THE CAUSES OF WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST
Historians and political scientists have proposed any number of causes for
WWII and the Holocaust.254 Unfortunately, detailed research has disproved
every one of them. Goldhagen's claim that ordinary Germans had long held "exterminationist"
antisemitic views255 has been disproved by careful historical studies that
showed Germany was "a safe haven in late-nineteenth-century Europe [where]
when German Jews looked toward France, they saw the startling antisemitism
unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair and when they looked eastward, they saw pogroms
and thousands of Jews fleeing toward Germany's safer political climate."256
The reason "why so many Jews failed to leave Germany [was] they really
couldn't believe that this Germany, which they loved [and] felt gratitude
toward" would ever harm them.257 In fact, earlier antisemitic movements
in Germany were tiny, and "most historians believe that the Nazis had
no deep roots in German history and that antisemitism in Germany was not essentially
different from that of some other nations"258 Careful studies of Nazi
party members have even found that most were not antisemitic when they joined;
"most people were drawn to antisemitism because they were drawn to Nazism,
not the other way around."259 Kershaw's recent careful studies conclude
"that antisemitism was not a major factor in attracting support for Hitler"260
As we shall shortly detail, what made Germans antisemitic was the anxieties
of the manic period after the Great Depression had ended, later in the 1930s
after Hitler gained power, and were not due some mysterious German gene for
eliminationist politics.
All the other explanations for WWII and the Holocaust have been
similarly disproved by recent historical research. Klaus Fischer's "no
Hitler, no Holocaust,"261 along with all the other studies blaming German
violence on "obedience" to Hitler's "hypnotic eyes"262
have been thrown out by the dozens of studies of the spontaneous, gratuitous
violence engaged in by average Germans even when they could have easily opted
out. "Only following orders" is simply a no longer considered a
serious motivation for the war and genocide. What is, however, most 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."263 "The only group affected [by the Depression] were
the workers. Yet paradoxically the workers remained steadfast in support
of the [democratic] status quo while the middle class, only marginally hurt
by the economic constriction, turned to revolution."264 Most workers
did not vote for the Nazis and of those who did, who "believed in Hitler
the magician," most soon felt disappointed.265 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."266 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.267 The "stress"
that triggered the war and genocide may have been related to economics, but
it in fact came from renewed prosperity in the late 1930s, not to the economic
collapse of 1929.
There is one psychological study based upon a developmental
event in the early lives of Germans that is given some credulity by historians:
the "Nazi Youth Cohort" thesis of Peter Loewenberg. This study claims
that "the rapid political ascendance of the Nazi party (NSDAP) in the
period from 1928 to 1933 was marked by a particularly strong support from
youth" who were deprived of food during the 1917-1919 Allied embargo.268
Citing low German birth weights and excess infant mortality during the period,
Loewenberg feels this "single traumatic event" accounts for "the
influx of German youth to the ranks of National Socialism, the political decline
of the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi seizure of power."269 The problem
with this thesis is the figures don't add up. While Loewenberg cites the census
of 1933 as showing 31 percent of Germans were "youthful," these
figures in fact were for those 18 to 30 years of age.270 Children born
in 1917-18 were actually only 11-12 years of age in 1929 when the Nazis received
their most uncoerced votes. Even those up to 5 years of age during the embargo
years would still be from 12-17 in 1929, too young to join the Nazi party.
And in fact most German youth didn't join the Hitler Youth, which managed
to attract only one percent of the young people belonging to religious and
political youth organizations in 1932.271 Therefore, the WWI famine, however
severe, cannot be a main cause of the Nazi takeover,272 since the average
age of membership of the Nazi party was in fact over 31 years.273
THE SOURCES OF WWII AND THE HOLOCAUST IN GERMAN CHILDREARING
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."274 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 be understood as explanatory.
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 late nineteenth-century 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."275 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."276 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."277 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 für psychohistorische Forschung, the German branch of The
Institute for Psychohistory.278 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 studied. 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."279 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
also 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."281 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,282 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."283 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.284
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."285
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"286 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."287 But kind words were
rare in German homes, so most Germans remembered "no tender word, no
caresses, only fear"288 and childhood was "joyless," "so
immeasurably sad that you could not fathom it."289 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!"290 Another father
summed up his feelings about family discipline 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.291
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."292 The mother especially ruled the nursery and kitchen,
where the children spent their time, and "she may actually exclude men
from these restricted areas"293 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.
