World War II and the Holocaust have been studied by historians and political scientists more than any war in history. Their conclusions about what caused them are that Germans were simply obeying Hitler, a case of “mass hypnosis” by one man: “Historians are, rightly, nearly unanimous that…the causes of the Second World War were the personality and the aims of Adolf Hitler” [F. H. Hinsley]; “the war Hitler started was one which he alone wanted” [William Manchester]; “only one European really wanted war—Adolf Hitler” [John Keegan]; “no Hitler, no Holocaust” [Klaus Fischer].¹ Psychiatrists have usually followed the lead of historians, claiming for instance that they could find no psychopathology in the Nazi leaders who were given Rorschach tests at Nuremberg—they were “all too normal” people, and their mass murders were committed by “well-integrated, productive and secure personalities”² who were merely “obeying orders.” That a theory which posits millions of people choose a leader who promises them they can kill millions of other people only because they were “following orders” is a pure tautology never occurs to them. When Eichman bragged “I laughed that I have killed five million Jews” and psychiatrists claim his statement was “normal,” it demonstrates not “the banality of evil” but the banality of psychiatry.

When states go to war because they re-enact the nightmares of child abuse that are embedded like time bombs in their brains in violent alters, and if they usually do so when they experience growth panic following an historical period of dangerous new freedom and growth, then each phase of going to war should betray historical evidence of real childhood traumas being re-experienced. In order to understand the traumatic nightmares being acted out in World War II and the Holocaust, we will have to first understand in detail the nightmarish terrors of German, Austrian and Japanese childrearing at the beginning of the 20th century. Because more psychohistorical research has been done on Central European childrearing than on Japanese, we will begin with a detailed description of early childrearing in Germany and Austria. We will then more briefly describe Japanese childrearing and finally show how both nations went to war in the seven group-fantasy phases described above, aided by similar sacrificial actions by the Allies that helped produce the war and genocide.

LATE 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN CHILDREARING
The first decision German and Austrian parents had to make when an infant was born was whether it should be killed. Newborn were not in most cases considered human since they did not yet have a soul, and so could be “killed in a kind of late abortion.”³ Mothers often “had their babies in the privy, and treated the birth as an evacuation…a bowel movement…killing their children by smashing their heads like poultry.”⁴ Even the underestimated figures given by officials showed German infanticide at the end of the twentieth century as 20 percent, half again higher than France and England.⁵ Infant mortality in Bavaria, where breastfeeding was rare, was given as 58% and was probably closer to 75%, which means almost every child watched their mothers strangle or otherwise kill their siblings when born.⁶ Mothers were described as being without remorse as they killed their newborn.⁷ Children routinely saw dead babies in sewers, on roads and in streams as they played.⁸ From early childhood on, German children experienced in direct form the terror of seeing babies killed without remorse by their Killer Mothers, imagining that “the babies must have been bad” to deserve their fate, and embedded in their amygdalan networks both a Killer Mother alter and a Bad Baby alter, vowing to always obey their parents and any other authority so they would not also be killed. Dicks found that Nazis had “particularly destructive mother images,” and the Oliners found German rescuers of Jews had families that showed them more love and respect than Nazi parents.⁹ Polls of Germans of the time show the majority were also routinely beaten by their fathers, and considered him “absolute law in the family…we feared him more than we loved him.”¹⁰

That real mothers regularly killed their newborn infants saying they were “unworthy of living” formed the main source of later German delusions that Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, French, British, American and other neighbors were “unworthy of living” and must be killed by the millions—fifty million in fact—an act embedded in their right brains as they watched their Killer Mothers murder their siblings.¹¹ When Hitler said that “France, the mortal enemy of our nation, inexorably strangles us,”¹² he was not, as most historians assume, just being colorful; he was expressing his and his fellow German’s experience of actually seeing their Killer Mothers strangling their infant siblings. Most of Germany agreed with him that their 1939 attack on Poland that started WWII was “defensive,” since they were “faced with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation.”¹³ The Killer Mother memory may have been totally in their heads rather than in reality, but it seemed more real than anything outside could be. And that Jews were for centuries really Killer Mothers was proven by German convictions since the thirteenth century that Jews drained children’s blood and killed them, called “the Blood Libel” by historians. Luther reflected the widespread German group-fantasy by calling Jews “thirsty bloodhounds and murderers [of] children.”¹⁴ And German Social Darwinists revealed the maternal model for the murder of millions by saying they were only “imitating Mother Nature who weeds out the weakest ones,” again a description of the actual German mothers who “weeded out” some of her newborn infants.
It should not be thought that the killing of newborn was mainly a result of poverty. In fact, my lengthy study of boy/girl ratios as a revealing index of infanticide (since little girl babies were more unworthy of living than boys) shows more infanticide in wealthier families, and visitors to Germany in the late nineteenth century reported” “It is extremely rare for a German lady to nourish her own children” and “It would have been very astonishing indeed if a well-to-do mother had suggested suckling her own baby,” saying “it is too messy” or “they didn’t want to ruin their figures” or “breast-feeding was inconvenient.”¹⁵ Wetnurses were commonly given the newborn, and more often than not they were “killing nurses”—termed Engelmcherin, “angelmakers”—who were paid to kill off the children sent to them. The children of the wetnurse would watch their mother briefly give the new baby her breast, saying “Poor, poor little one…soon you will go, soon, soon” and see the child was dead by morning.¹⁶ German children who watched their parents send their newborn siblings off to wetnurse implanted this image in their violent alters and repeated their actions in the “resettlement” of millions of Jews and Poles and others when they became adults.

