashing of the genocide upon Jews.
Although both sadists and masochists dominated in Nazi quarters, sadists dominated at first, then the more self-destructive actions of the masochists who killed German Jews.
At first, only, quote, bad children, the handicapped, the sick, and other weak babies and useless eaters, were sent to the first gas chambers and killed by doctors, quote, to cleanse the German national body.
By 1933, The Nazis seized power by carrying out their first faked incident, the fire in the Reichstag, started by a lone Dutch syndicalist, by throwing all the leading German communists into prison, suspending civil liberties, and passing the enabling act that created Hitler's dictatorship.
Jews were not made the target of violence since when Goebbels called for a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops, he had to call it off after a few days because, quote, it had failed to arouse popular enthusiasm.
The initial central task of the Nazis was not persecuting Jews.
It was creating a powerful Killer Mutterland, a Vuck that made Germans feel that they refused to With the killer mother alter egos in their heads.
This fused state was termed Gleichschaltung, a total national unity.
Within a year of Hitler's assuming power, there were six times as many stormtroopers, numbering over four million warriors, dwarfing the German armed forces restricted to a mere 100,000 by the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler himself, of course, shared all the deadly child abuse described above prevalent in German and Austrian families.
Most biographies of Hitler follow Binion's statement that, quote, although breastfeeding was rare in Branau, where he was born, his mother must have, quote, overfed, overprotected, and overindulged Adolf, making him a spoiled mother's darling.
Neither Minion nor the over fifty other historians who claim Hitler was overfed and overindulged give a single historical citation to back their claims.
That he was tightly swaddled is historically accurate, and that his father regularly kicked and whipped him until he lost consciousness no doubt formed the childhood imprinting incidents for his fears that Germans are exposed to the kicks of all the world.
And, of course, for the physical kicking and whipping of his enemies.
But that Hitler was regularly starved as he lay tightly bound in his swaddling clothes, like other Bavarian infants of the time, and that this was imprinted in his lifelong delusional fears of imminent German starvation, is denied.
Hitler's words about the need to go to war revealed his and his nation's bizarre fears of starvation, As early as in Mein Kampf, he explained that the reasons that they needed to expand the motherland was so that the German mother might nourish her offspring sufficiently.
A fear reaching back to all those starving, swaddled babies, and to the ones killed because the mother didn't feel like nursing them.
The source of his violent political program in infancy is obvious in his choice of imagery.
How can we feed the nation?
The answer lies in the cradle.
The child does not ask when it drinks whether the mother's breast is being tortured.
The notion that Adolf was overly nursed and overindulged by his mother is without a shred of evidence.
Like all war leaders, he was fused with her, claiming, my only bride is my Mutterland.
And he personally acted like a usual German-Austrian mother while speaking to his audience, screaming and bounding on tables and threatening others with death.
One German who knew Hitler said, Hitler is the most profoundly feminine man he has ever met, and there are moments when he becomes almost effeminate.
His listeners knew him as a perfect representative of their own killer mothers, Goebbels saying they, felt like a child in the arms of a mother with him.
As we pointed out earlier, Hitler saw his mother as a death-dealing Medusa, keeping both his mother's and Medusa's pictures near his desk, and saying of the painting of Medusa, Those are the eyes of my mother.
That he was fused with her deadly eyes is shown by his practice of rehearsing in front of a mirror his own death-dealing stare that he believed was, like his mother's, all-powerful and that everyone remarked it was hypnotizing.
Even sexual abuse was likely for Hitler.
Like other Bavarian children, he slept in his mother's bed, at least for his first six years, and witnessed the sexual intercourse she had when his father was home.
I consider it likely that he experienced maternal incest since his father was away so much, and since his mother was so lonely.
He was often afraid his sperm would poison the blood of his female partner.
He heard voices telling him to rescue his mutterland from the Jews who had violated her, and was said to talk by the hour about depraved sexual customs.
And he asked his female partners to, quote, undress and squat down over his face where he could examine her at close range so she could urinate on him.
The fusion of Germans and Austrians with their killer Mutterland was aided by the fact that at the end of the World War I they were not invaded and occupied by the Allies so they could retain the group fantasy that they were still fused with their powerful, grandiose killer mothers.
