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Making An
Obedient Mass
The Nazis
and the Occult
by D. Sklar
The Germans are vigorously
submissive. They employ philosophical reasonings to
explain what is the least philosophic thing in the world,
respect for force and the fear which transforms that respect into admiration
---Madame de Stael
It is too easy to say that the German soul was predisposed
to totalitarianism. Even if the people were inured to submissiveness through
iron discipline for generations, they were never, before Hitler, genocidal maniacs.
Since World War II, several books have appeared which, while not dealing
directly with the Nazis, are of invaluable aid in explaining how ordinary
people can be transformed into automata, devoid of conscience or reason. They
help us to understand, not only the Nazis but millions of disciples of
movements in Western countries today who, almost overnight, are weaned from
their customary behavior and attachments and
indoctrinated with irrational beliefs. They are The True Believer by
Eric Hoffer, The Mind Possessed by William Sargant, and The Rape of the Mind by Joost Meerloo.
What is the formula for producing pliant followers?
Take people, not wholly preoccupied with subsistence, who despair of being
happy either in the present or in the future. 'They feel the sharp cutting edge
of frustration. Either through some personal defect or because external
conditions do not permit growth, they are eager to renounce themselves, since
the self is insupportable.
Many German men were in this position at the end of World War I. They came home
to a civilian life without purpose, in which they had no part. In the chaos and
collapse, vast armies of uprooted people felt threatened by the war's economic
and social aftermath. National Socialism gave them a chance for a fresh start.
As Eric Hoffer points out:
People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot
find a worthwhile purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual
career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and
a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted
and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices
of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in
the self can be good and noble. 'Their innermost craving is for a new life-a
rebirth-or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride,
confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy
cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join
the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit
collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride,
confidence and purpose by identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements
and prospects of the movement.
To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole
self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke
out of their individual resources.
The movement, in turn, encourages self-renunciation. It
does not attract the individual who believes in
himself, nor does it care to; on the contrary, he is precisely the individual
whom it ridicules. It popularizes the idea that the private person who finds
his own satisfactions is halting the progress of civilization. But to the
person with the unwanted self, unable to believe in himself, the movement
provides something larger to believe in. As Hitler pointed
out: "Monkeys put to death any members of their community who show a
desire to live apart. And what the apes do, men do too, in their own
manner."
The movement also provides justification. To those who find no meaning or
purpose in life, it says: "The world is out of joint, not you" or
"The world that most people inhabit is an illusion.
"No longer alone in its misery, the frustrated mind now has
company, which includes even those who protest that they are happy, because it
is taught to see through that so-called happiness.
As one Nazi, Karl-Heinz Schwenke, a tailor, described
it:
I had ten suits of my own when I married. Twenty-five years
later, when their "democracies" got through with me in 1918, 1 had
none, not one. I had my sweater and my pants. Even my Army uniform was worn
out. My medals were sold. I was nothing. Then, suddenly, I was needed. National
Socialism had a place for me. I was nothing -- then I was needed.
The movement also provides a suitable outlet for the
pent-up rage which frustrated people feel, against themselves and the world. It
fans that rage and honors it. The believer's rage may
actually increase in proportion to what he has had to give up to become part of
the movement: his former life, his friends, his family, his privacy, his
judgment, sometimes even his name and worldly goods. He is willing, even eager,
to make these sacrifices and more, of course, because by making them he can
slough off the undesirable self. He receives, in return, an artificial sense of
worth. His stature grows through involvement with the group. He is assured that
he is great, one of the chosen.
SS men were held together by the idea that they were a sworn brotherhood of the
elect. Their mystic rituals gave them special obligations, some too abhorrent
to contemplate, but also special privileges.
The believer becomes a fanatic. As a frustrated person, incapable of acting in
his own best interests, he never had a firm grip on reality. He can enter into
the fantasy life of the movement and act on behalf of impossible dreams, which
impose less risk on his fragile ego than he would encounter if he were to
tussle with personal hurdles. He gets a sense of omnipotence, too, from
tackling world-shaking tasks.
