Digital Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other]

The Cause of Nazism
LdM answers an e-mail

-----Original Message-----
From: Lloyd deMause [email protected]
To: [email protected] [email protected]
Date: Monday, December 13, 1999 9:00 AM
Subject: The Cause of Nazism

>>This other list is now onto Hitler, and the German woman is
>>defending how Hitler turned Germany around and did such
>>wonderful things for Germany.
>>
>> She is saying "Hitler came into power because
>>Germany was going through the same depression as the United States was. Life
>>was tough, very tough. Hitler promised them a good future, and he kept his
>>promise, for quite a while. He was a genius..."
>>
>>Anyone know of any article in the archives on this topic?

>>Any Lloyd article on this that I can direct her to?

I will publish a very long article on the childhood origins of Nazism in the Spring 2000 issue of The Journal of Psychohistory (subscribe by emailing me a postal address). An excerpt is below, showing that the Depression could not be the cause of WWII and the Holocaust (12 years later), and just a bit of the evidence on how horrifying German childhood was:

"War as Righteous Rape and Purification"
by Lloyd deMause

. . . What is, however, widely accepted is that Germans were "under stress," voted Nazi and then turned to violence because of the Great Depression. Numerous detailed studies of Nazi membership all disprove this "economic stress" argument. The "model Nazi party member" joined before the Depression, "his economic status was secure, for not once did he have to change his occupation, job, or residence, nor was he ever unemployed." "The only group affected [by the Depression] were the workers...Yet paradoxically the workers remained steadfast in support of the status quo while the middle class, only marginally hurt by the economic constriction, turned to revolution." Most workers did not vote for the Nazis and of those who did, who "believed in Hitler the magician," most soon felt disappointed. Hitler, in fact, admitted "economics was not very important to him [and] very few Germans had any information about what his economic program actually was." Germans who became violent Nazis came primarily from authoritarian middle-class backgrounds, not from poverty; indeed, "those who grew up in poverty showed the least prejudice" in Merkl's study of Nazi stormtroopers.

. . . If German childrearing practices are not considered as the cause of German mass violence, there is no way to avoid Goldhagen's conclusion that the war and the Holocaust must be due to "something monstrously Germanic...at bottom unexplainable [and not] a product of human decisions." But if German childhood around 1900 is recognized as a totalitarian nightmare of murder, neglect, battering and torture of innocent, helpless human beings, then the restaging of this nightmare four decades later in the Holocaust and war can finally be understood as inevitable.

Historians have avoided researching German childrearing at the end of the nineteenth century. The few that have begun to do the research have found German childhood uniformly more brutal than French and British childhood. A comparison by Maynes of 90 German and French autobiographies of working class childhoods found German far more brutal and unloving, with the typical memory of home being that "No bright moment, no sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home where motherly love and care could shape my childhood was ever known to me." In contrast, "French workers' autobiographies tell somewhat different childhood tales. To be sure, there are a few French accounts of childhoods marked by cruelty, neglect, and exploitation." Yet "much more common are stories of surprisingly sentimental home loves and warm relationships with mothers (and often fathers), even in the face of material deprivation." Maynes found unrelenting child labor, sexual molestation and beatings at home and at school were consistently worse in the German accounts. Most of the research into primary sources on the history of German childrearing has been done by psychohistorians connected with the Deutsche Gesellschaft f=FCr psychohistorische Forschung, the German branch of The Institute for Psychohistory. The two main studies covering nineteenth-century German childrearing were those published in The Journal of Psychohistory by Aurel Ende and Raffael Scheck; both found uniform cruelty and neglect in their detailed review of 154 German autobiographies. Child battering was so common in German families that Scheck concludes, "There is virtually no autobiography which doesn't tell something about violence against children and almost no author who has not been beaten as a child." And Ende's massive study concludes that "nowhere in Western Europe are the needs of children so fatally neglected as in Germany," where "infant mortality, corporal punishment, cruelties against children, the exploitation of working children and the teacher-pupil relationship" were so brutal that he feels he has to apologize "for not dealing with the 'brighter side' of German childhood because it turns out that there is no 'bright side.'"

