Nazi Thesis- Part I

One Year Old Adolf Hitler

I serialized my undergraduate history thesis on the Vietnam War on this blog last year, and now I will serialize my second undergraduate thesis on Nazi Germany. This main focus of this thesis is the nature of Nazi culture and what defines the personality of a Nazi. I hope that this will be informative and thought provoking. Here now is part one.

The Nazi regime was arguably the most oppressive and terrible in the history of mankind. It has come to symbolize the very essence of evil. Adolf Hitler and his closest henchmen formed the nucleus of an evil empire that sought to dominate the world through war and racial purification. Something about the Nazi ideology appealed to each of these men at a very base level which made them endeavor to do all that they could to forward the movement. No two men within the regime had the same life story, and each had their own path that drew them into the Nazi inner circle. While there are more differences than similarities in the lives of the Nazi leaders, each man had some void to fill in his life, and for all of them the party helped to fill that void. 

Hitler, perhaps, had the largest void to fill, and that is why he and the Nazi regime became one entity, and why when he died the Nazi movement could no longer survive. Those closest to Hitler became so wrapped up in the Nazi philosophy that none could survive without it. The key question to ask is, why was this? What made all of these men so dependent on Nazism? What sort of men were these, and why did they resort to such horrific means to obtain their goals? It was because of the Nazi personality, and it had the ability to take many forms, and affect people in different ways. 

Among the traits inherent in the Nazi personality- deception, manipulation, ambition, ruthlessness, insecurity and fear. These attributes were displayed to varying degrees in Hitler and his elite, and each man had a duality about his character that shaped his life. In order to comprehend the whole, the parts must be examined individually.

It is necessary to examine the leader of the movement to truly begin to brake down Nazi psychology. Adolf Hitler, the first child in his family to survive infancy, was pulled in two directions as a child that greatly affected the course of his life. Hitler’s father, Alois, was a strict disciplinarian who foisted great expectations and criticism on his son. An insensitive and domineering man, Adolf both hated and feared his father. This treatment by his father gave young Adolf an inferiority complex about himself and his abilities. The treatment his mother gave him more than compensated for his father’s coldness towards him. Klara Hitler doted on Adolf as he was the first of her children not to die in early childhood. The love that Klara Hitler gave Adolf was so unconditional that out of her treatment he was given a superiority complex. These two halves of Hitler’s personality came to make up what is in many ways the Nazi personality, fear on inadequacy and failure, coupled with a strong sense of god-like superiority and greatness. Each critical decision in Hitler’s life would be dominated by these two sides of his personality.