System in Madness – “Hollywood of the SS Victims”

The Third Reich is often portrayed as a delusional system based on racial mania; a system directed by the “carpet muncher” Adolf Hitler, i.e. a mad dictator. To dismiss not only “the Führer” or the regime, but the whole of society as sick or insane – this was already common practice in the 1930s. After his expulsion from Nazi Germany in 1942, CBS correspondent Howard K. Smith (1914–2002), stationed in Berlin, summarized his impressions thus: “Nazi society is rotten from top to bottom and through and through…A morbid interest in pseudo-science and crude superstitions of every conceivable kind has…given rise to the boom in all sorts of things: in phrenology…in astrology and in all sorts of fortune-telling” (Smith 1986, pp. 142–143). The advantage of such characterization of the Third Reich is that we, as bystanders, can draw from it the convenient conclusion – as sarcastically stated in the book title by Sinclair Lewis: It can’t Happen Here (1935) – nothing like this can happen to us, because we are normal, we are not insane, as a society we are not rotten, and a mad leader would be unthinkable in our country. But, one wonders, was it only the Germans at that time, or also much of the world, that acted irrationally or was blind in dealing with delusions, so that the Third Reich could emerge, flourish, and resort to the worst possible atrocities?