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.294
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."295 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."296 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"297 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 her child.298 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,299 the figures in the south--the highest
in Europe--being due to their practice of not breastfeeding,300 since
hand-fed babies died at a rate three times that of breast-fed babies.301 The
best figures for overall German infanticide at the end of the century were
20 percent, half again higher than France and England.302
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."303 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."304 Ende reports
that for centuries "One rarely encounters a German infant who is fully
breastfed. Everywhere they got their mouths stuffed with Zulp, a small
linen bag filled with breadSwaddled babies could hardly get rid of these
often dirty rags."305 Mothers who could afford it sent their newborn
to wetnurses--commonly called Engelmacherin, "angelmakers,"
because they were so negligent toward the children. The mothers complained,
"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?"306 While English gentry began
to nurse their infants themselves during the seventeenth century, the mothering
revolution had not yet really reached Germany by the end of the nineteenth
century.307 Visitors who wrote books on German home life reported, "It
is extremely rare for a German lady to nourish her own child,"308 and
"It would have been very astonishing indeed if a well-to-do mother had
suggested suckling her own baby."309 Almost all mothers who refused to
breast-feed could have done so if they "seriously wanted to," according
to a 1905 German medical conference.310 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.311 Even after their children returned from wetnurse, "noble
ladies showed not the slightest interest in their offspring"312 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.313
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.314 Two centuries after swaddling had disappeared in
England and America, two British visitors described it as routine throughout
Germany:
A German baby is a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound
up like a mummy in yards of bandage. 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 removed315
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 cheese316
When the children were finally removed from their swaddling
bands after six to twelve months, other restraint devices such as corsets
with steel stays and backboards continued their tied-up condition to assure
the parents they were still in complete control.317 The result of all this
early restraint was the same production of later 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 eventually actual violence.318
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.319
Children were given away and even sometimes sold320 to relatives, neighbors,
courts, priests, foundling homes, schools, friends, strangers, "traveling
scholars" (to be used as beggars)--anyone who would take them--so
that for much of history only a minority of German children lived their entire
childhoods under their family roof. Children were reported to be 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.321 Scheck notes from his
study of autobiographies, "When their parents came to take them home,
their children usually didn't recognize them any more."322 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 permanently as a cheap helper in the parental
household.323 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."324
Those children who were kept by their parents were considered,
in Luther's words, "obnoxious with their crapping, eating, and screaming,"325
beings who "don't know anything, they aren't capable of doing anything,
they don't perform anything [and are] inferior to adults"326 and are
therefore are only useless eaters327 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."328 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."329 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).330 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,"331 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"332
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 violent batterers in
Europe,333 particularly toward their boys,334 seconding Luther's opinion that
"I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one."335 Since
mothers continued to be the main caretakers of the young children, the mother
was far more often the main beater than the father.336 Scheck and Ende found
brutal beating in virtually all autobiographies at the end of the nineteenth
century; Hävernick found that 89 percent were beaten at the beginning
of the twentieth century, over half of these with canes, whips or sticks.337
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 falling from earlier periods.338
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 percent to 30 percent by
their partners,339 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[inflicting] 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."340 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 Krüger, "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!"341 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.342 Parents were often described
as being in a "righteous rage" during the beatings343 and the children
often lost consciousness.344 "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."345
Klöden writes that the motto of German parents at the
end of the nineteenth century was simple: "Children can never get enough
beatings."346 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. 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.347 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."348 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,349 fear of beatings by parents being the
reason most often cited by the children for their suicide attempts.350 Few
people 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.'351" 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,"352 even though feminists in misogynous Germany in
any case soon became "a symbol of disorder, decadence and physical and
psychological disease."353
Although these constant beatings quickly produced compliant,
obedient children, parental projections into them made continuous overcontrol
appear necessary. German children were "often locked in a dark room or
a closet or fastened to a table leg,"354 were "hardened" by
washing them with ice-cold water before breakfast,355 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.356
Children were not only controlled by being frightened by endless ghost stories
where they were threatened with being carried away by horrible figures.357
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."358
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"359
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."360
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."361
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,"362
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.363 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."364 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."365
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. Neighbors... 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"366
German children were also used by parents and servants as sexual
objects from an early age.367 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.'"368 Even Freud said he was seduced by his nurse and
by his father,369 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."370 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.371 These incestuous assaults were regular enough
to be remembered rather than repressed in the autobiographies of the period.372
In poorer families, of course, "it was unheard of for children to have
their own beds,"373 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. "Little Hans," for instance,
reported he regularly was masturbated by his mother, "coaxed [Freud's
footnote: 'caressed'] with his Mummy [Freud's footnote: 'meaning
his penis.']," but then told she would "send for Dr. A. to cut off
your widdler" if he touched his penis.374 It is no wonder that Freud
reported that his patients "regularly charge their mothers with seducing
them,"375 but not because "they had been cleansed by their mothers"
as he claimed but because they had in fact been used sexually by them. They
then impose various punishments and anti-masturbation devices such as penis-rings,
metal cages with spikes and plaster casts to prevent erections while sleeping
in order to punish the child for the incestuous acts of the parent.376
As children left their families in pedophile-prone nineteenth-century
Germany, they were again raped at school, as servants, on the streets and
at work. The majority of prostitutes were minors, often starting their careers
as young as age seven, with parents often living off the prostitution of their
daughters.377 Virgins were particularly valuable, since "a superstition
prevails that venereal diseases may be cured by means of sexual intercourse
with a virgin."378 Bloch thought seducing children was "very widespread"
because "timidity and impotence on the part of adult men, rendering intercourse
with adult women difficult" led to their commonly raping children.379
Rape by employers of servants was widespread, but since no one wanted illegitimate
children, the servant girl was expected to kill any offspring.380 Girls leaving
school at thirteen regularly told tales of sexual assault at the hands of
factory employers and managers or by bosses in the office.381 And both boys
and girls were open to rape in schools, by teachers as well as older students--there
were even "free schools" known for pederastic use of young boys
that espoused "pedagogical Eros" concepts that were popular in the
period.382
Even the daily beatings so commonly reported at schools had
overtones of sexual assault--after all, the German schoolmaster who boasted
he had given "911,527 strokes with the stick, 124,000 lashes with the
whip, 136,715 slaps with the hand and 1,115,800 boxes on the ear"383
was engaged in a severe sexual compulsion, not a disciplinary act. One can
easily sense the sexual excitement behind the claim that teachers must "know
how to love with the cane,"384 in schools that were
real torture-chambers for children and young people. All day
long the hazel-rod, the ruler and the cowhide reign, or they fly around
in the class-room to warn the sluggish ones and the chatter-boxes or to call
them to step out. Then, they were given a sound thrashing. How inventive were
some school tyrants concerning their punishments. There is rarely a morning
on which we do not see servants or even parents in the streets, dragging violently
to school boys who cry at the top of their voices.385
THE INNOVATIVE PHASE: WEIMAR GERMANY AND THE FORBIDDEN LEAP
INTO MODERNITY
A small minority of Germans at the turn of the century, however, had more
modern, less brutal childrearing, and it was these who in every economic class
managed to provide the new psychoclass that supported the democratic and economic
reforms of the Weimar Republic. During the Weimar period, these advanced Germans
were able to borrow more advanced social and economic models from other more
democratic nations nearby, creating even larger a gap between the majority
of Germans brought up in medieval childrearing ways and the needs of modern
capitalism and democratic forms of government. This advanced minority did
not mainly come from the wealthier economic classes; wealthy mothers regularly
sent their newborn out to peasants who had reputations as being totally without
feeling for the infants for whom they were supposed to care. The new psychoclass
German children can be found in the historical record in exceptional autobiographies
and diaries, more in the north than the south--where as we have seen
the mothers didn't even breastfeed--more in the middle classes than in
the wealthy, more urban than rural, and more in certain ethnic groups, particularly
the Jews.