Running away from an acceptance of his own nature and the world as it is, the
believer is prone to credulity. He believes because it is impossible. He can be
persuaded by the irrational and led by the nose by charlatans. It is easy for
him to become irresponsible, since he is not following his own will.
Rudolf Hoess, commandant of
Since life has been irremediably spoiled for the believer, he has relatively
little hesitation about spoiling it for others. This gives him an advantage. He
can be unscrupulous under the disguise of idealism. His self-righteousness
permits him to convince himself that he is destroying people for their own
good. Josef Goebbels felt it his duty "to
unleash volcanic passions, outbreaks of rage, to set masses of people on the
march, to organize hatred and despair with ice-cold calculation." Eric Hoffer explains such inhumanity:
It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our
worthlessness we do not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than
others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. We hate then the whole world,
and we would pour our wrath upon the whole of creation.
There is a deep reassurance for the frustrated in witnessing the downfall of
the fortunate and the disgrace of the righteous. They see in a general downfall
an approach to the brotherhood of all. Chaos, like the grave, is a haven of
equality. Their burning conviction that there must be a new life and a new
order is fueled by the realization that the old will
have to be razed to the ground before the new can be built. Their clamor for a millennium is shot through with a hatred for
all that exists, and a craving for the end of the world.
This recalls Alfred Rosenberg's argument that "the
denial of the world needs a still longer time in order to grow so that it will
acquire a lasting predominance over affirmation of the world," and his
equation of the Jew with world affirmation.
To be bored is also to be potentially an easy mark for a movement. It provides
the meaning and purpose which are gone from the fife of the isolated
individual, burdened with freedom. As one young Nazi put it just before World
War U, "We Germans are so happy. We are free of freedom."
What sort of social milieu is it that breeds people who want to be free of
freedom?
Precisely that which has increasingly prevailed since the nineteenth century: a
mass society in which the individual is atomized and counts for very little. He
stands completely alone. His ties with the community, the family, the kinship
group have been broken. Paradoxically, he needs them more than ever, because
individual life becomes increasingly absurd and incoherent the more mass
society advances.
Uprooted from village and ancestral loyalties and shifted to the anonymous
city, the individual suffers culture shock: The old values are out of place in
the hostile, competitive world. As an isolated person, no longer part of a
settled group whose norms he accepted, he is uncertain and empty-unless he is
an independent thinker or a creative spirit, in which case he may feel himself well
rid of the influence of the group. But with the encroachment of mass society,
it is less and less likely that he will be able to or create. A philologist,
specializing in Middle High German, described the situation candidly to Milton
Mayer, They Thought They Were Free:
... suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as
the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences,
interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports,
bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in
the community, the things in which one had to, was "expected to"
participate that had not been there or had not been important before.... it
consumed all one's energies…. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think
about fundamental things. One had no time… 'The dictatorship, and the whole
process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an
excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway… Most of us did
not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to.
Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about--we were decent
people-and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and
so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national
enemies," without and within, that we had no time to think about these
dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.
Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?
Through mass education and mass communication, the
individual is propagandized and molded into
conditioned responses, like one of Pavlov's dogs. His innate ability to figure
things out for himself atrophies, with predictable consequences.
To soften the pain of emptiness, he is drowned in entertainment,
which offer him hero-surrogates who are able to live for him. Eternally
occupied either as hustler, machine, or spectator, he seldom has a moment to
notice that he cannot think, feel or live; that his life is petty, shabby, and
totally without meaning; that his authorities are deceitful and manipulative,
his society disintegrating, his relationships hollow, and worst of all, that
nothing is being done to remedy these horrors.
The irony is that the individual in mass society has only himself. The
authority of his parents has been undermined. He has moved from the soil where
he was born and experienced certain local allegiances. His work is inhuman and
mechanical. No meaning, responsibility, or dignity attaches to it. It requires
his participation, but actually develops passivity. It regiments him, and he
remains an apathetic machine. He is dependent on his job, and in periods of
economic insecurity, glad to have it, but he feels diminished by it.
His relationships lack intimacy and affection. He can no longer trust anyone.
