Hitler Is Magic

excerpted from Omnibook Magazine, “Is Tomorrow Hitler’s?” (February, 1942 *p.134)

Q: What is the secret of Hitler’s power?

A: That is a question that has interested me for eighteen years, since I first saw Hitler and heard him speak. During all this time I have heard hundreds of explanations of his power and have thought of some myself. But the most interesting and plausible discussion of his personality I have ever heard was given to me by Dr. Carl G. Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, when I visited him in his home in Zurich to ask him to diagnose the dictators. It was in October 1938, and I had come directly from Prague where I had witnessed the death of Czechoslovakia. Dr. Jung’s analysis of Hitler has been remarkably confirmed by the events since that time.

He had been personally fascinated by the problem of Hitler’s personality, and had studied it for years. He said: “There were two types of strong men in primitive society. One was the chief who was physically powerful, stronger than all his competitors, and another was the medicine man who was not strong in himself, but was strong by reason of the power which the people projected into him. Thus we had the Emperor and the Pope. Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer.”

I asked, “Why is it that Hitler who makes nearly every German fall down and worship him, produces next to no impression on any foreigner?” “Exactly,” Dr. Jung assented. “Few foreigners respond at all, yet apparently every German in Germany does. It is because Hitler is the mirror of every German’s unconscious, but of course he mirrors nothing from a non-German. He is the loud-speaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul until they can be heard by the German’s conscious ear. He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the World War, and the one characteristic which colors every German soul is the typically German inferiority complex, the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is always a bit late to the feast.

Hitler’s power is not political; it is magic. To understand magic you must understand what the unconscious is. It is that part of our mental constitution over which we have little control and which is stored with all sorts of impressions and sensations; which contains thoughts and even conclusions of which we are not aware. Besides the conscious impressions, which we receive, there are all sorts of impressions constantly impinging upon our sense organs of which we do not become aware because they are too slight to attract our conscious attention. They lie beneath the threshold of consciousness. But all these subliminal impressions are recorded; nothing is lost. Someone may be speaking in a faintly audible voice in the next room while we are talking in here. You pay no attention to it, but the conversation next door is being recorded in your unconscious as surely as though the latter were a dicta-phone record.

Now the secret of Hitler’s power is not that Hitler has an unconscious more plentifully stored than yours or mine. Hitler’s secret is twofold; first, that his unconscious has exceptional access to his consciousness, and second, that he allows himself to be moved by it. He is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source, and then acts upon them. In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey it—but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always led. We can see it work in him. He himself has referred to his Voice. His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people he would be nothing. It is literally true when he says that whatever he is able to do is only because he has the German people behind him, or, as he sometimes says, because he is Germany.

So with his unconscious perception of the true balance of political forces at home and in the world, he has so far been infallible. That is why he makes political judgments, which turn out to be right against the opinions of all his advisors and against the opinions of al foreign observers. When this happens it means only that the information gathered by his unconscious, and reaching his consciousness by means of his exceptional talent, has been more nearly correct than that of al others, German or foreign, who attempted to judge the situation and who reached conclusions different from his.”

I remarked that if Hitler’s Voice continued to be always right, we were in for a very interesting period. This was five months before Hitler swallowed the whole of Czechoslovakia, and eleven months before he launched the Second World War by assaulting Poland. Dr. Jung gravely answered: “Yes, it seems that the German people are now convinced they have found their Messiah. In a way the position of the Germans is remarkably like that of the Jews of old. Since their defeat in the World War the Germans have awaited a Messiah, a Savior. That is characteristic of people with an inferiority complex. The Jews got their inferiority complex from geographical and political factors. They lived in a part of the world which was a parade ground for conquerors from both sides, and after their return from their first exile to Babylon, when they were threatened with extinction by the Romans, they invented the solacing idea of a Messiah who was going to bring all the Jews together into a nation once more and save them.

The Germans got their inferiority complex from comparable causes. They came up out of the Danube Valley too late, and founded the beginnings of their nation long after the French and English were well on their way to nationhood. They were too late for the scramble for colonies and for the foundation of empire. Then when they did get together and made a unified nation, they looked around them and saw the British, the French, and others with rich colonies and all the equipment of grown-up nations and they became jealous, resentful, like a younger brother whose older brothers have taken the lion’s share of the inheritance.” Dr. Jung said he had closely observed Hitler at his meeting with Mussolini in Berlin. “I was only a few yards away from the two men and could study them well. In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign. His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism. With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?”

Q: Isn’t there anything constructive about Hitlerism? Is it all destructive?

A: To the German there is something mystically attractive about this Nazi Wave of Destruction. They feel their fate is being achieved by violence so fierce that it intoxicates them, as the young Nazi Shock Troops are intoxicated by battle lust when they fling themselves upon the enemy. It is the Nazis’ ability to combine this berserk, mystic rage with cold scientific mastery of the intricate instruments of mechanized war that makes them so formidable. They even loot scientifically, as witness the way they have bled France. I know an amusing and typical example of the German’s aptitude for plundering profitably. In Spain I met a young German Nazi machine gunner serving with Franco. His name was Franz, and he had been an SS officer in Duesseldorf. He had come to Spain, he declared, for idealistic motives, to fight the Bolsheviks, and now after three months’ service his idealism had been rewarded with a small fortune. I asked him how he had been able to make any money serving as a non-commissioned officer. “Oh,” he explained, “I have the advantage over these Spaniards and Moors of having an academic education. I did not finish school but I had enough Naturwissenschaft to know my way about in a physics or chemistry laboratory. Now what do these poor ignorant Spaniards and Moors do when they enter a town we have just taken. They go busting around breaking into homes and offices, looking for cash and jewelry and such things, but nobody ever leaves cash and jewelry lying around. What do I do? I go straight to the Kino, the motion picture theater, and straight to the projection room, and there I remove the lenses which are worth from ten to twenty thousand pesetas, and I put the lenses in my suitcase when I get back, and now I have two suitcases full of lenses. They are worth a fortune. You see the beauties of education?”

Q: Why do the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich?

A: Historically the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, the second was the one founded by Bismarck, and the third is Hitler’s. When I discussed this once with Dr. Jung, he pointed out deeper meanings. He said, “Nobody called Charlemagne’s kingdom the First Reich, nor William’s the Second Reich. Only the Nazis call theirs the Third Reich, because it has a profound mystical meaning.” Dr. Jung said the Nazis feel parallel between the Biblical triad, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the Third Reich, and that in fact many Nazis refer to Hitler as the Holy Ghost. “Again,” Dr. Jung continued, “consider the widespread revival in the Third Reich of the cult of Wotan, God of Wind. Take the name Sturmabteilung, Storm Troops. The swastika is a revolving form making a vortex moving ever toward the left—which means in Buddhistic symbolism sinister, unfavorable, directed toward the unconscious. All these symbols of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer, the prophet, the Fuehrer himself can foretell—and perhaps not even he.” This psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters. They are products of that most hysterical, illogical, emotional mentality in Europe, the German.