That German Jewish families "constituted one of the most
spectacular social leaps in European history [and] produced some of the most
fiercely independent minds" in Germany386 is a little-understood cause
of their persecution during the Holocaust, since a nation afraid of independence
naturally chooses the most independent people in their population as scapegoats
for their fear of freedom. Jews in Germany were far more literate (even the
women) than others since medieval times, when most populations were nearly
totally illiterate. Jewish families, smaller and more urban than other German
families and far less authoritarian,387 almost always nursed their own children,
so that in 1907, for instance, in the south "44 percent of the children
of Christian families died, but only 8 percent of the Jewish children."388
Two major studies of German Jewish family life confirm that it was quite different
from most of the other families around them, so much more loving and compassionate
that even after the end of WWII, after experiencing during the Holocaust the
most "severe abuse and unimaginable stress, there were no suicides [in
survivors] the people are neither living a greedy, me-first style of life,
nor are they seeking gain at the expense of others389most of their lives
are marked by an active compassion for others" As was stressed earlier,
what produces violent restaging of early trauma isn't merely the severity
of the trauma, but whether or not the child blames himself.390
Two similar retrospective studies--one by Dicks of Nazis
and another by the Oliners of rescuers of Jews--clearly reveal the different
family backgrounds of the more advanced psychoclass represented by rescuers.
Just as Dicks found brutal, domineering parents of Nazis who had "particularly
destructive mother images,"391 the Oliners interviewed over 406 rescuers
of Jews, and compared them with 126 nonrescuers, and found that their economic
class, their religion, their education, jobs and other social characteristics
were all similar, only their childrearing was different.392 Altruistic personalities,
they found, had families that showed them more respect, more concern for fairness,
more love and had less emphasis on obedience and more on individuality. They
were almost never sent out to others to be cared for, and if they were sometimes
hit by their parents, the parents often apologized.393 Obviously, a new childrearing
mode had penetrated to a minority of Germans at the beginning of the twentieth
century, in time to produce a new innovative phase and an attempted "leap
to modernity" during the Weimar Republic.
During this decade of prosperity, "many Germans enjoyed
a temporary triumph of eros over thanatos, experiencing a sense
of liberation hitherto unknown in a land where strong discipline and public
conformity had held sway for generations."394 Universal suffrage allowed
women to vote, a minority of parties were even fairly democratic in intent,
economic freedoms multiplied and produced unaccustomed prosperity, women's
rights over their children were promoted and sexual material and even contraception
became widely available, reducing for the first time the number of children
per family to two.395 But all this political, economic and social liberation
produced terror in the average German, terror of maternal engulfment. Democracy
was seen as "a beast of a thousand heads [that] crushes anything it cannot
swallow or engulf."396 Weimar Purity Crusades began to call for "emancipation
from emancipation" and "a restoration of authoritarian rule."397
Anti-pornography laws "to protect youth against literary rubbish and
dirt" began to be passed as early as 1926.398 Even women delegates in
the Reichstag opposed "the masculinization of women" that they said
was the result of women's rights, which were deemed "un-German."399
Germany felt it needed a Phallic Leader who would give them a national
enema, a purging, a purifying of "foreign" liberalism to "unify
and cleanse"400 the body politic as their mothers and nurses had forcefully
purged them of feces and cleansed them of their desires for independence.
The myth about "the stab in the back" (the enema) being the underlying
cause of Germany's problems had deeper meaning than the political. It was
agreed that "The stab in the back [is] a crime the cause of our general
paralysis and joylessness"401 What was needed, it was said, was something
to "remove the Verstopfung [constipation]" that was obstructing
German culture.402 Germans complained throughout the Weimar period about "the
stab in the back" they had received at the end of WWI, and said about
the Versailles Treaty "always think about it, never speak of it,"
both phrases really referring to their enema assaults as children. The more
prosperous Weimar became, the more growth panic Germans experienced--as
shown in the increase in murder and manslaughter rates during the later Weimar
years.403 Thus it was that Germany--the nation that during the 1920s
enjoyed higher standards of living than any other in Europe --404began
its search for a violent, purging dictator long before the Depression began,
the supposed cause of the dictatorship.
