The idea that whole nations can be psychoanalyzed strikes me as dubious, to put it no more bluntly. Let us instead apply Ocaam’s Razor in asking ourselves why it was that Germany, a modern, civilized European nation, succumbed to totalitarianism. We have no need to appeal to Weber or Freud for the answer: It’s right there in the pages of history. As the child is father to the man, the history of Germany up to the 1930s was a major factor in presenting Hitler with his opportunity. Nothing that the Nazis promulgated was novel; eliminationist anti-Semitism, for instance, was a preexisting condition (see Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust). In like manner, authoritarianism had a long pedigree in German history.
More immediately, the impact of defeat in the Great War with all its baneful consequences set the stage for National Socialism. The Weimar Republic was seen by a significant percentage of Germans as the base and shameful offspring of defeat, imposed on Germany by a clique of defeatists: the “November criminals” who’d stabbed the heroic German Army in the back. Therese feelings were exacerbated by the provisions of the peace treaty, “the shame of Versailles, which disarmed Germany, stripped her of territory, imposed war reparations and branded the nation with war guilt. Added to this was a plague of economic shocks: first the ruinous postwar inflation and then the Great Depression. Thus when Hitler embarked on his political career he found his platform ready made for him.
The Republic was undermined from the start by the attitude of various key groups: the officer corps of the Army, the professional civil service and the judiciary. By and large the same people who’d served the Kaiser in these capacities continued in office under the Republic. But they never accepted the Republic in their hearts, having cooperated with it in the postwar period “to prevent the worst from happening”: a communist seizure of power. When the Republic faced its terminal crisis in the early Thirties, these key groups more or less stood aside.
The infinite variability of human nature guarantees that any attempt to place a psychological template over a nation of millions will produce nothing but a crude and misleading caricature. It does have one great advantage, though: relieving its proponents of the hard work of learning and understanding history.
