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According to conservative estimates, six million Jews were systematically murdered in Europe between 1939 and 1945. There can hardly be any doubt that one man was the driving power and thus, in a moral sense, responsible1 for this mass murder, the uniqueness and magnitude of which is but feebly reflected in the term genocide created to meet the very novelty of the crime. It is of psychological and of historical interest to look for the answer to the question: why did Adolf Hitler kill six million Jews?
No general discussion of anti-Semitism, or of such political or economic rationalizations as have been offered by Hitler himself, by some of his biographers, or by observers and historians of National Socialism, is intended here. The presentation aims solely at investigating the origin of such a violent and all-pervading anti-Semitism in an individual, by psychoanalytic interpretation of biographical data. This case study is no more than a small contribution to the urgent problem of the anti-Semitic character that at present is being investigated on a large scale by qualified experts.2
The main difficulty with this study is the paucity of material about the emotional development of Adolph Hitler. Available data are mainly of three types: factual material obtained by several reliable biographers; the frankly autobiographical sections of Mein Kampf; such utterances in Mein Kampf as reveal some of Hitler's fantasies. To the last category I believe to have discovered a valuable and hitherto unknown addition. At best, the scarcity of recorded and verifiable facts make some