Even if the mother breastfed her baby, it was only a few times a day, and the rest of the time it was abandoned to the cradle in a dark room, wrapped in tight swaddling bandages, with their mouths stuffed with a Zulp, a linen bag filled with bread and alcohol, so those dying of neglect and starvation ranged from a quarter to half in their first year of life.¹⁷ Infants were so routinely hungry that “one rarely encounters a German infant who is fully breast-fed…those poor worms get their mouths stuffed with a dirty rag containing chewed bread so that they cannot scream.”¹⁸ Children simply were not felt to be human like adults. Even when they were infants and little children, their parents constantly told them they were just “useless mouths to feed…rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father’s comment that we did not merit it.”¹⁹ Indeed, fathers were competitors to their babies for their wives’ breasts. In Bavaria, for instance, where breastfeeding by the mother was uncommon, a man married a woman from northern Germany, and when she had her baby the jealous father told her that nursing her child was “swinish and filthy” and he himself “would not eat if she did not give up this disgusting habit.”²⁰

The phrase applied to children—“useless mouths to feed”—was widely repeated before and during WWII to apply to the wish of Germans and Austrians to kill 30 to 50 million “useless mouths” in Europe, from Jews to any outside enemy who was attacked. Their need had nothing to do with anything economic; as Hermann Goering put it in 1941, “This year 20 to 30 million people will starve in Russia. Perhaps this is for the best, since certain nations must be decimated.”²¹ The same infantile starvation fantasy was evident in many other Nazi notions, such as their supposed need to kill others to obtain more Lebensraum, more room to grow food to prevent imminent starvation, a situation that simply did not apply to Central Europe, which had plenty of resources to increase their supply of food. Hitler’s conviction that Mother Germany did not have enough Lebensraum to properly feed the nation came directly from his memory of his infantile hunger, since mothers in Braunau where he was raised rarely breastfed their infants.

The shortage of Lebensraum (room to live) had a second source in childhood. Upon birth, “the wretched new-born little thing was wound up in ells of bandages, from the feet right, and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be embalmed as a mummy…babies are loathsome, foetid things, offensive to the last degree with their excreta…”²² Babies simply could not move for their first year of life. A visitor from England described the German baby as “a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy in yards of bandages…it is never bathed…Its head is never touched with soap and water until it is eight or ten months old.”²³ Their feces and urine was so regularly left on their bodies that they were covered with lice and other vermin attracted to their excreta, and since the swaddling bandages were very tight and covered their arms as well as their bodies, they could not prevent the vermin from drinking their blood. Their parents considered them so disgusting they called them “filthy lice-covered babies,” and often put them, swaddled, in a bag, which they hung on the wall or on a tree while the mothers did other tasks.²⁴ The fear of being poisoned by lice was daily embedded in the fearful alter of the baby, and was as an adult re-experienced as a fear of Jews being “filthy lice who attempted to infect the pure German blood and who had to be exterminated to cleanse the German bloodstream.”²⁵ Germany, Hitler said, had to restore its 1914 borders “to get an influx of fresh blood [because] the Polish Corridor is a national wound that bleeds continuously.” Infancy in swaddling bands was re-experienced: “Poisonous bacilli” were “sucking out our blood [and injecting] a continuous stream of poison into our blood vessels.”²⁶