This was one basis to their objections to the Versailles Treaty's penalties, since emotionally they felt they had not lost the war.
Even the terms of the armistice, quote, which required rapid German withdrawal behind the Rhine, had the unanticipated effect of tightening the German army's grip on the nascent Weimar Republic, strengthening their delusional fusion.
The projection of the killer motherland into other nations, even those that were not unfriendly, was everywhere evident, as in Heidegger's declaration that Germany, under Nazi rule, could at last, quote, save the world from annihilation by America and Russia.
The fission of all bad-mother qualities onto neighboring nations left Hitler as Germania's savior.
People felt, quote, We all really loved him.
We felt that he could do no wrong.
He had the image of a savior.
We were ecstatic when Hitler came to power.
German mothers marched through the streets, chanting, We have donated a child to the Führer!
And Hitler Youth sang, We are born to die for Germany.
They longed to, quote, return to the bosom of the Mütterland, in death, saying, as they went to war, quote, If I die, mother, your pride will conquer your pain because you have the privilege of offering a sacrifice.
Fusion with Germania made one, quote, freed from all sins, no longer a single suffering man, one with the Volk, And fusion with an all-powerful Germania was necessary because their child-rearing made them feel so weak that they had to switch into their alter-ego trances and die as Nazi soldiers to prove they were stronger and more devoted to her than anyone else.
They were heroes who, like enemies, became sacrificial victims to the killer motherland.
The response by Germany's neighbors to Nazi plans to go to war was highly influenced by the kinds of child-rearing they had experienced.
Eastern European nations, including the Soviet Union, have been shown by Puhar and Devin to have had even more abusive and abandoning mothers than Germany, including tight swaddling, routine starving, incest, beating, submissiveness, and humiliations.
The result was that these eastern nations, plus, of course, Austria and Italy, at bottom admired the Nazis for their violence and even joined them in their violent ventures.
Lenin and Stalin's Red Terror produced even more millions of deaths to clean Russia of all vermin, fleas, and bugs than Hitler's genocide of Jews.
The French had somewhat less abusive childhoods, but one central childhood factor determined what they were to reenact in World War II. The majority were sent at birth to a wet nurse, whether the parents were rich or poor, abandoned and rarely visited for years at a time.
Like German wet nurses, French wet nurses were called killer nurses, since a majority of infants sent to them died from mistreatment.
French films between the wars were filled with themes of abandonment, and France's reaction to Germany's threats during this time was to create their own abandonment by other nations, who might have been willing to join them in military defensive moves, plus cutting French defense expenditures rather than rearming when they saw the German military expanding.
Daladier admitted That only a firm military policy could stop Hitler, but was at a loss how to do it, since he and the French were acting out their infantile abandonment.
Hitler responded to French self-isolation as if it were an invitation to Germany to invade.
As one historian put it, if a military alliance had been constructed in 1936 instead of 1939, a European war might have been averted, And Hitler himself admitted to Speer.
If the French had taken any action, we would have been easily defeated.
British child rearing early in the twentieth century had evolved beyond German and French, so that swaddling and sending to outside wet nurses were not common.
Yet if the mothers could afford nannies and governesses, they turned the little children over to them to raise.
And before long sent them to public schools where they were fagged, made slaves of older boys, including even sexual slaves, and starved and bullied into subjection.
Beating for, quote, discipline rather than outright abandonment was the focus of British child rearing, beginning in infancy.
British discipline was actually constant training in being humiliated by bully parents, bully nannies, and bully schoolmates who fragged them and used them sexually.
So when Hitler, the bully dictator, appeared on the international scene and threatened to beat them up once more, quote, Halifax praised Nazi Germany as the bulwark of Europe.
And, as Beisel summed up in the period, quote, Britons came to admire Hitler and Nazism's authoritarianism.
Halifax met Hitler and thought he was, quote, absolutely fantastic.
In the House of Commons, Lord Winterton said, quote, The German nation possesses a mental and physical virility seldom exceeded in the world's history.
Churchill admired Hitler, surely the most clinically grandiose narcissistic leader on earth, calling him an indomitable champion who could restore our courage.
Hitler returned the praise, saying he admired England's ability to kill and dominate, vowing, What India was for England and the territories of Russia will be for us.