Visitors to German homes at the end of the nineteenth century found that in general "one feels sorry for these little German children; they must work so hard and seem to lack that exuberance of life, spirits, and childish glee that make American children harder to train but leave them the memory of a happy childhood." In particular, visitors noted the German preference for boys and their maltreatment of girls. Whereas in France and England beginning in the eighteenth century there was "an increasing appreciation of girl children," with parents often openly expressing their preference of having a girl, in Germany even at the end of the nineteenth century girls were resented and uniformly neglected: "From childhood on, the lives these women led were exceedingly harsh...dominated by memories of paternal brutality or negligence...drunkenness and violence was a routine part of life [including] a father's incestuous advances...[and] abuse with sexual overtones at the hands of her mother...beatings and other forms of violent punishment." Germany in general was historically far behind the rest of Western Europe in the education of girls and in woman's rights, so that innovative mothers and hopeful daughters were found far less than in other countries.

German family maxims described the lack of love of mothers toward their children, saying tenderness was "generally not part of the mother's character...Just as she kept her children...short on food and clothing, she also was short on fondling and tenderness...[feeling] the children should...regard themselves as useless weeds and be grateful that they were tolerated." Children were expected to give love to their parents, not the parents to their children: "We always appeared trembling before our parents, hoping that our official kiss of their hands would be accepted..." One boy reported his mother once dropped a word of praise, saying to someone that "He is good and well-liked," so that the boy remembered it all his life "because the words were totally new sounds to my ear." But kind words were rare in German homes, so most Germans remembered "no tender word, no caresses, only fear" and childhood was "joyless," "so immeasurably sad that you could not fathom it." Yet this hatred of children in German families was not something that they felt guilty about. German parents endlessly impressed upon the children their pride in their family atmosphere of hatred. "I don't want to be loved," said one typical father, "I want to be feared!" Another father summed up his feelings as follows:

It is good to hate. To hate is strong, manly. It makes the blood flow. It makes one alert. It is necessary for keeping up the fighting instincts. To love is feebleness. It enervates. You see all the nations that talk of love as the keynote of life are weak, degenerate. Germany is the most powerful nation in the world because she hates. When you hate, you eat well, sleep well, work well, fight well.

GERMAN INFANTICIDE, WETNURSING
AND SWADDLING OF INFANTS

Since German fathers at the end of the nineteenth century spent little time at home, childrearing was overwhelmingly the job of the mother: "The care and training of the children are almost entirely in her hands for the first five years." The mother especially ruled the nursery and kitchen, where the children spent their time, and "she may actually exclude men from these restricted areas" when they were at home. Thus, although most studies of the treatment of infants and young children in Germany stress the admitted brutality and authoritarianism of fathers, the real lives of young German children in the past centered more on their murder, rejection, neglect, tying up and beating by their mothers and other women caretakers.

Infanticide and infant mortality rates at the end of the nineteenth century were much higher in Germany and Austria than in England, France, Italy and Scandinavia. Newborn were not considered in most areas as fully human since they not thought to have a soul until they were six weeks old, and so could be "killed in a kind of late abortion." Women giving birth often "had their babies in the privy, and treated the birth as an evacuation, an everyday event, and...carried on with their work." Births which were "experienced as a bowel movement made it possible for the women [to] kill their children in a very crude way, by smashing their heads [like] poultry and small animals..." Mothers who killed their newborn babies were observed by others as being without remorse, "full of indifference, coldness and callousness [and gave] the impression of a general impoverishment of feeling" toward the child. Even if the infant was allowed to live, it could easily be neglected and not fed enough, and it would be made to "go straight to heaven." Infant mortality rates in Germany ranged from 21 percent in Prussia to an astonishing 58 percent in Bavaria during the latter part of the nineteenth century, the figures in the south-the highest in Europe-being due to their practice of not breastfeeding, since hand-fed babies died at a rate three times that of breast-fed babies. The best figures for overall German infanticide at the end of the century were 20 percent, half again higher than France and England.