Nazi “housecleaning of the unfit” began early on with 800,000 children having their blood taken to analyze its purity, and over 70,000 “useless eater” children were exterminated in the first gas chambers and crematorium ovens before any Jews were sent to gas chambers—to “cleanse and disinfect” the nation.²⁷ Eventually, Jews and other “useless eaters” were sent to gas chambers, run by doctors, claiming they were “filthy lice who attempted to infect the pure German blood” who had to be exterminated to “cleanse the bacteria that brought about infection.”²⁸ Himmler explained the childhood origins of the Jewish bacteria delusion as follows: “Anti-semitism is exactly like delousing. The removal of lice is not an ideological question, but a matter of hygiene.”²⁹ Hitler himself used to watch for hours as his own blood was being sucked by leeches “to rid it of poison.”³⁰ Jews were rounded up and made into “Bad Selves”—shit-babies—putting them into overcrowded death camps and telling them: “You’ll be eaten by lice, you’ll rot in your own shit…All are going to die.”³¹ Jews were called “pestiferous bacillus carriers,” made to live like lice-covered babies, forced to lie in barracks like they themselves were forced to live in their swaddling bands, “awash with urine and feces, forced to eat their own feces, and finally dying in showers covered with their excrement.”³² Repeating their parents’ curses at them as shit-babies, their guards told them “You’ll be eaten by lice; you’ll rot in your own shit, you filthy shitface.”³³ As they killed Jews, guards told them what they imagined their mothers felt as they killed their newborn siblings: “Because you’re dirty you have to die.”³⁴ They were all Bad Shit-Babies. They had to die. If they were not killed, Nazis said they would “gobble up the breast of Germany!”³⁵

The abandonment of children was not limited to sending them to wetnurses. Children were given away and even sold to relatives, neighbors, foundling homes, even “traveling scholars” to be used as beggars, with the rationalization that this was so they could be “drilled for hard work” and “learn discipline.”³⁶

If a German newborn was allowed to live, it was then subjected to the most horrifying traumatic tortures that can be inflicted upon children, every detail of which became indelibly imprinted on their early amygdalan fear system and then re-inflicted upon “enemies” during the war and the Holocaust. The restrictions of the first year of tight swaddling were continued in subsequent years by putting them in various restraint devices, steel-stayed corsets worn by both sexes, steel collars and backboards strapped to the waist, all to ensure they would not become “tyrants.”³⁷ The endless encirclement fears of childhood were implanted in German alters and re-experienced in the constant fears of Germany itself being encircled by enemies, even when, as with the British and Soviets in the interwar period, they “continually denied all charges of encirclement.”³⁸ Hitler from the first used swaddling/restraint language all the time to describe Germany’s emotional plight: “Germany is bound head and foot by Peace Treaties” and they must go to war in order to “breathe more freely.”³⁹ Restrictive, abandoning German childrearing guaranteed sacrificial war when they were adults—even monkeys who are reared in isolation and restriction grow up vicious and self-mutilating.⁴⁰

The traditional German obsession with children’s feces continued after swaddling ended by the regular use of enemas as a maternal 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.’ There were special enema stores that German children would be taken to in order to be ‘fitted’ for their proper size of enemas. Mothers had “an intensive fear of the notorious smell of the small child” which made them give daily enemas “to prevent them from becoming a relentless house tyrant.”⁴¹ 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.’”⁴² Enema fears, of course, were re-experienced in the “stab in the back” group-fantasy that Germans kept referring to when they imagined the Versailles Treaty was agreed to by German socialists without Germany ever having been defeated in WWI.
Sexual molestation of children was routine and considered normal. When infants were removed from their cribs, they usually slept in the family bed and either were made part of the sexual act or regularly witnessed it close up. Bloch reported the seduction of children in Germany was “very widespread,” and German doctors reported “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.’”⁴³ Freud’s patients (and Freud himself) said they were seduced by their nurses, who “put crying children to sleep by stroking their genitals.”⁴⁴ “Little Hans” slept with his mother for four years, and told Freud his mother said if he touched his penis she would cut it off.⁴⁵ Priests used children for sex then too.⁴⁶ Both boys and girls regularly were raped in schools, by teachers and older students, and there were even special schools espousing “pedagogical Eros”—the benefits of teachers using students for sex “to help learning.”⁴⁷ Plus, of course, most young girls and boys were sexually assaulted as servants and apprentices.⁴⁸

There were all kinds of “obedience rituals” in German families that were designed to make the child “always good” that were commented upon by outsiders at the time as being particularly violent. Kind words were rare in German homes, and most Germans remembered “no tender word, no caresses, only fear” during childhood.⁴⁹Children were regularly placed on a red-hot iron stove if obstinate, tied to their bed-posts for days, thrown into cold water or snow to “harden” them, forced to kneel for hours every day against the wall on a log while the parents ate and read, and frightened by parents dressing up in terrifying ghost costumes (the so-called Knecht Ruprecht) and pretending to eat up and kill them for their transgressions.⁵⁰ 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.”⁵¹ The apocalyptic group-fantasies of Nazism were direct results of these childhood nightmares.