THE DEPRESSIVE PHASE: CHOOSING THE PHALLIC LEADER
Careful studies of the rise of Nazism conclude that the Depression came after,
not before, the death of Weimar democracy and that "the decay of parliamentary
government preceded the Nazi rise."405 Nor did the Versailles Treaty
and Allied demands for reparations cause them, since "German borrowing
from abroad always far exceeded her reparation payments."406 Nor, as
we have documented, was antisemitism the cause of the rise of the Nazis. Not
only was earlier German antisemitism milder than many other European nations,407
"in the decisive electoral campaigns of 1930 and 1932anti-Semitic
agitation proved, if anything, more of a hindrance, so leadership consciously
played it down."408 Most Germans were "relatively indifferent towards
the Jewish Question,"409 and "the vast majority of the general population
did not clamor or press for anti-Semitic measures [even by] the Kristallnacht
pogrom of November 1938"410
The call for a dictatorship, in fact, came before it began
to center on Hitler, first in films and other cultural material (Kracauer
calls Weimar culture "a procession of tyrants")411 and then in the
Reichstag. The middle classes--"hardly touched by the depression"412
--and the wealthy--"the richer the precinct the higher the
Nazi vote"413 --were the main sources of the over two-thirds of
all delegates who voted Hitler dictator. Women in fact voted for Hitler in
even greater proportions than men.414 The ecstatic enthusiasm of the jubilant
masses of people who celebrated their Phallic Leader came directly from his
promises of a violent Purity Crusade that would end what Hitler called the
"poisoning hothouse of sexual conceptions and stimulants [and the] suffocating
perfume of our modern eroticism [which is] the personification of incest"415
--all three images suggesting flashbacks to the sexually engulfing mommy
of the family bed. Even during the Depression, Germans said, "We are
somebody again!"416 only because of their delusional merger with their
Phallic Leader. Economics, political forms, antisemitism--all played
second fiddle in the Nazi propaganda to Hitler's "ranting about prostitution
and moral decadence."417 What made Germans say about Hitler's dictatorship,
"The Joy inside me was impossible to describe,"418 was his violent
Purity Crusade, a dopamine rush that warded off engulfment by the Terrifying
Mother--using his hatred of his own mother that can be glimpsed in his
saying about a frightening painting of Medusa he kept on his walls: "Those
eyes! They are the eyes of my mother!"419
THE MANIC PHASE: BEGINNING THE KILLING OF "USELESS EATERS"
The Depression was relatively short in Germany. Since economic downturns are
caused by motivated "mistakes" in restricting liquidity, Hitler
performed what was called an "economic miracle" simply by reversing
the "mistakes" of late Weimar economic policies, so that by the
end of 1936 Germany surpassed the highest levels of GNP achieved during the
1920s.420 It was only as the manic phase was well under way that Germany really
felt their growth panic and completed their merger with the Fatherland and
the promised violence of the Phallic Leader. Protected against growing body
disintegration anxieties by fetishistic Nazi leather boots and uniforms, Germans
could accomplish the "purification" of their nation by "stopping
the creeping poison" exuded by Terrifying Mommies and Bad Boy selves,
at home and abroad. One must say "Halt!" to freedom to be loved
by mommy: after all, the "Heil Hitler!" salute, with arm stiffly
outstretched and palm out, is a universal symbol of "Halt." Germans
who as children were made to kneel silently against the wall for hours encountered
American swing music as adults, wanted to dance, but still were under their
internal parents' injunction to "Halt!" So Nazi soldiers halted
all swing dancing in Germany and sent those who danced to swing music to concentration
camps.421 Only if Germans could stop being individuals living in freedom could
they go back and live as "one family" in the "joyful rapture"
of one Volk, cleansed of sinfulness.
Only if they were slaves to totalitarian
Nazi whims could they restage their slavery to their parents in the totalitarian
family of their childhoods; thus, even the chains of swaddling bands were
embedded in the Nazi dicta: "He who can do what he wants is not free. He
who feels himself without chains is not free."422 Only those who could
worship the Motherland (the swastika is an ancient symbol of Mother Goddess
worship) could feel reborn and be loved as they always felt they deserved
to be since birth. Since group-fantasies of merging with mommy proliferated,
men feared they would become feminine, so homosexuals began to be persecuted
with a vengeance.
Indeed, all of post-Depression Europe, America and even Asia
were in their manic phase in the late Thirties and felt the need for a cleansing
world war and sacrifice of scapegoats. American antisemitism, for instance,
was on the rise, a steady minority feeling that Jews were a menace to America423
and two-thirds indicating Jewish refugees should be kept out of the country.424
In the summer of 1939 when over a thousand German Jews arrived in the New
World, they were sent back.425 The bill to accept 20,000 Jewish children into
the U.S. was received with massive opposition because "20,000 children
will soon turn into 20,000 ugly adults."426 Thirty-two nations assembled
at a conference on Jewish emigration and voted they "regretted"
they could not take in more Jews.427 When the British were approached to save
Jews in exchange for goods, they replied, "What on earth are you thinking
off. What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?"428
Nor was Hitler without his admirers in other countries before the invasion.
Churchill called him "an indomitable champion [who could] restore our
courage,"429 Anthony Eden said of him "without doubt the man has
charm I rather liked him."430 Indeed, Beisel's research into the group-fantasies
of Western nations before the war concludes that Germany was "the bad
boy" of Europe who was delegated the starting of the war by others in
"the family of nations," just as many "bad boys" are delegated
the acting out of violence felt by others in individual families.431
Before the war broke out, however, the killing of "bad
boy" alters had begun in earnest. The earliest death camps, in fact,
were set up to kill children who were useless eaters, the same
term applied to the Germans themselves by their parents when they were children
at the turn of the century. Long before the Holocaust of Jews began, medical
officers sent questionnaires to parents and guardians of children in mental
hospitals and homes for delinquent children, asking them if they would give
their consent to killing them. So powerful was the unconscious group-fantasy
at that time that "bad" children were polluting the German nation
that most parents and guardians agreed to the killing of their "useless
children."432
The doctors, including pediatricians, spontaneously set
up a Reich Committee "to exterminate ‘undesirable' children, which
drew up standards that read exactly like the child care manuals at the end
of the nineteenth century, asking whether the child had been "late in
being toilet trained" or had used "dirty words" or were "slow
learners;" if they were, they were exterminated in gas chambers and crematorium
ovens.433 Over 70,000 of these "useless eaters" were murdered by
doctors to "cleanse the German national body"434 before the war
began.435 So proud were these doctors of their murder of "bad children"
that they actually made a popular film of the killings, which was shown in
theaters.436 At the same time, throughout Germany, "midwives and nurses
were instructed to report births of defective infants including ‘racially
undesirable' ones. Thousands were killed by injection or deliberate starvation."437
The wiping out of Bad Boy alters "out there" in the real world to
remove them from "inside here," in the traumatized hemisphere of
the brain, had begun. Killing millions more "Bad Boys" in the Holocaust
and World War II soon followed.
THE WAR PHASE: RAPING MOMMIES AND KILLING BAD BOY ALTERS
Killing mommies and children was the two tasks of Germans in starting WWII.
Hitler made this clear in the speech he gave before his generals ordering
the invasion of Poland. Note the exact words he used:
Genghis Khan has sent millions of women and children into death
knowingly and with a light heart. I have put my death's head formations in
place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death
many women and children of Polish origin438
After quoting these sentences, Fischer says "Hitler had
exclaimed that he would kill without pity all men, women and children."439
But men were not in fact mentioned in his quote. Hitler said women and
children must die--women as symbolic Terrifying Mothers, and children
as symbolic Bad Boys. Even all the soldiers who must die--including the
German soldiers who must die--were "youth," symbolic Bad Boy
alters, vital, growing inner selves sacrificed to Moloch.
