THE NAZI MIND

A playbook for totalitarianism with echoes in today’s headlines.

British historian and documentarian Rees opens by recounting a meeting with an unrepentant veteran of the Waffen SS, who believed that the Nazi regime had marked a golden age in German history and that “the Jews had been a ‘problem’ that had to be dealt with ‘one way or another.’” It is exceedingly difficult, Rees holds, to shake true believers from beliefs that, however evil or misbegotten, help separate “them” from “us,” speaking to the fundamental instinct of humans to form in-groups and then identify others as members of out-groups. Hitler was a master of mass psychology, and he began with the chillingly familiar deployment of conspiracy theories, helped along by German exceptionalism: Our army was made up of the world’s best soldiers, the thinking went, and so it must have been the fault of some enemy within that we lost World War I. Though Hitler probably didn’t know the physiology involved, Rees credits him with knowing how to play the amygdala to incite anxiety and fear, further dividing the German people into us-and-them tribes. Other factors that shaped the “Nazi mind” included the certainty of the political and financial elites that they could control Hitler; the omnipresence of officially sanctioned protection rackets; the exploitation of racial animus and privileging of “pure” Germans; and the leveraging of religion to provide legitimacy for state authoritarianism. Altogether, providing the necessary substitutions, the phenomena Rees describes are depressingly familiar, and signs of that fearful, vengeful, all-destructive mind are all around. As Rees observes, meaningfully, “Everything is more fragile than we think. That is the central message that I have taken from my work.” It is, and it’s the takeaway from this book as well.

A timely exploration of how the unthinkable becomes normal.