It was brutal beating, beginning in infancy, that visitors to Germany most commented upon at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the mother far more often the main beater than the father. Luther’s statement that “I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one”⁵² is misleading, since it implies disobedience only was the occasion for beatings, whereas mere crying or even just needing something usually resulted in being punished. “Dr. Schreber said 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…one is master of the child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child.”⁵³ Havernick found 89 percent of parents admitted beating little children at the beginning of the twentieth century, over half with canes, whips, or sticks.⁵⁴ The motto of German parents for centuries was “Children can never get enough beatings.”⁵⁵ They were not just spankings; they were beatings with instruments or whippings like Hitler’s daily whippings with a dog whip, which often put him into a coma.⁵⁶ (As Fuehrer, Hitler used to carry a dog whip with him as he gave orders to be carried out.) It is not surprising that German childhood suicides were three to five times higher than other Western European nations at the end of the nineteenth century, fears of beatings by parents being the reason cited by children for their suicides.⁵⁷ No one spoke up for the children; newspapers wrote: “ boy who commits suicide because of a box on the ears has earned his fate.”⁵⁸ The beatings continued at school, where “we were beaten until our skin smoked.”⁵⁹ Children could be heard screaming on the streets each morning as they were being dragged to school by their mothers.⁶⁰ The schoolmaster who boasted he had given “911,527 strokes with the stick and 124,000 lashes with the whip” to students was not that unusual for the time.⁶¹ Comparisons of German and French childhoods in the late nineteenth century found “no bright moment, no sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home [with] mother love and care” in the German ones, with “sexual molestation and beatings at home and at school consistently worse in the German accounts.”⁶² Ende’s massive study of German autobiographies of the time found “infant mortality, corporal punishment, and cruelties against children” were so brutal he had to apologize “for not dealing with the ‘brighter side’ of German childhood because it turns out that there is no ‘bright side.’”⁶³ Other studies found most Germans remembered “no tender word, no caresses, only fear” with childhood “so joyless, so immeasurably sad that you could not fathom it.”⁶⁴ When Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that “the German people today lies broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world”65 both he and his reading audience read this not as political metaphor but as the real kicks of their parents and teachers and real memories of lying broken and defenseless. The tortures of childhood were far more traumatic and constant than the later studies of “authoritarianism” ever imagined. There was a good reason that Germans and Austrians spoke so often about their Kinderfeindlichkeit (rage toward children), and it is this rage that is embedded in the early violent amygdalan alters which is inflicted upon others in World War II and the Holocaust. The child-hitting hand was even the symbol of Nazi obedience, since the Nazi salute endlessly displayed the open palm of their beating parents as they fused with them, flush with opioids. “Ghosts from the nursery” embedded by extremely insecurely attached children were displayed everywhere in Nazi Germany. To imagine tens of millions of people “just obeying Hitler” as though there were no inner compulsion to inflict their nightmarish earlier childhood tortures on others is simply absurd.

JAPANESE CHILDREARING BEFORE WWII
All of the routine child abuse described above for Central European families was common in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. Infanticide was so common it was accepted “as a form of family planning,” killing either boy or girl newborn babies in murders called “thinning out.”⁶⁶ As siblings watched their mothers bury the newborn, they like the Germans imagined it was because they were weak “bad babies,” embedded this fear in their alters, and revived the fear of being killed by enemies when their society was changing so fast during their industrial and cultural expansion. Despite the fact that Japan had grown economically three times as fast as the U.S. during the interwar period, they claimed before attacking Pearl Harbor that the attack was necessary because “Japan is getting weaker [and] the enemy is getting strong…we won’t be able to survive” unless we attack.⁶⁷ Even though no nation was threatening to conquer Japan in 1941, their amygdalan fearful alter memory of watching their mothers commit infanticide by the millions told them, as they put it, “the very existence” of weak little Japan [was now] a matter of life and death” and they were about to be “strangled.”⁶⁸