Nineteenth-century doctors condemned the practice of German mothers refusing to breastfeed their babies, saying the pap made of flour and water or milk was "usually so thick that it has to be forced into the child and only becomes digestible when mixed with saliva and stomach fluids. At its worst it is curdled and sour." Infants were so commonly hungry that "those poor worms get their mouths stuffed with a dirty rag containing chewed bread so that they cannot scream." Mothers who could afford it sent their newborn to wetnurses-commonly called Engelmacherin, "angelmakers," because they were so negligent toward the children-with the mothers complaining, "Do you think I am a farmer's daughter, that I should bother myself with little children? That a woman of my age and standing should allow her very strength to be sucked dry by children?" While English gentry began to nurse their infants themselves during the seventeenth century, the mothering revolution had not yet really begun in Germany by the end of the nineteenth century. Visitors who wrote books on German home life reported, "It is extremely rare for a German lady to nourish her own child," and "It would have been very astonishing indeed if a well-to-do mother had suggested suckling her own baby." Almost all mothers who refused to breast-feed could have done so if they "seriously wanted to," according to a 1905 German medical conference. Those who did not gave "completely trivial reasons," such as "because it is messy," because they "didn't want to ruin their figures" or because breastfeeding was "inconvenient. Even after their children returned from wetnurse, "noble ladies showed not the slightest interest in their offspring" and turned them over to nursemaids, governesses and tutors. The result was that parents were often strangers to their children. When one German father asked his child whom he loves the most and the child replied, "Hanne [his nurse]," the father objected, "No! You must love your parents more." "But it is not true!" the child replied. The father promptly beat him.

Mothers and other caretakers of newborn German babies were so frightened of them that they tied them up tightly for from six to nine months and strapped them into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep out the lurking evils. As two British visitors described it:

A German baby is a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy in yards of bandages...it is never bathed...Its head is never touched with soap and water until it is eight or ten months old, when the fine skull cap of encrusted dirt which it has by that time obtained is removed...

In Germany, babies are loathsome, foetid things...offensive to the last degree with the excreta that are kept bound up within their swaddling clothes...the heads of the poor things are never washed, and are like the rind of Stilton cheese...

When the children were removed from their swaddling, other restraint devices such as corsets with steel stays and backboards continued their tied-up condition to assure that the parents were still in complete control. The result of all this early restraint was the same production of potential violence in children as that obtained by experimenters physically restraining rats and monkeys, marked by depletions of serotonin, increases in norepinephrine levels and massive increases in terror, rage and violence.

The fear of one's own children was so widespread in German families that for centuries autobiographies told of a tradition of abandonment of children by their parents to anyone who would take them, using the most flimsy of excuses. Children were given away and even sometimes sold to relatives, neighbors, courts, priests, foundling homes, schools, friends, strangers, "traveling scholars" (to be used as beggars)-anyone who would take them-so that only a minority of German children lived their entire childhoods under their family roof. Children were sent away to others as servants or as apprentices, "for disciplinary reasons," "to be drilled for hard work," "to keep them from idleness," because of a "domestic quarrel," "because it cried as a baby," "because his uncle was childless," etc. Scheck notes from his study of autobiographies, "When their parents came to take them home, their children usually didn't recognize them any more." Peasants gave away their children so regularly that the only ones who were guaranteed to be kept were the first-born boys-to get the inheritance-and one of the daughters-who was sometimes crippled in order to prevent her from marrying and force her to stay as a cheap helper in the parental household. After two children, it was said that "the parental attitude to later offspring noticeably deteriorated [so that] a farmer would rather lose a young child than a calf."

Those children who were kept by their parents were considered, in Luther's words, "obnoxious with their crapping, eating, and screaming," beings who "don't know anything, they aren't capable of doing anything, they don't perform anything...[and are] inferior to adults" and are therefore are only "useless eaters" until they began to work. "When little children die, it's not often that you have a lot of grief [but] if an older child dies, who would soon be able to go off to work...everybody is upset-it's already cost so much work and trouble, now it's all been for nothing." As "useless eaters" children were mainly resented: "...rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father's comment that we did not merit it." The children grew up feeling that "my mother was fond of society and did not trouble much about me" (Bismarck) or "[my mother] did not conduce to evolve that tender sweetness and solicitude which are usually associated with motherhood. I hardly ever recollect her having fondled me. Indeed, demonstrations of affection were not common in our family" (Wagner). It is not surprising, therefore, with such a drastic lack of maternal love that historically outsiders complained that German mothers routinely abandoned their children, "paid less attention to their children than cows," and observed that "mothers leave their small children or babies at home alone and go off shopping; or parents go visiting in the evening, leaving the small children at home by themselves..."