The path to war, however, did not begin with the killing of
Bad Boy "useless eaters" to the East. Indeed, Hitler temporarily
made a Nonaggression Pact with Russia and attempted to extend it to Poland.
Germany's first task was righteous rape, the knocking of Mother England
off her pedestal and, while still wooing her, teaching her a lesson of how
she must stop humiliating Germans by rejecting their courtship. Nazi diplomatic
language dripped of maternal imagery for the two Western nations, as when
Goering asked, "Why should France continue to tie herself to a decayed
old nation like England--a rouged old maid trying to pretend that she
is still young and vigorous."440 Hitler believed that war would teach
England a lesson and make her respect Germany, predicting that "the end
of the war will mark the beginning of a durable friendship with England. But
first we must give her the K.O.--for only so can we live at peace with
her, and the Englishman can only respect someone who has first knocked him
out."441 Mother England, after all, was a "purely Germanic nation"
who, like a good German mother, ruled over her children (colonies) with an
iron fist.442 Germany had to rape her to dominate and really have her, but,
Hitler said, "This doesn't prevent me from admiring [the English]. They
have a lot to teach us."443
Historians agree that during the 1936-38 period "Hitler
assumed that Britain could be wooed or forced into an alliance."444 When
England finally said they would defend Poland, Hitler responded by "abandoning
his courtship of England, which had rejected him"445 and proceeded with
what was called "the rape of Austria," what Hitler called "the
return of German-Austria to the great German motherland."446 All Germans
had long blamed England and France for the ineffective "Treaty of Shame"
(Versailles)--a flashback to all their childhood memories of shame and
humiliation by their caretakers--and promised to fight the West to "restore
to each individual German his self-respect We are not inferior;
on the contrary, we are the complete equals of every other nation."447
Even those Germans who were turned over to nurses by their mothers knew what
Hitler meant when he declared that "Germany would not suffer under the
tutelage of governesses,"448 i.e., England.
Nazi Blitzkreig and dive-bomber tactics were particularly
loaded with righteous rape fantasies featuring powerful thrusts and penetration
of enemy bodies, wreaking vengeance for earlier wrongs. The war began in the
East, restaging German childhood traumas against Bad Boys in Poland, and it
involved from the start suicidal intent and the killing off of sinful Germans.
Historians admit that fighting "an unlimited war of conquest [against]
a worldwide coalition of state was in itself an insane undertaking"449
that was suicidal and sacrificial from the beginning. As Hitler promised nothing
but death to what he called the "thousands and thousands of young Germans
who have come forward with the self-sacrificial resolve freely and joyfully
to make a sacrifice of their young lives,"450 German mothers marched
through the streets chanting "We have donated a child to the Führer,"
Nazi soldiers felt "politically reborn [when] filled with a pure joy
I realized that what my mother had once said was true after all--that
it was a hallowed act to give up one's life for Germany," and Hitler
Youth sang, "We are born to die for Germany."451 At no point was
mere conquest of land the goal of Germany's invasions. Hitler hated Chamberlain
for making concessions and avoiding war at Munich, telling his soldiers later,
"We want war," and saying "I am only afraid that some Schweinehund
will make a proposal for mediation" like at Munich.452 "I did not
organize the armed forces in order not to strike. The idea of getting out
cheaply is dangerousWe must burn our boats."453 He instructed his
diplomats always to demand "so much that we can never be satisfied."454
When asked about Poland, "What is it that you want? Danzig? The Corridor?"
the answer was, "We want war."455 The goal was to "Act Brutally!
Be harsh and remorseless!"456 While Germans marched West with visions
of raping French women and climbing the Eiffel Tower, they marched East with
visions of smashing Jewish babies heads against walls457 and turning Moscow
into "an artificial lake."458 All Bad Boy alters to the East must
be eliminated. The orders were: "Complete destruction of Poland is the
military aim. Pursue until complete annihilation"459 and "Moscow
must be destroyed and completely wiped from the earth."460
Jewish annihilation plans only came later, actually during
the summer months of 1941 when, "convinced that the military campaign
was nearly over and victory was at hand, an elated Hitler gave the signal
to carry out [the] racial 'cleansing' [of the Jews.]"461 Initially,
for many years, Jews were to be resettled, part of Hitler's "grandiose
program of population transfers"462 --90 percent of which were ethnic
Germans and others and only 10 percent were Jews--a "massive upheaval
of humanity"463 that restaged upon five million people464 the experiences
of having to leave home endured during childhood by most Germans as their
parents endlessly moved them around to wetnurses, relatives, schools and work
sites. In 1940 Hitler and Himmler had rejected the "physical extermination
of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible."465
It was only by the summer of 1941, in victory and afraid of running out of
Bad Boys to kill in the East, that Hitler would approve of "the mass
murder of all European Jews in the form of deportation to death camps equipped
with poison gas facilities"466 like those used for murdering the 70,000
German children killed earlier. Christopher Browning correctly points to mania
and success as the source of the Holocaust when he concludes, "Hitler
[only] opted for the Final Solution in the 'euphoria of victory' of
midsummer 1941."467 Jews were the ultimate Bad Boys, symbols of liberalism,
freedom and prosperity in the stock market, and so finally must be totally
eliminated for Germans to return to the "pure" authoritarian family
atmosphere of 1900 where only Good Boys survived.
Even the notion that Germany had to kill Poles and Jews for
the acquisition of Lebensraum, or living space, completely misses the
motive for the Holocaust. Lebensraum was a completely phony concept.