Britain chose Chamberlain, quote, who was badly bullied as a boy, as their leader, who was compelled to arrange for Britons to be humiliated and badly bullied by the Germans who are, he said, bullies by nature.
They had been trained to, quote, take it, to consider themselves courageous to be bullied without defending themselves, And even conducted a peace ballot before the war in which half the nation voted not to defend themselves if attacked militarily by another nation.
A majority of Oxford students even passed a resolution that they would, quote, in no circumstance fight for king and country, and over 100,000 British men signed a pledge to renounce participation in any war to defend Britain.
The Labour Party leader, George Lansbury, promised, quote, to disband the army and disband the air force in case of war.
Stanley Baldwin declared it was time for Britain to, quote, proceed with unilateral disarmament, and Anthony Eden visited Hitler in Berlin with a plan to allow Germany to triple their army and build hitherto forbidden tanks and artillery.
Unbelievably, Eden thought that France, not Germany, was a threat to peace, saying it was essential that, quote, we must discourage any military action by France against Germany.
As British historian A. L. Rose put it, we were doing Hitler's work for him.
As early as 1931, Chamberlain said, The whole of Europe is locked in a suicidal embrace which will probably drown the lots of us, and he proceeded to help carry out that suicidal embrace.
At Munich, when Hitler was handed over the western part of Czechoslovakia, England gave him tens of thousands more Jews to persecute.
Since, quote, the German army was still unprepared for war, during the Sudeten negotiations, German generals offered to rebel against Hitler if the British would not sign the Munich Agreement, but the British were not interested.
Hitler was the delegate of every nation in Europe, quote, they all became Hitler by identifying with him and encouraging his aggression.
He was their delegate, the out-of-control raging child in them.
Kagan summarizes the effects of the period before the war, quote, Had the democracies not disarmed, both materially and psychologically, but remained responsible and alert, Hitler's plans of conquest would have been ludicrous.
Neither he nor any other German leader could have posed a danger so long as France and Britain chose to prevent it.
Beisel captures the motivations behind Britain's policy of appeasement, quote, Millions liked what they saw and could participate in Nazi militarism and Hitler's arrogance by proxy.
Hitler, of course, took the British support as an invitation to rearm and move towards war.
Britain's actions in reaching out its hand to Germans were surely elements in Hitler's decision to strike.
As Churchill said, If ever there was an avoidable war, It was the Second World War.
The outer circumstances of Europe did not require war.
The inner alter egos of the European psyches did.
When England guaranteed Poland's frontiers and then had to carry out their promise to go to war, Chamberlain at first backed down, then reluctantly declared Britain at war with Germany only because, as Beazle puts it,"...the British had gotten a war they unconsciously wanted.
It would allow them to discharge their own aggressive feelings, which had been driven by an unconscious need to relive earlier childhood humiliations." Phase 5.
Fracturing off of bad self enemies.
As noted above, children, not Jews, were for several years the central scapegoats killed by the Nazis as bad self enemies.
As early as 1929, Hitler mused that, if a million children a year are born in Germany, and 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest are eliminated, the end result might be an increase in strength.
He was listening to his inner alter ego, reflecting fearfully upon the families he saw around him killing off their useless eaters.
And his own mother?
She lost four of her little children.
He set his personal doctor, Theo Morell, to study the euthanasia of children, and Morell reported back advising the killing of handicapped children because they were, quote,"...disgusting." Children were sterilized as early as 1937 as part of the racial sterilization of gypsies and others,
in all about 400,000 sterilized as, quote,"...worthless." By 1939, long before Jews were being killed in quantity, Disinfection, cleansing of, quote, unfit children, those born with deformities,
those late in being toilet trained, those who were slow learners, began in what was called a euthanasia program, which gave lethal injections of gas in gas chambers and injected chemical warfare agents into the hearts of thousands of children to cleanse the German national body.
Parents or guardians of the children often gave their consent to the murder of these bad children, and there was even a popular movie made of how wonderful their murder was for Germania.
The more, quote, bad self children were murdered, the more fused Germans felt with their killer Mutterland.
By the end of the 1930s, the designation of bad self enemies spread from children to Jews and other useless eaters.
