Destructive and self-destructive trends in criminalized society; a study of totalitarianism.

Abstract

The criminal activity of the SS culminated in murders on an unprecedented scale; mass murders, according to preconceived diabolic schemes which were to serve the master plan of genocide, as well as murders of those considered useless, disagreeable or disloyal were perpetrated. Finally wanton murders were committed for the sake of murdering alone, possibly with the idea of "hardening" the men who were carrying out tile murders, and tying them irrevocably to the SS. This eruption of aggressive-destructive activity brought about, probably as a means of psychological defense, a fundamental perversion of the idea of death into a heathen concept, which I should like to call "idolatrous delight in death," or more briefly, thanatolatry. The first open statement of this type is probably the astounding remark made by Goering in one of his speeches early in the war, in which he said, "With every German airman who is killed by the enemy our Luftwaffe becomes stronger." This statement is illogical unless one assumes that the spirit or the strength of the dead man somehow entered into the substance of the Luftwaffe and thereby made it stronger in an irrational and mystic manner reminiscent of Voo-Doo beliefs. There is more evidence than this, that the Nazi Germans actually entertained such superstitious beliefs, for they actually believed that dead bodies could give strength to inanimate matter. Human bodies, living and dead, were encased in the concrete of fortifications and bunkers, as reported by many reliable witnesses. At the Herman Goering steel works, according to one report ob-