Book Review: The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess and the Analysts
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts by Daniel Pick
When Rudolf Hess (Hitlers' official Deputy) bailed out of his Messerschmitt into a field in Scotland on the night of 10 May 1941, he was, on account of his method of entry, travelling light. If official reports are to be believed (and there is nothing about the Hess adventure that is not contested), he was carrying a flight map, some photographs of him with his son, and the business cards of two German friends. There were no other documents, no identification (Hess initially gave a false name to his captors, a befuddled group comprising a farmer with a pitchfork and the local Home Guard). However, as Daniel Pick recounts, his pockets were "stuffed full of pills and potions, including a curious elixir that had been given to him by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who had in turn received it from a Tibetan lamasery."
Examined by the Medical Research Council a fortnight later, this was described as "a remarkable collection of drugs", apparently designed to ward off "all assault of the devil as far as his flesh was concerned". It included opium alkaloids, aspirin, atropine, Pervitin, barbiturates, saline mixture and a host of homeopathic products "so dilute that it is impossible to say what they are". The report concluded, with calculated understatement, that Hess had "a curious outlook on medical science."
When Rudolf Hess (Hitlers' official Deputy) bailed out of his Messerschmitt into a field in Scotland on the night of 10 May 1941, he was, on account of his method of entry, travelling light. If official reports are to be believed (and there is nothing about the Hess adventure that is not contested), he was carrying a flight map, some photographs of him with his son, and the business cards of two German friends. There were no other documents, no identification (Hess initially gave a false name to his captors, a befuddled group comprising a farmer with a pitchfork and the local Home Guard). However, as Daniel Pick recounts, his pockets were "stuffed full of pills and potions, including a curious elixir that had been given to him by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who had in turn received it from a Tibetan lamasery."
Examined by the Medical Research Council a fortnight later, this was described as "a remarkable collection of drugs", apparently designed to ward off "all assault of the devil as far as his flesh was concerned". It included opium alkaloids, aspirin, atropine, Pervitin, barbiturates, saline mixture and a host of homeopathic products "so dilute that it is impossible to say what they are". The report concluded, with calculated understatement, that Hess had "a curious outlook on medical science."
The mystery of Hess and his "mission" went far deeper than his pharmacophilia, of course, and at first it was the task of intelligence officers to establish his motives. But, as Pick shows in this fascinating study, his role as emissary (for a negotiated peace between Germany and England, or so he claimed) and as intelligence source "was soon to be complemented and eventually eclipsed by his status as patient". Looking very much like "a caged great ape", as one of his psychiatrists put it, "Deputy Führer" Hess was to spend the rest of the war under close observation as a rare live specimen of that elusive quarry, "the Nazi mind".
Whether or not such a thing as the Nazi mind could be said to exist, let alone recovered or explained, lies at the heart of this book, which examines how psychoanalysis was harnessed to political thought about Nazism, and the legacy of that encounter. Just as the teams of Bletchley Park and the US Army Signals Intelligence Service sought to crack the enemy's secret codes, so psychoanalysts and psychiatrists were mobilised to decipher the unconscious encryptions and fantasies that were thought to drive Nazi ideology.
The analogy has its limitations: one approach is empirical and scientific, the other is amorphous and speculative. The Enigma Code could be broken, whereas the enigma of the unconscious cannot. Indeed, in four years of forensic probing, the psychoanalysts assigned to Hess were unable to reach any coherent opinions as to the subterranean contours of his mind. Was there a repressed homosexual identification with the Führer? Did he exert a Svengali-like influence on Hitler, or was it the other way around? Did he have a mother fixation? Did his rise in the Nazi party derive from a triumph of the will or its elimination? Was he insane? "No discrete diagnostic view of Hess lasted for long without some amendment," Pick writes. "He was conceptualised variously, or in combination, as obsessional, hysterical, paranoid and schizoid; a malingerer, manipulator and fantasist; highly neurotic; dissociated and confused; perverse and phobic."
Hess's mental condition deteriorated day by day. "It dawned soon enough on his doctors that his anxieties could never be assuaged by realistic assurance," Pick notes. This is rather glib. Hess had failed in his mission, he was a prisoner of war, estranged from his family, his country, his beloved Führer; he was subject to constant monitoring (even of his nocturnal emissions). What realistic assurance could be given in these circumstances? This demands a wider discussion, curiously absent here, of the psychological impact of captivity. As Pick acknowledges: "It was not always clear if he was being interrogated or psychoanalysed, debriefed or diagnosed."