The economic downturn had long ago disappeared, thus disproving the theories that it was economic distress that caused the war and the genocide.
Germans in the middle 1930s were feeling the grandiose high effusion with their killer Mutterland.
Quote,"'At a time when no foreign danger threatened and the national economy was robust, Hitler fulminated about hostile foreign powers and spineless liberals,' But barely said a word about Jewry, although militant Nazis felt empowered to persecute Jews at will.
Although Streicher's Desturmer tabloid called for the annihilation of Jews during the 1930s, Rudolf Hess insisted in 1935, Lawless outbursts against Jews must cease at once.
The Führer forbids Nazi Party members from undertaking unauthorized actions against individual Jews.
In the 1930s, Hitler called for Jewish deportation, and Himmler in 1940 even asserted that, quote, the physical destruction of a people was un-German and impossible.
The problem was, foreign nations didn't want the Jews.
So Nazis complained, quote, all we want to do is to get rid of our Jews.
The difficulty is that no country wishes to receive them.
As the British senior officer said, what shall I do with these million Jews?
Where shall I put them?
Roosevelt turned Jews away as they tried to immigrate into the U.S. He wouldn't even back a bill taking in Jewish refugee children, as the British did.
Newspapers headlined, Power Slam Doors Against German Jews.
Eastern Europeans, also swaddled and horribly abused as children, split off their bad selves and projected them into bad baby Jews who were then senselessly murdered.
One day in July 1941, Half of the population of Judwabny, Poland, murdered the other half, some sixteen hundred men, women, and children.
They gouged out their eyes with kitchen knives, dismembered them.
Infants were pitchforked in front of their mothers and thrown onto burning coals, all accompanied by the shrieks of delight, indeed the laughter of their neighbors.
The steady move from just resentment to mass annihilation of Jews and other bad selves bubbled up from below during the 1940s as Germans, Austrians, and others around the globe fused with their killer Mutterland alter egos, turned off the empathy in their insulas, and heard the Mutterland's voice demand death for all bad selves.
Jews were more and more seen as the poisonous lice that they had been tormented with as swaddled children, lice that could poison their bloodstreams.
As one little German boy said, looking at lice in a museum exhibition, Jewish army, Jewish army.
Even though they were in no way threatened by any of their neighbors, and even though, in 1938, the German chief of staff was opposed to starting any new war, By 1939, most Germans were certain that the enemies that surrounded them, they were really just in their brain alter egos, were about to strike.
On August 22nd, 1939, as van Evere put it, Hitler explained to his generals that we are faced with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation sooner or later.
I think he and his supporters believed this paranoid group fantasy.
Ten days later, he launched his lightning war on Poland, triggering World War II. Phases 6 and 7.
Faking Provocations and Fighting Germany faked many provocations in trying to justify their wars.
From pretending that the single person who began the Reichstag fire in 1933 was the beginning of a national revolution, jailing 100,000 communists and social democrats, to blaming Jews in 1938 for a minor incident where a Pole shot a German diplomat in Paris.
Organizing the violence against Jews on Crystal Night, to putting Germans into Polish military uniforms in 1939, claiming they had attacked them, pretending this had provoked Germany into war.
Göring put the need for faked attacks bluntly when he explained.
The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked.
Hitler, too, was filled with claims about supposed, quote, conspiracies to overthrow the Reich.
All versions of earlier internal alter egos shared by Germans, still wishing they could overthrow their killer mother, still blaming scapegoats for their dissociated, rebellious childhood wishes.
We will not list all these faked provocations here.
Any textbook about World War II can provide many examples.
But the most important faked provocation in starting the war was Franklin Roosevelt's provocation to encourage Japan to strike first with the hidden self-destructive goal that U.S. forces would be tied down in the Pacific rather than be available to fight in Europe.
Since Japan was already fighting a war with China, it was true that, as Admiral Nomura said in 1940, quote, there are few Japanese who want war with the United States.
Therefore, FDR had to take hidden actions to provoke Japan into attacking the U.S. There are by now over 40 excellent scholarly works detailing how Roosevelt chose a group of advisors who created an eight-step program to bring about the so-called unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor.
