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It is striking to the observer that the things of which the Nazis accuse their enemies—particularly the Jews—are precisely what they themselves are doing. They first projected certain inclinations of theirs onto their enemies, and this very projection made it possible for the projected wishes to 'return'. Thus Nazis now are committing deeds which otherwise would probably have been inhibited by anxiety. Moellenhoff investigates education in Nazi Germany as it is used to induce the new generation to perform the necessary projection.
This induction becomes effective through a concomitant goading of infantile narcissism, rooted in the trust in an inaccessibly powerful father, whose inaccessibility is assured by threats of castration and death. Thus 'demons' of anxiety and guilt feeling are created which, in their turn, are projected onto enemies. The author's analysis of the mechanisms in Nazi education is extremely interesting, even if we do not agree with his speculations about the part played by the 'death instinct' in this anxiety and guilt feeling. Unfortunately he neglects basic problems: for example the question of how the urge for world domination (which urge is much discussed by Moellenhoff) comes into being at all, or what conditions enable it to become effective, or the problem of what a 'nation' actually is. Moellenhoff frequently treats a nation as though it were an individual, whereas advantages and disadvantages of new ideologies are very different for different parts of the same nation. This neglect, it is true, is admitted by Moellenhoff himself: 'In historical movements and events, many factors play their part that I purposely had to neglect.'