In the 2024 Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, director Jonathan Glazer depicts the everyday family life of Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig and their five children in their idyllic home just outside the wall of the death camp. As a Guardian review of the film noted, the mundaneness of Höss’s domestic life, while he was overseeing mass murder, reflects Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s insistence that it is ordinary people, rather than monsters, who are responsible for committing atrocities.
In The Nazi Mind, however, Laurence Rees vividly demonstrates that it was in fact an alliance between “monsters” and “ordinary people” that was responsible for the cataclysm of Nazi mass murder.
At its core, nazism was a violent pathological ideology of racial hatred and messianic ambition, fanatically held by the monsters who led Germany to war and genocide. Strengthening the German racial stock, alongside a plan for acquiring living space in the east for the purified German race, were the twin ambitions of Hitler and the Nazi leadership from the start. The former would require the elimination of Jews and all those deemed to be “weak”; the latter the mass murder of 30 million people in central Europe and the Soviet Union.
The Nazi Mind chillingly describes, step by step, how this master plan was implemented by the Nazi elite, first by stealth and then, as Hitler’s successes mounted, with increasing acquiescence and enthusiastic support from the ordinary men and women of Germany. Disturbingly, Rees recounts how medical doctors were one of the professions that most readily embraced Nazi ideology. About half of German doctors voluntarily became members of the Nazi Party, many going on to play important roles in the murders of the Holocaust.
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As war broke out and violence escalated, Rees documents the demonic social forces that were unleashed – the mass murder of the disabled, the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, and the death factories of the Holocaust – including Auschwitz with Höss’s pretty house on its perimeter, with its well-manicured garden and its swimming pool for the children.
A disturbing but essential book, The Nazi Mind is a vital testament to the nightmarish consequences that alliances between monsters and ordinary people can bring about.
Collaboration between monsters and “not so ordinary” people is the topic of Stephan Malinowski’s The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis. The relationship between the former Hohenzollern royal family and the Nazis, which this book explores, was thrust into the limelight during the 1990s, when the family filed compensation claims, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, for Soviet expropriations following Germany’s defeat in the second World War. The law excluded claims from those who had supported the Nazi dictatorship, hence the contemporary importance of events almost a century ago. As a result of his historical research on this topic, Malinowski has suffered a barrage of legal attacks from the Hohenzollern family.
The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis is a deeply informative book, not only about the behaviour of members of the former royal family, but also about the dynamics of dictatorship. A big theme that emerges from Malinowski’s epic telling is the deep continuities between Kaiser Wilhelm’s pre-first World War Germany, and Germany more than two decades later at the time of Hitler’s rise to power. As Malinowski describes, during the 1930s the culture of large parts of German society remained vehemently hostile to democracy, within the judiciary, the civil service, the army and the nobility.
Malinowski documents in extensive detail the shared values and world views that much of the nobility shared with the Nazis. These included their pursuit of the end of the Weimar Republic, their desire to restart and win the first World War, their valorisation of violence and militaristic nationalism, their lust for more “living space” for Germans in the east, and their anti-Semitism.
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As the Weimar Republic struggled to establish democracy, it was assailed on the right, therefore, both by aristocrats on one side and Hitler’s Nazi Party on the other. It was not wholly unexpected that these seemingly disparate forces might form an alliance.
At one point Malinowski argues that both the monarchy and the Third Reich, built as they both were on the aura of individual leaders, were hugely dependent on the fantasies that masses of ordinary people project on to such leaders. Such projection, Malinowski continues, is a crucial factor “in whether an individual – be it an heir to the throne or a commoner styling himself as ‘the Führer’ – is considered a superhuman messiah or a laughable clown”.
In our own age of laughable clowns, both these books, meticulously researched, brilliantly written and passionately argued, vividly illustrate the indispensable role of history, when it courageously pursues the truth, in understanding the patterns of catastrophe of the past and resisting their recurrence in the present.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy and a senior research fellow at the MaREI Centre at UCC.
