Psychopathography of Adolf Hitler
[9] Famed is Hannah Arendt's invention of the phrase the "banality of evil"; in 1963, she stated that for a Nazi perpetrator as Adolf Eichmann, mental normality and the ability to commit mass murder were not mutually exclusive.
[16] On the other hand, some authors have noted that figures such as Charles Manson and Jim Jones, who have been described as having a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, nonetheless succeeded in having a tremendous influence on their groups of followers.
[8][51] During World War II, the United States intelligence agency, Office of Strategic Services (OSS), collected information about Hitler's personality and commissioned a research team led by Walter Charles Langer to develop psychological reports in 1943.
Jan Armbruster and Peter Theiss-Abendroth (2016) write "Having barely escaped a German concentration camp, Karl Kroner found it difficult to make a living in Iceland because his medical diploma wasn't recognized by the local authorities.
"[55] In 1939, Austrian physician and writer Ernst Weiss, who lived in France in exile, wrote a novel, Ich, der Augenzeuge ("I, the eye witness"), a fictional autobiography of a doctor who cured a "hysterical" soldier A.H. from Braunau who had lost his eyesight in the trenches.
[56] Starting with the assumptions of the intelligence report and following Weiss' novel, a series of researchers and authors have, consecutively, developed suspicions about a possible involvement of Forster in a supposedly securely established hypnotherapy.
[8] These reconstructions are questionable not only because they do not provide any new evidence; they also exclude alternative interpretations from the outset, widely disregard the historical context, and overlook even that Forster held a view of hysteria that would have led him to other methods of treatment than hypnosis.
But as psychiatric historian Jan Armbruster (University of Greifswald) judged, they were not sufficiently convincing, such as in the case of journalist Ottmar Katz, author of a biography of Hitler's personal physician, Theodor Morell (1982).
[65] Already in his lifetime, many elements in Hitler's personal beliefs and conduct were classified by psychiatrists as signs of schizophrenia, for example, his faith that he was chosen by fate to liberate the German people from their supposed enemy, the Jews.
He considered him as perched between hysteria and schizophrenia, but stressed that Hitler possessed considerable control over his pathological tendencies and that he deliberately used them in order to stir up nationalist sentiments among the Germans and their hatred of alleged persecutors.
[27] He writes that both managed to stay in touch with reality because they had the opportunity to create their own organisations (Steiner: the Anthroposophical Society; Hitler: the NSDAP and its many subdivisions) that they could influence according to their delusions – and therefore avoid the, normally expected, "schizophrenic withdrawal".
[citation needed] The psychologists and historians reviewed passed down reports by people who knew Hitler, and evaluated these accounts in accordance with a self-developed diagnostic tool that allowed for a wide range of personality, clinical, and neuropsychological disturbances to be measured.
[31] In the late 1980s, Ellen Gibbels (University of Cologne) attributed the limb trembling in Hitler's later years to Parkinson's disease, a widely held consensus in the research community.
[30] Given the inhumanity of his crimes, Hitler was early on linked with "psychopathy", a severe personality disorder whose main symptoms are a great or complete lack of empathy, social responsibility, and conscience.
However, the symptomatology is rare, and unlike in popular discourse, where the classification of Hitler as a "psychopath" is commonplace,[71] psychiatrists have only occasionally endeavored to associate him with psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder.
[73] In this volume, Bychowski, a Polish-American psychiatrist, compared several historical figures who have successfully carried out a coup d'état: Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, Maximilien Robespierre, Hitler, and Joseph Stalin.
[74] In 1993, the interdisciplinary team of Desmond Henry, Dick Geary, and Peter Tyrer published an essay in which they expressed their common view that Hitler had antisocial personality disorder as defined in ICD-10.
[25] While psychiatrically oriented authors, when dealing with Hitler, were primarily endeavouring to diagnose him with a specific clinical disorder, some of their colleagues who follow a depth psychological doctrine as the psychoanalytic school of Sigmund Freud, were first and foremost interested in explaining his monstrously destructive behaviour.
Miller owed her knowledge about Hitler to biographic and pathographic works such as those by Rudolf Olden (1935), Konrad Heiden (1936/37), Franz Jetzinger (1958), Joachim Fest (1973), Helm Stierlin (1975), and John Toland (1976).
She wrote that Hitler's hate-ridden and destructive personality, that later made millions of people suffer, emerged under the humiliating and degrading treatment and the beating that he received from his father as a child.
She posits that Hitler early on identified with his tyrannical father, and later transferred the trauma of his parental home onto Germany; his contemporaries followed him willingly because they had experienced a childhood that was very similar.
According to Dorpat, many of Hitler's personality traits – such as his volatility, his malice, the sadomasochistic nature of his relationships, his human indifference, and his avoidance of shame – can be traced back to trauma.
Vinnai then leaves the psychoanalytical discourse and comments on social psychological questions, such as how Hitler's political world view could have emerged from his trauma and how this could appeal to large numbers of people.
In a 1976 published essay, psychiatrists Colin Martindale, Nancy Hasenfus, and Dwight Hines (University of Maine) suggested that Hitler had had a sub-function of the left hemisphere of the brain.
Mayer identified three groups of symptomatic behavioral singularities: 1. indifference (becoming manifest for example in murder of opponents, family members or citizens, or in genocide); 2. intolerance (practicing press censorship, running a secret police, or condoning torture); 3. self-aggrandisement (self-assessment as a "unifier" of a people, overestimation of own military power, identification with religion or nationalism, or proclamation of a "grand plan").
Mayer compared Hitler to Stalin and Saddam Hussein; the stated aim of this proposition of a psychiatric categorisation was to provide the international community with a diagnostic instrument which would make it easier to recognise dangerous leader personalities in mutual consensus and to take action against them.
[43] Michael Fitzgerald, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, published a cornucopia of pathographies of outstanding historical personalities, mostly stating that they had Asperger syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum.
Some authors have described Hitler as a cynical manipulator or a fanatic, but denied that he was seriously mentally disturbed; among them are British historians Ian Kershaw, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, and A. J. P. Taylor, and, more recently, German psychiatrist Manfred Lütz.
[86] American psychologist Glenn D. Walters wrote in 2000: "Much of the debate about Hitler's long-term mental health is probably questionable, because even if he had suffered from significant psychiatric problems, he attained the supreme power in Germany rather in spite of these difficulties than through them.
"[91] After two years of study – of the diaries of Theodor Morell among others – physician Hans-Joachim Neumann and historian Henrik Eberle published in 2009 their joint book War Hitler krank?