BEATING, TERRORIZING AND SEXUALLY MOLESTING
GERMAN CHILDREN

Although little children can be made less threatening by being given away, tied up or ignored, as they grow older they must be forced to conform to parental images of them as poison containers by beating and terrorizing them. German parents throughout history have been known as the most authoritarian batterers in Europe, particularly toward their boys, seconding Luther's opinion that "I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one." Since mothers continued to be the main caretakers of the young children, the mother was more often the main beater than the father. Scheck and Ende found brutal beating in virtually all autobiographies at the end of the nineteenth century; H=E4vernick found that 89 percent were beaten at the beginning of the twentieth century, over half of these with canes, whips or sticks. More recent surveys of report 75 percent of German adults say they had suffered from violence from their parents during their childhood, although hitting with instruments was down from earlier periods.

Battering babies sometimes begins in the womb. Violence against pregnant women has always been prevalent throughout human history, and since even today pregnant women are assaulted between 21% to 30% by their partners, this suggests that many fetuses were probably physically abused at the end of the nineteenth century, even without considering the effects of widespread maternal alcoholism in Germany. The physical assaults resumed as soon as the little child was out of swaddling bands, whenever they cry for anything. The widely-followed Dr. Schreber says the earlier one begins beatings the better: "One must look at the moods of the little ones which are announced by screaming without reason and crying...bodily admonishments consistently repeated until the child calms down or falls asleep. Such a procedure is necessary only once or at most twice and-one is master of the child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child." Schreber was overly optimistic and, like other German parents, continued to be threatened by imagined disobedience from his children, and so the beatings continued. Every independent move of children was seen as done, says Kr=FCger, "with the intent of defying you;" it is "a declaration of war against you" which you must "whip him well till he cries so: Oh no, Papa, oh no!" These are not just spankings; they are whippings, like Hitler's daily whippings of sometimes over 200 strokes with a cane or a hippopotamus whip, which sometimes put him into a coma. Parents were often described as being in a "righteous rage" during the beatings and the children often lost consciousness. "At school we were beaten until our skin smoked. At home, the instrument for punishment was a dog-whip...My father, while beating, more and more worked himself into a rage. I lost consciousness from his beatings several times."

Klöden writes that the motto of German parents at the end of the nineteenth century was simple: "Children can never get enough beatings." Although few German parents from the past would today escape being thrown in jail for their batterings, children at the end of the nineteenth century found little protection from society, since their own word and even physical evidence of severe abuse counted for nothing against their parents. Ende's survey describes typical court cases where a neighbor would alert police to "a three-year-old girl [whose] body was covered with welts. Lips, nose and gums were open wounds. The body showed numerous festering sores. The child had been placed on a red-hot, iron stove-two wounds on the buttocks were festering," but the court let the parent go free. Ende describes routine beating, kicking, strangling, making children eat excrement, etc., saying, "The cases I have presented are not the most extreme; they are typical of the vast literature on German families." The result was that German childhood suicides were three to five times higher than in other Western European countries at the end of the nineteenth century, fear of beatings by parents being the reason most often cited by the children for their suicide attempts. Few cared about the reason for the suicides, since "suicidal children were thought to be spineless creatures, spoiled by indulgent parents...Newspapers wrote: 'A boy who commits suicide because of a box on the ears has earned his fate; he deserved to be ruined.'" There simply was no one around to sympathize with battered children in Germany. Even the small feminist movement in Germany failed to speak out for the rights of children, declaring motherhood "oppressive," although feminists in misogynous Germany in any case soon became "a symbol of disorder, decadence and physical and psychological disease."

