National Psychology, National Socialism, and Analytical Psychology: Reflections on Jung and anti-semitism Part II

It is interesting to note that Hitler did not regard Germany as being composed purely of ‘Aryans’. Rather, he hoped to increase the Aryan proportion of the population through genetic selection, deportation, and extermination. But, as I mentioned in Part 1, throughout Hitler's writings it is clear that there is a pronounced nationalistic as well as a racial component in his thinking. (This is also true of nineteenth-and twentieth-century anti-semitism in general—see Marrus (1987) on the Dreyfus Affair.)

Re-reading Hitler confronts us with a coldly paranoid logic. Hitler regarded all history as consisting of struggles between competing nations for living space and, ultimately, for world domination. The Jews, according to Hitler (who got it from Lueger), are a nation and participate in these struggles with the principal goal of world domination. Hitler thought that this was because the Jews did not possess living space, an identifiable, geographical locality. Therefore, it is the world or nothing for them. In fact, for Hitler, the nationalism of the Jews is ‘de-nationalization, the inter-bastardization of other nations’ (quoted in S. Gordon, 1984, p. 94). The Jewish nation achieves its goal of world domination by de-nationalizing existing states from within and imposing a homogeneous ‘Jewish’ character on them—for instance, by its international capitalism and by its equally international communism. So, in Hitler's thinking, there is a tussle between wholesome nationhood and its corrupting enemy, the Jews.