FDR's program included embargoing oil trade to Japan, which got 80% of its oil from the U.S. and was about to run out in months, carrying out pop-up cruises in the territorial waters of Japan, which he said would keep the Japs guessing if the U.S. was about to attack,
leaving the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor despite complaints from the U.S. fleet commander that it would leave them unprotected, Hiding the fact that Japanese codes had been broken so the attack would appear as a surprise and other faked provocations.
It is no wonder that the Japanese openly spoke of, quote, suicide when they finally attacked Pearl Harbor, saying that it was better to jump off Kiyomosu Temple and commit suicide than be starved to death by the U.S. FDR and his White House advisors literally cheered when they heard their provocations had worked and the Japanese had been provoked to attack.
FDR was cheered by Congress when he announced the new war, and 42% of American soldiers said the U.S. should wipe out all Japanese, civilians as well as warriors.
After the attack, Roosevelt still refused to ask Congress to declare war on Germany.
Many Americans agreed with Senator Harry Truman, who had earlier said of the German invasion of Russia, quote, If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.
In that way, let them kill as many as possible.
Hitler, of course, was reported to be, quote, in ecstasy that the American military would be tied down for years in the Pacific.
Meanwhile, Hitler and the Germans were busy committing suicide in their sacrificial war against every neighbor they could provoke.
Hitler promising parents he would sacrifice ten million German youth, as mothers held up their little ones over the heads of the enthusiastic crowd, as if they wanted to say, you belong to him.
German mothers marched through the streets chanting, we have donated a child to the Führer, and Hitler Youth sang, we are born to die for Germany.
Hitler avoided any peaceful concessions that might limit the blood sacrifices of war, Telling his soldiers, we want war.
I am only afraid that some Schweinhund will make a proposal for mediation like at Munich.
Hitler's speeches, says Beisel, were, quote, filled with images of things collapsing of internal disruption, isolation, disintegration, and sacrifice.
He overruled his military in launching a suicidal attack against the Soviets, Saying they would, quote, collapse within a month and surrender so that winter supplies were not given to the troops.
Grandiosity had overcome reality.
Powerful dopamine infusions of their basal ganglias made them feel high, extraordinarily powerful.
Hitler told German officers that invading Russia, quote, would be like a child's game in a sandbox.
Although, in fact, Soviet tanks, artillery pieces, and aircraft were at least three times as numerous as German.
As one historian put it,"...because Hitler's strategic ends were infinitely expansive, no military doctrine could keep up with his policy in the end." The leading historian on Hitler, Ian Kershaw simply called Hitler's decision to attack so many powerful nations, quote, sheer madness, a death wish for himself and his nation.
Hitler had declared war on the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union, whose combined productive ability was six to ten times that of Germany.
Germans were simply re-enacting their embedded childhood feelings, That they deserved being liquidated because they were, quote, bad.
They were fully in their war trance, possessed by their inner childhood alter egos, solving their childhood despairs, their fears of dying, by choosing to die.
Hitler was their tribal shaman.
He would cure the inner despair of Germans by exercising it through suicidal blood sacrifices.
War was chosen by Germans as a massive suicidal ritual that would quiet their explosive inner voices.
Hitler's gratuitous declaration of war against the US for no reason after Pearl Harbor was particularly suicidal.
Before he invaded Poland, he gave orders that all the Germans who were inmates of mental hospitals should be exterminated.
His speeches during the war contained more suicidal imagery, quote, either we will be the master of Europe, or we will experience a complete liquidation and extermination.
When the end came, Hitler ordered Germany destroyed completely, ordering, it must disappear.
When German women and children sought refuge in Berlin subways, he ordered them flooded.
Finally, the German people in April 1945 continued to carry out the suicidal intent of the war.
As the war wound down, a generalized suicidal mania rippled across Germany.
Hundreds of thousands were gripped with thoughts and talk of suicide as tens of thousands killed themselves in perhaps the largest mass suicide in history.
Lloyd DeMoss is editor of The Journal of Psychohistory, director of the Institute of Psychohistory, and author of seven books on psychohistory, three of which including The Emotional Life of Nations can be found for free downloading at www.psychohistory.com.
This article is Chapter 6 of the forthcoming book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse.
My name is Stefan Molyneux, and I am the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the internet, available at www.freedomainradio.com.
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