He must have answers that will explain the problems of his life. Yet, because
he has been trained not to think for himself, he faces a void, and his life
becomes unendurable.
Human beings can't stand being unimportant. Most will readily accept the idea
of further and further "massification" the
greater leveling and equality which is evidence of
greater democracy-as a sign of progress. Mass society is symbolized by
modernism and egalitarianism, two popular myths of progress. In
Sixty thousand men have outwardly become almost a unit,
that actually these men are uniform not only in ideas, but that even the facial
expression is almost the same. Look at these laughing eyes, this fanatical
enthusiasm, and you will discover how a hundred thousand men in a movement
become a single type.
What does the movement offer the faithful?
Nothing less than a new life. His rebirth is sometimes
symbolized in a new name, exotic and foreign, to make the change of identity
tangible. Now there is certainty. He knows exactly what is expected of him.
Within a circumscribed set of rules, all is permitted rage without guilt,
relief from responsibility, the assertion of superiority over others.
He knows what action is required of him in the present and can look forward to
a millennial future as well. There is no more ambiguity. The conflicts,
tensions, self-criticisms, and doubts that assail the rest of us are washed
away, and he enjoys a state of equilibrium. He is no longer a passive
participant. Righteously, he looks down at those whom he formerly felt to be
superior. The same society which scorned him now is forced to recognize that
his beliefs are important. The mass man becomes a power in the world. Rudolf
Hess, the melancholy student who became deputy leader of the Third Reich,
remained grateful to the end. As he testified at
It was granted to me for many years of my life to live and
work under the greatest son whom my nation has produced in the thousand years
of its history. Even if I could I would not expunge this period from my
existence. I regret nothing. If I were standing once more at the beginning I
should act once again as I did then, even if I knew that at the end I should be
burnt at the stake. No matter what men do, I shall one day stand before the
judgment seat of the Almighty. I shall answer to him, and I know that he will
acquit me.
In exchange for this miraculous transformation, the
individual willingly subjects himself to a thorough brainwashing, through which
his old beliefs and personality are eradicated. He may never be aware that he
is being brainwashed. It may happen instantly or gradually, but he puts
absolute trust in the leaders of the movement. The group becomes the good
father he may never have had, the proxy whom he depends on to solve all his
problems, the authority to which he owes obedience. From the moment he is
captured, he identifies with the group and begins to think as they do. Their
common undertaking insures that he will never have to shoulder any personal
blame for failure or shortcomings. So long as he behaves according to the
rules, he will be accepted. The rules are clear and consistent, or seem to be.
The Germans were used to compulsion from early childhood. Rudolf Hoess's reminiscence is fairly typical, and makes his
subsequent acquiescence in running
It was constantly impressed upon me in forceful terms that
I must obey promptly the wishes and commands of my parents, teachers, priests,
etc., and indeed of all grown-up people, including servants, and that nothing
must distract me from this duty. Whatever they said was always right.
These basic principles on which I was brought up became part of my flesh and
blood. I can still clearly remember how my father, who on account of his
fervent Catholicism, was a determined opponent of the
Reich Government and its policy, never ceased to remind his friends that,
however strong one's opposition might be, the laws and decrees of the State had
to be obeyed unconditionally.
From my earliest youth I was brought up with a strong awareness of duty. In my
parents' house it was insisted that every task be exactly and conscientiously
carried out. Each member of the family had his own special duties to perform.
The group is beyond criticism. Its realm is sacred. Even if
a man has convictions which run counter to those of the movement, he can still
be led to act in a manner which contradicts his own beliefs, either because his
will is weak or because he is the victim of certain techniques which cause his
will to be transcended. He can say, with Hermann Goring, "I have no
conscience! Adolf Hitler is my conscience!" or
"It is not I who live, but the Fuhrer who lives in me.
"
It is important to examine these techniques if we are to understand how people
can be made to follow a Fuhrer wherever he may lead.
The proselyte is isolated at first. No free exchange with unbelievers is
allowed. He is cut off from ties of loyalty with the past. His family and
friends are discredited. Feelings of exclusivity are encouraged.