It was actually a code word for the desire to break free, to have room to
live and grow, to throw off swaddling bands and corsets, to get up from crouching
against the wall as children and to have some space to live. Conquering
foreign lands or annihilating Jews and others to expand the actual amount
of soil Germany could farm made no sense at all, because Germany already had
so much unused land that they had to import a steady stream of foreign workers
to farm it.468 Germans ate well under Hitler. The only reality behind the
popular Lebensraum notion that the "Germanic mother could not
feed her children adequately"469 was the inability of German mothers
and wetnurses four decades earlier to empathize with and adequately feed their
infants and children.
Jews, then, were the main poison containers for the restaging
of traumatic German childrearing practices four decades earlier. Every one
of the things done to Jews in the Holocaust can be found to have been perpetrated
by parents and others to German children at the turn of the century. The precise
details of earlier events that were reinflicted upon Jews later are astonishingly
minute and literal. Jews were, of course, murdered by the millions, just as
German children had watched their siblings murdered in infanticidal acts earlier,
using the exact same phrase for the genocide of Jews--"elimination
of useless eaters"--as parents had used earlier for their infants
and children as they murdered them at birth.470 Because infanticide rates
were so high, the majority of German children would have witnessed the murder
of newborn siblings by their mothers, would have heard the murdered baby being
called a "useless eater," and would themselves have been called
a "useless eater" as children and so could have wondered if they
might also be murdered. One can hardly read a single Holocaust book without
having to wade through endless accounts of children buried alive by Nazis,
"children having their heads beaten in like poultry and thrown into a
smoking pit," "babies thrown from the fourth floor and crushed on
the pavements," "children's bodies lay around, torn in half with
the heads smashed in," "'little Jews' caught on bayonets after being
thrown from upper story windows," etc.471 Even the specific methods German
mothers had used for killing their newborn--especially smashing the baby
against a wall or throwing it into a latrine--were "a regular occurrence"472
against Jews in concentration camps:
When mothers succeeded in keeping their babies with them. A
German guard took the baby by its legs and smashed it against the wall of
the barracks until only a bloody mass remained in his hands. The unfortunate
mother had to take this mass with her to the 'bath.' Only those who
saw these things with their own eyes will believe with what delight the Germans
performed these operations. [Also] SS men used to amuse themselves by swinging
Jewish children by their legs and then flinging them to their deaths. He who
threw a Jewish child farthest won.473
Jews were also regularly tied up and made to live in their
own filth exactly as swaddled German infants were earlier. Rarely washed,
Germans had spent their early lives covered with their own excreta, addressed
by their parents simply as "little shitter."474 In the concentration
camps, Jews were subject to what Des Pres calls a constant "excremental
assault," in which they were forced to defecate and urinate upon each
other, were often thrown into the cesspool if they were too slow, lived in
barracks "awash with urine and feces," walked about "knee-deep
in excrement," were forced to eat their own feces, and finally died in
gas chambers "covered all over with excrement."475 In one camp,
30,000 women not only had to use a single latrine, but in addition, "we
were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line
to get into this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement."476 Holocaust
scholars, missing the childhood origins of all these gratuitous excremental
cruelties, have been puzzled by how much of the concentration camp routine
was devoted to the endless humiliations: "Why, if they were going to
kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?"
Gitta Sereny asked of Franz Stangl.477 But of course the humiliation was the
point, restaging early German childhood exactly. Hitler--himself swaddled
and left alone in his feces by his mother--had told Germans in Mein
Kampf , "If the Jews were alone in this world, they would suffocate
in dirt and filth."478 In the Holocaust the Jews--"so much
like us" (Hitler)--would suffocate in dirt and filth, as all little,
helpless German babies did all day long at the hands of their mothers. And
since the "little shitter" German babies were also covered with
lice, vermin and rodents as they lay swaddled in their cradles, unable to
move, Jews too were called "lice, vermin and rats" as they were
locked into the concentration camps, told "This is a death camp. You'll
be eaten by lice; you'll rot in your own shit, you filthy shitface"479
Some guards even restaged the rodent attacks "by inserting a tube into
the victim's anus, or into a woman's vagina, then letting a rat into the tube.
The rodent would try to get out by gnawing at the victim's internal organs."480
Later toilet training of German children was also restaged, often in precise
detail, as by having the ghetto-latrine supervised by a "guard with a
big clock, whom the Germans dressed comically as a rabbi and called the ‘shit-master.'"481
Every extermination camp reproduced elements of a typical German
home. Jews were not said to be there to be murdered, they were there to be
"housecleaned."482 Mommy hated her children's "dirtiness,"
wanted them "clean," so "dirty Jews" were killed so only
"clean Germans" would be left. Jews were Untermenschen (with
overtones of "little people") who were forced to crawl on the floor
naked like babies,483 and who were tied up, starved, made to kneel for hours,
doused with ice water, terrorized and beaten just like most German children.484
The battering of Jews in camps followed the hallowed German child-beating
pattern of "being strong" (not making the perpetrator feel guilty
by crying out):
I dropped to my knees without uttering a sound. I knew what
was expected of me. I looked at the commandant from my knees as he smiled
back at me with approval. He swung the chair at me again, striking me on the
shoulder. I sprawled on the ground, bruised and dizzy, but I still made no
sound. He raised the chair and brought it down on my head, shattering it. I
bit my tongue to stop myself making a sound I knew that if I made another
sound, nothing could save me. 'Very good, for being strong. You shall
be rewarded. Get some food. Tell them I sent you...'485
The beatings and tortures were, as is so often the case with
sadism, often sexualized:
The SS camp commander stood close to the whipping post throughout
the flogging his whole face was already red with lascivious excitement.
His hands were plunged deep in his trouser pockets, and it was quite clear
that he was masturbating throughout. On more than thirty occasions, I myself
have witnessed SS camp commanders masturbating during floggings486
Sexual tortures of prisoners were legion, including pushing
sticks up into boys' penises and breaking them off, brutally massaging prostates
with pieces of wood inserted into the rectum, castrating men and removing
the ovaries of women, training dogs to attack their genitals, etc.487 Victims
were all Bad Boys and Bad Girls, needing to be punished for their sexuality,
as the German guards' parents had punished them. The Holocaust was one gigantic,
bizarre "cautionary tale," teaching everyone the same lessons taught
to German children as they were assaulted, so when local civilians during
the Holocaust saw Jews being clubbed to death in the street, they cheered,
"with mothers holding up their children to enjoy the spectacle and soldiers
milling around to watch the fun like a football match."488
THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF CHILDREARING AND THE DECREASE IN
HUMAN VIOLENCE
As the next three chapters will document, childrearing has steadily improved
historically, even if very unevenly, so if the psychogenic theory is correct
then human violence should have decreased steadily over the past millennia.