Even though these constant beatings quickly produced compliant, obedient children, parental projections into them made continuous control appear necessary. German children were "often locked in a dark room or a closet or fastened to a table leg," were "hardened" by washing them with ice-cold water before breakfast, and were tightly tied up in various corsets, steel collars and torturous back-support devices with steel stays and tight laces to hold them in controlled positions all day long. Children were not only controlled by being frightened by endless ghost stories where they were threatened with being carried away by horrible figures. The parents actually "dressed up in terrifying costumes [as] the so-called Knecht Ruprecht, made their faces black and pretended to be a messenger of God who would punish children for their sins." At Christmas they dressed as Pelznickel, "armed with a rod and a large chain...If they have been bad children, he will use his rod; if good, he will bring them nuts..." Petschauer remembers being threatened by a "hairy monster [that] chased me under the living room table, chains clanking, hoofs stomping, appearing it wanted to drag me off in its carrying basket, the Korb." As Scheck sums up the effects of these terrifying devices, "Most children had been so deeply frightened that their 'demons of childhood' persecuted them at night and in feverish dreams for their whole lives."

Toilet training was an early, violent battle-ground for parental control over the infant. Since "babies and young children won't obey, don't want to do what grownups want them to do but instead test them, resist them, and tyrannize them [and since] they are impure, unclean and messy," toilet training begins at around six months of age, long before the infant has sphincter control. The training is done by regular use of enemas and by hitting the infant: "The baby cannot walk yet [Nana] spanks the baby Hard. 'He is a dirty, dirty Hansi-baby,' she says, as she spanks. 'He made pooh-pooh last night! Dirty Hansi!' Nana slaps the little red buttocks." Traditional German obsession with children's feces is well known; both Dundes and von Zglinicki have written entire books on the subject. The enema in particular was used as a frightening domination device, a fetish-object often wielded by the mother or nurse in daily rituals that resembled sexual assaults on the anus, sometimes including tying the child up in leather straps as though the mother were a dominatrix, inserting the two-foot-long enema tube over and over again as punishment for "accidents." There were special enema stores that German children would be taken to in order to be "fitted" for their proper size of enemas. The ritual "stab in the back" was a central fear of German children well into the twentieth century, and they learned "never to speak of it, but always to think about it."

The punitive atmosphere of the German home was so total that one can convincingly say that totalitarianism in the family led directly to totalitarianism in politics. Children were personal slaves of their parents, catering to their every need, waiting on them, tying to fulfill their every whim, even if only to be poison containers for their moods. Many accounts of the time describe a similar tense home atmosphere:

When the father came in from work, the children were expected to be at home. Neighbours...would warn...'[Your father's] coming! We ran like a flash, opened up and were inside in time!' The children would bring him his slippers, help him off with his coat, lay the table or just retreat in silence to a corner of the room...Right away we got punished, whack, a clip round the ear or something...'You take off my shoes; you go and get water; you fill my pipe for me and you fetch my books!' And we had to jump to it, he wouldn't have stood for it if we hadn't all done just as we were told...we had to kneel, one by the one window, another by the other...we would kneel with our heads against the wall...we had to stay there for two hours..."

German children were also used by parents and servants as sexual objects from an early age. German doctors often said "nursemaids and other servants carry out all sorts of sexual acts on the children entrusted to their care, sometimes merely in order to quiet the children, sometimes 'for fun.'" Even Freud said he was seduced by his nurse and by his father, and said "nursemaids, governesses and domestic servants [were often] guilty of [grave sexual] abuses" and that "nurses put crying children to sleep by stroking their genitals." Children were used like a comfort blanket: "If the father goes away on a journey, the little son can come to sleep in mother's bed. As soon as father returns, the boy is banished to his cot" next to the parents' bed, where he will continue to observe their intercourse. These incestuous assaults were regular enough to be remembered rather than repressed in the autobiographies of the period. In poorer families, of course, "it was unheard of for children to have their own beds," but even in wealthy families parents bring their children to bed with them. After using them sexually, they then would threaten to punish the child for their sexuality.

Lloyd deMause
[email protected]
www.psychohistory.com .

Digital Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other]

To report errors in this electronic
transcription please contact:
[email protected]