His mind is barraged with repetitive propaganda until it is made weary. The
indoctrination may go on uninterruptedly for sixteen hours or more a day, for
weeks on end. Even if the proselyte rejects what he hears, argues against it,
or falls into apathy, the Pavlovian conditioning ultimately seduces him, and he
surrenders to the training.
Mechanical drill, rhythmical marches, dance rituals, and repetitive chanting
are also effective in breaking down resistance.
The English psychiatrist William Sargant could better
grasp how Hitler was able to bring even intelligent Germans into "a
condition of intellectual and emotional subjection" through "mass
rallies, marching and martial music, chanting and slogans and highly emotional
oratory and ceremony" after witnessing the subservience of certain African
tribes to their leaders and seeing their powerful initiation rites:
Whether in a "primitive" tribe or at school or in
the army, the process is essentially the same. Severe stress is imposed on the
new recruit, by subjecting him to arbitrary and frightening authority, by
bewildering him, abusing or ill-treating him, by telling him that his old
values and sentiments are childish, and so inducing in him a state of unease
and suggestibility in which new values can easily be drummed into him, and he
recovers his self-confidence by accepting them. The initial conditioning
techniques may have to be reinforced from time to time by further conditioning
procedures, and follow-up indoctrination is considered most important in all
types of religious or other conversion.
Once the proselyte has been broken down and sensitized, his
thinking and feelings can be manipulated, and delusions implanted. He falls
under the suggestive power of the group and accepts its distortions as
objective truth.
Most people are suggestible and can be hypnotized against their will, obeying
commands even when they go against the grain. Dr. Sargant
observes:
It is not the mentally ill but ordinary normal people who
are most susceptible to "brainwashing," "conversion,"
"possession," "the crisis" . . . and who . . . fall readily
under the spell of the demagogue or the revivalist, the witch-doctor or the pop
group, the priest or the psychiatrist, or even in less extreme ways the
propagandist or the advertiser.
In the suggestible state, the proselyte may attribute
divine powers to his leader and accept dogmas which he might have rejected in a
more normal state. Some of the men closest to Hitler, for example, acknowledged
that they believed in his divinity. Himmler's
masseur, Felix Kersten, relates that he once answered
the phone and heard Hitler's voice before passing the phone on to Himmler, who exclaimed: "You have been listening to
the voice of the Fuhrer, you're a very lucky
man." Himmler told Kersten
that Hitler's commands came "from a world transcending this one" and
"possessed a divine power." It was the "Karma" of the
German people that they should be "saved" by "a figure of the
greatest brilliance" which had "become incarnate" in Hitler's
person.
And even disbelievers and scoffers can also come to accept irrational
dogmas-through contagion, imitation or sudden conversion.
Beliefs have the power to infect. The onlookers at a mass rally, where emotions
are being stiffed up, often feel the same intensity of excitement that the
participants feel. We can "catch" ideas that are completely foreign
to us. In early Judaism, for example, there was no concept of a demonic force.
God was responsible for both good and evil. But with influences from
Hitler's early speeches were so mesmerizing that even
people who were repelled by his ideas felt themselves being swept along. The
playwright Eugene Ionesco mentions in his
autobiography that he received the inspiration for Rhinoceros when he felt
himself pulled into the Nazi orbit at a mass rally and had to struggle to keep
from developing "rhinoceritis.
"
We "catch" ideas, too, because we want to be like others,
particularly when we want not to be our despised selves. If we're satisfied, we
don't need to conform, but if we're not, we imitate people whom we admire for
having greater judgment, taste, or good fortune than we do. Obedience itself is
a kind of imitation. Through conformity, the person who feels inferior is in no
danger of being exposed. He's indistinguishable from the others. No one can
single him out and examine his unique being. Conformity, in turn, sets him up
to be further canceled out as an individual, to have
no life apart from his collective purpose. This gives a movement tremendous
power over the individual. Even intelligent people are not immune from the
desire to conform. Heinrich Hildebrandt, a schoolteacher who was anxious to
hide his liberal past, joined the Nazi party, and to his own disgust, found himself "proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I
'belonged,' and the pleasure of 'belonging,' so soon after feeling excluded,
isolated, is very great…. I belonged to the 'new nobility.' "
Hoffer observes:
Above all, he [the true believer] must never feel alone.
