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The fifty years since the rise of Hitler and Nazism have not dimmed the horror of the Holocaust—the destruction of 6 million Jews and “the other Holocaust” of 9 to 10 million dissidents and other Nazi undesirables. So appalled do we remain at Hitler's Final Solution that our concern here with examining the functioning, the survival of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in that dread era may appear an overrefined academic pursuit.
Yet, in both the mourning and the contemplation of the linguistic mockery of the “final solution” as actually the ultimate horror, there is an ultimate task which is singularly in harmony with that of psychoanalysis at its best—as Freud put it, the task is to understand the meaning, the reason in the irrational.
A flock of questions arises, some pertaining to the Third Reich itself: How was it that Hitler's bombastic rages and thrust for violence, could activate so much of the cross section of German society—the working people, the middle class, the intellectuals, the many professions, including those whom Mitscherlich (1949) described in his Doctors of Infamy. This was also an issue that Fromm, the emigre, addressed in Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, before the United States had even entered World War II.
How was it that Hitler's manifest psychopathology, as indeed some apprehension of it existed at the time, was to be thought of as a tool for making changes in Germany by those with influence who backed him there? The answer is still being worked at, as the very recent book by Matthias Schmidt (1984), entitled Albert Speer: The End of a Myth endeavors to cast some light on.