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The author of this volume is a Norwegian psychiatrist and a criminolo-gist, who is at present Research Associate with the Dept. of Psychiatry at Columbia University.
One of the minor blessings which the end of the war brought was to dry up the deluge of the half-baked, pseudo-scientific books which purported to psychologize and psycho-analyze our enemies. We had endless volumes on what makes the Germans a race of paranoids, a set of gangsters and homosexuals; what makes Mussolini so fat and his voice so loud, etc. etc. I sincerely hope that the volume under review is the last of the lot, because it certainly is not any better.
It is a small volume but sheds far less light than heat than even a volume of its smallness ought to. It is in the same class as the ones which appeared prior to 1945. It is the usual re-hash of fact, fancy, fiction and superstition with some psychiatric jargon and misapplication of sound psychiatric principles.
The author for 155 pages is busily psycho-analyzing and psychologizing the “personalities”, the “minds” of the leaders of Hitler Germany together with the arch-traitors, Quisling and Laval. But he goes further. He wants to analyze and study the mind of the “German people”, whatever that is. I do know there are about 70 million German citizens. The author goes to it blithely with a flourish of ego, superego, complex and all the rest, with talk of environment and social factors, etc. He manages to