Though stranded on a desert island, he must still feel that he is under the
eyes of the group. To be cast out from the group should be equivalent to being
cut off from life.
This is undoubtedly a primitive state of being, and its most perfect examples
are found among primitive tribes. Mass movements strive to approximate this
primitive perfection, and we are not imagining things
when the anti-individualist bias of contemporary mass movements strikes us as a
throwback to the primitive.
Sudden conversions, which may happen through hypnosis,
emotional shock, despair, or exhaustion, can bring people into movements.
William Sargant believes an apparently well-balanced
person, "dominated by hypnoid and slightly suggestible brain
activity," may suddenly give up his "previous intellectual training
and habits of rational thought," to accept "ideas which he would
normally find repellent or even patently nonsensical." Sargant
is convinced that a heightened state of suggestibility accounts for many cases
of demonic possession, or for sudden salvation. The history of mysticism offers
instances of extreme opinions instantly reversed. The critical faculty is
suspended, and what was formerly believed to be black is now white, and
vice-versa.
Once the believer has been taken over by one of these means, it is difficult
for him to revert to his former self. In a sense, collective totalitarian
thinking can be compared with schizophrenia. In both, there is, says Joost Meerloo in The Rape of
the Mind, a "loss of an independent, verifiable reality, with a
consequent relapse into a more primitive state of awareness." In both, thought
and action are arrested at an infantile level of development.
Since the totalitarian denies man's dynamic nature, views him simply as a
submissive robot, and provides this robot with one single, simple answer to all
the ambivalence, doubts, conflicts, and warring drives within him, all attempts
to dislodge the official clichés clash with those same clichés. The believer's
isolation in a fortress of other delusional thinkers gives him no opportunity
for clear thought or contact with other influences. He is immune to reasonable
propositions. He is convinced that he is reasonable, and that his enemies are
not. Having burned his bridges behind him, broken with his family and old
friends, he cannot go back. He is committed to his involvement in the group. To
renounce it would be to repudiate himself. It would
also mean giving up all the psychic benefits of omnipotence. His personality
and prejudices have become crystallized around a set of actions and dogmas.
They are irreversible. Any external stimulus which threatens to penetrate his armor and make him see the absurdity or injustice of his
position is rationalized to further harden his rigidity. He has joined the
movement at least partly because it handed him stereotypes in place of his vague
notions and saved him from having to think things out for himself. Any stimulus
which evokes a symbol causes a reflex action. With his weakened conscience and
consciousness, he can no longer respond spontaneously, however he may appear to
be doing so. He has become the movement. All thoughts and feelings that are at
odds with it are snuffed out. This is what gives the believer the air of a
one-dimensional man. He lacks depth. There is a limited range of possibilities
open to him. If one wants, therefore, to convert him back to an autonomous
human being, one finds that there is nobody at home. His mind is shut tight
against new ideas. The slogans and ready-made judgments he has absorbed stretch
forward into infinity. The believer is protected for all time. Within his sacred
circle, all other knowledge is taboo. One might say that the most telltale sign
of a believer is his refusal to examine ideas other than the divine
commandments which have been implanted in him. One can't get to him because he
will not and cannot engage in dialogue. What is particularly maddening about
him is that, sterile and unimaginative, he masquerades as an exemplary man, an
objective guide eager to spread enlightenment.
The ability to exercise his own judgment, having
atrophied, is never restored. Even if he should drop out of one group, he will
quickly seek and find another. Like a drug addict who needs his fix, he cannot
live without his clichés.
At
We need not, however, look as far back as Nazi Germany for examples of people
undergoing personality changes and extreme shifts in ideology. We can learn
from present-day American groups.
END of chapter. (Printed and distributed freely for
research.)
Now back to the Worldwide
Church of God…OIU Vol. 5
Part Two
Please read this book in it entirety.
THE NAZIS AND THE OCCULT
DUSTY SKLAR
DOREST PRESS,
1989
ISBN 0-88029-412-4