Yet the twentieth century has been widely touted as the most violent in history
and has often been compared by anthropologists to some so-called peaceful
tribes they have claimed represent our oldest ancestors. How can childhood
be the source of human violence if violence has vastly increased while childrearing
has improved?
That twentieth century wars have been more violent seems to
be an obvious fact. Technology alone allows us to be far more lethal than
in earlier centuries, when wars causing 250,000 or more deaths were rare,489
while World War II alone killed 15 million people in battle, and total battlefield
deaths for the twentieth century have exceeded 100 million.490 What's more,
if one expands the definition of war deaths to what Rummel terms "democide"--so
that the 40 million Russian deaths ordered by Stalin, for instance, are included--the
number of "deaths by government" in the twentieth century jumps
past 170 million.491 Surely Nordstrom is right in saying, "This past
century was the bloodiest century in human existence,"492 thus disproving
the psychogenic theory of decreasing violence resulting from improving childrearing.
Yet Nordstrom's pessimistic conclusion is reversed if one measures
the rate of violence by the likelihood of one's dying by war and democide.
With several billion people on earth during the twentieth century, the rate
of death by wars is in fact less than two percent of the population.493 Although
individual wars in the past have killed less in numbers, they could easily
wipe out many times this percentage of the population, particularly if--as
is rarely done--the battlefield deaths are increased to include the democides
of the past, when massacring civilians in entire cities was a common practice.494
Further, what is more relevant to the childrearing comparison is that lumping
all nations in the twentieth century together regardless of their childhood
evolution masks the fact that advanced democratic nations like the United
States, England and France have lost only a fraction of a percentage of their
populations in wars during the century. The United States, for instance, lost
120,000 soldiers in WWI, only .12 percent of the population, and 400,000 soldiers
in WWII, only .34 percent of the population.495 The Korean War only lost .04
percent, the Vietnam War only .03 percent, and the Gulf War .0003 percent
of Americans. The facts are that the more advanced the childrearing, the more
democratic the society and the less percentage lost in wars. This is why no
democratic nation has ever gone to war with another democratic nation in history.496
Anthropologists have promulgated what Keeley calls "the
myth of the peaceful savage" so effectively that when actual deaths by
war are tabulated for pre-state simple societies one is astonished by how
such a notion can continue to be taught to students.497 Keeley documents 22
prestate tribes with war deaths five to ten times that of contemporary democratic
nations, concluding that "what transpired before the evolution of civilized
states was often unpleasantly bellicose."498 Death rates in areas like
New Guinea and South America, where there has been less Western policing of
war than in Africa and Asia, range from an astonishing 25 to 35 percent of
all adult deaths.499 The most warlike society ever described is the Waorani
of the Amazon, which produced 60 percent of all adult deaths from war raids.500
It is likely that prestate societies 10,000 years ago had similar astronomical
death rates from wars, if the number of human bones with stone axes and arrowheads
embedded in them are counted.501 The 30 percent average of adult deaths in
prestate societies is even higher than the figures of below 10 percent that
early modern wars tended to average out,502 although admittedly little has
been done to date to measure non-battlefield deaths in state wars prior to
the twentieth century. The overall historical decline from 30 percent of adult
population to under one percent for war/democide adult deaths for democratic
nations has therefore been plotted in the graph below as a clear downward
trend through history, as childrearing improves through the ages and gradually
reduces the inner need to kill others.
 The Decline of Human Violence
Besides war and democide, the graph also shows the decline of
the two other outlets for human violence: infanticide and homicide/suicide.
Infanticide is usually not counted as murder by demographers, since they do
not consider newborn as human. But most human murders in history were in fact
committed by mothers killing their newborn. The rates of infanticide in contemporary
pre-state tribes are enormous: Australian Aborigine mothers, for instance,
killed about 50 percent of all newborn, and the first missionaries in Polynesia
estimated the two-thirds of the children were murdered by their parents.503
Birdsell hypothesized infanticide rates as high as 50 percent for prehistoric
tribal societies, based on high fertility rates and slow growth of populations.504
My own cross-historical study, On the Demography of Filicide,505 is
based on a large number of boy-girl ratios that ran as high as 135 to 100,
which showed that girls until modern times were killed in sufficiently higher
numbers than boys to have affected census figures for children. Tribal societies
also often infanticide enough of their newborn girls at a higher rate than
boys to produce childhood sex ratios of from 140 to 100 (Yanomamö) to
159 to 100 (Polynesian),506 meaning that virtually all families killed at
least one child and most killed several, averaging perhaps half of all children
born, especially if "late infanticide" (such as letting an infant
starve to death) are counted. Since 50 percent infanticide rates seems to
be the norm around which all these studies of simple tribes center, it is
what is shown at the left of the chart.
The third outlet for human violence is homicide/suicide--lumped
together because when homicide rates initially go down in modern times suicide
rates tend for a while to climb, suicide being somewhat more "advanced"
(less impulsive) method of personal violence than homicide. Many simple tribes
had homicide rates of up to 50 or 60 percent, causing one anthropologist to
conclude about one group, "There was not a single grown man who had not
been involved in a killing in some way or another."507 Even so-called
"peaceful" tribes like the famous !Kung of Africa actually have
"twenty to fifty times" current modern homicide rates.508 Knauft's
careful study found the Gebusi homicide rate to be sixty times the current
U.S. rate,509 with 60 percent of all males admitting to having committed one
or more homicides,510 while Steadman found the Hewa--who specialize in
killing witches--had a homicide rate of one percent of the population
per year, a thousand times the current U.S. rate.511 Most tribal homicide
rates run around ten percent of the adult population over a lifetime.
Suicide
in small societies is usually higher among the women, since they live lives
of despair, often reaching 10 to 25 percent of adult women's deaths, staying
high in antiquity but declining under Christianity, when suicide was declared
to be self-murder.512 Homicide rates in medieval and early modern history,
when almost everyone carried a knife or sword and often used them, ran about
ten times higher than today's rates of about a quarter of one percent--although
they should be adjusted upward for the number of unrecorded homicides in the
past--while suicide rates today run about a half of one percent of adult
population over a lifetime.513 Thus homicide/suicide rates, like those of
war and infanticide, have decreased steadily, to less than one percent for
most democratic nations today. Added together, then, the rate of human violence
has dropped from around a 75 percent chance of being murdered by your fellow
human beings to around 2 percent for advanced democratic nations today, as
a result of the slow and steady improvement in childrearing over the centuries,
with the reduction of early trauma, the growth of the hippocampal-orbitofrontal
cortex network and more balanced neurotransmitters in the human population.
WHAT WILL WARS BE LIKE DURING THE NEXT CENTURY?
Even just two percent of six billion people is a hundred twenty million people.
Should we still expect violence to kill this many people each generation during
the next century? What's more, only a part of the world today is democratic.
Most of the world is still "leaping into modernity," just becoming
more free, democratic and prosperous, but with their childrearing not yet
modern, thus going through the same growth panic process that Germany went
through in the middle of the twentieth century. We can therefore expect higher
rates of democide in the coming decades in the developing countries. Yugoslavia,
as an example, became democratic only recently, and only then began expressing
their growth panic through mass murdering and raping their neighbors--much
like the Nazis did--since their childrearing was still thoroughly medieval.514
Especially with nuclear and biological weapons proliferating, might we expect
major wars in the next century to again kill hundreds of millions of people,
despite slowly improving childrearing?
Advanced democracies today have sufficient proportions of good
parents now to be satisfied with working off their growth panics by small
wars and recessions rather than world wars and depressions.515 Since the end
of WWII, wars have been far smaller in fatalities--at least for the democracies,
if not for their opponents--so that the sacrificial needs of nations
seem to be satisfied with only thousands or even hundreds of deaths rather
than millions, what has been termed "low-intensity wars."516 Military
spending in democratic nations has dropped from around 75 percent of government
spending in the late eighteenth century to somewhere between 10 and 20 percent
today.517 These smaller wars have been more frequent and have alternated more
frequently with small recessions, so the classic 50-year manic/depressive
cycle of the previous centuries that we graphed above has been drastically
shortened, and recessions and small wars seem to substitute for each other
as sacrificial rituals rather than alternating as in past centuries. But all
this has happened mainly in developed, democratic nations with better childrearing,
so the answer to the question about war in the next century has to be ambivalent.
I am confident that I can trust my children and their friends on the West
Side of Manhattan--who have loving, helping mode parents who come from
every ethnic and economic strata--to make a non-violent world in the
next century.
But the average Chinese or African or Russian child has still
so often been brought up in an atmosphere of infanticide, battering, sexual
molestation and severe domination that they can be forecast to need to repeat
their parental holocaust on the historical stage in the future as they experience
their new freedoms, repeating the democides of the twentieth century but with
even greater destructive weapons. Just allowing the usual slow historical
evolution of childrearing may not be enough to outweigh the escalating destructiveness
of our weapons. Therefore, the more advanced psychoclasses will have to
actually intervene in the world's families to help change parenting and thus
childhood for everyone on earth. Unless this can be done during the twenty-first
century, it seems likely that the proliferating power of our weaponry could
outrun the evolution of our childrearing and make the coming decades even
more violent than the twentieth century has been.
A new way to change parenting, community parenting centers,
has in fact begun to be developed in a few American communities, and their
surprising success provides hope that they can decrease human violence around
the world at affordable costs. Parenting centers not only have free classes
in parenting; they also have a staff that visits the homes of every child
born in the community weekly during their first two years of life and helps
the parents parent, teaching them what no school has ever thought it worthwhile
to teach--that you need not be afraid of your child, that you need not
hit them or use them for your needs, that you can love and trust them to grow
up and turn out better than you did by not repeating on them the abusive parenting
you once endured. Exactly how these parenting centers work will be described
in detail in the final chapter of this book. They promise to be able to eliminate
child abuse and drastically reduce human violence around the globe, with costs
only a fraction of the $8 trillion the world has spent on warfare since WWII.518
As an example of how global parenting centers could work to
reduce world-wide violence, consider NATO, which was built up to "counter
the Communist threat" at the cost of over a half trillion dollars. NATO
has been actually so far used only to kill a few thousand Yugoslavs. Suppose
around fifty million dollars of the half trillion had been spent on helping
Eastern European nations have better families--sort of an Eastern European
Marshall Plan, only including helping parents directly with parenting centers
that reached into every home, showing parents that they need not swaddle,
beat and torture their children as has been common in the Yugoslav zadruga.519
Yugoslav children would then not have grown up to be violent youth raping
and killing others as they are doing today, but would instead be "new Yugoslavia
youth" building their nation. This new principle of actively changing childhood
can in fact be repeated around the world again, at a fraction of the cost
of the destructive arsenal the world today maintains.
Removing the causes of violence only takes empathy, foresight
and will, not huge resources. We are today like a group of people standing
on the banks of a river trying desperately to save people we see drowning,
but refusing to go upstream and stop them from being thrown in. The reduction
of human violence involves prevention first of all the removal of the
source of the illness just like the prevention of any other human clinical
disorder. That enough of us can summon the empathy and understanding needed
to change what has long been called "our violent human nature" is our only
hope for the future of our precious world.
Citations
Lloyd deMause is editor of The Journal of Psychohistory, President of the International Psychistorical Association, Director of the Institute for Psychohistory and author and editor of seven books and many scholarly articles. View the website at The Institute for Psychohistory.
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