Japanese babies at birth were wrapped with a futon and encased in a restrictive ejoko box, so they could not move, and kept tied up in it much of the time for three or four years as late as the early twentieth century⁶⁹—producing constant fears of being restricted and encircled identical to those of Germans and Austrians. All the other abuses described above were in constant use by Japanese parents: beating and burning of incense (moxa) on the skin as routine punishments,⁷⁰ cruel bowel training with constant enemas,⁷¹ frightening children with ghosts (o-bake), “kicking, hanging by the feet, giving cold showers, strangling, driving a needle into the body, cutting off a finger joint,” putting the child outside the house at night, “dressing up as a ghost” to frighten the child, and telling visitors to “take this child away—we don’t want it!”⁷²

But it is in the practice of the sexual use of children that earlier Japanese excelled even more than Germans and Austrians. Imperial incest was common, and Japanese fathers until recently would often marry their daughters after the death of their wives, considering incest a “praiseworthy” practice.⁷³ Samurai warriors, priests and other elite historically favored using young boys for anal pederastic sex, finding them preferable to sex with their subordinated wives.⁷⁴ Boy geishas and prostitutes were rife until recently.⁷⁵ Because Japanese husbands so rarely come home at night—going to geisha or other women for sex—the mothers are desperately lonely, and so routinely co-sleeping with their children “skin to skin” (nude, dakine) and co-bathing until they were grown up.⁷⁶ Even today, many Japanese mothers masturbate their children in public, in bed “to put them to sleep” and during co-bathing, sometimes promising to let them have intercourse with them if they do well on their next school test.⁷⁷ Childhood sexual abuse, I have found, leads nations more to self-destructive than just the violent behavior instilled by beatings.

Japanese childhood, therefore, contained at least as much abuse and neglect as Central European, and as these two areas contained the most powerful democratizing political nations in the world in the 1920s, they experienced the most fearful growth panic by their populace in reaction to the democratic freedoms introduced by their “transitional democracies”⁷⁸ and reacted by fusing with their Killer Motherlands and going to war. In the following sections, we will first explain in detail the seven group-fantasy phases of going to war and creating the Holocaust for Germany and Austria, then more briefly for Japan, and then watch the rest of the world both contribute to and defend itself in the most deadly sacrificial war in history.

AMERICAN AND BRITISH CHILD ABUSE BEFORE WWII
Although of course America and England had almost entirely given up infanticide and tight swaddling, their child abuse rates for the people raised in 1900–1920 who fought WWII were still considerable. The overwhelming majority of toddlers were beaten, with hard objects, and teachers flogged children daily. I detail the historical evidence for this physical abuse in my book, The Emotional Life of Nations,⁷⁹ but there is one aspect of child abuse that was routine in the early 20th century that must be estimated from current abuse figures: the sexual use of children. The best U.S. studies today are those of Wyatt and Russell, based on recent face-to-face interviews, which found 38 percent and 45 percent respectively of women and 30 percent of men had memories of serious sexual abuse during their childhoods. U.K. figures for today are even higher, with 59 percent of women and 27 percent of college men admitting to being sexually abused.⁸⁰ Two-thirds of British parents today still hit their helpless infants in their first year, and the majority are still smacking their four-year-olds several times a week.⁸¹ In addition, the routine sexual use and brutal beating of children in British schools in the 20th century are well documented. All these U.S. and U.K. child abuse rates must have been much higher in the 1900–1920 period for those who fought WWII, so that one must conclude that the majority of people in these nations were seriously abused as children and then like the Germans precipitated and fought the war for internal emotional motivations.

PHASES ONE AND TWO: WEIMAR FREEDOMS AND FEARS
By the end of the nineteenth century, Germany and Austria began to achieve a new surge of industrialization and the beginnings of a democratic political system that were the result of improving childrearing in a minority of their families to produce a new more advanced psychoclass—in particular in cities where working class and Jewish families concentrated. German Jewish families “constituted one of the most spectacular social leaps in European history [and] produced some of the most fiercely independent minds” in Europe.⁸² In the Weimar phases, therefore, Jews and workers were the most progressive in childrearing and politically, and were therefore the target of the reactionary majority in political activity. This reactionary majority attacked progressive parliamentary activities and whatever the authoritarian alters saw as threatening to the rigid systems of domination that their parents practiced: civil rights, free press, “materialism,” “arguing with each other” in political parties, and women’s rights. Scholars like Goldhagen have assumed without evidence that anti-Semitism was somehow passed on in German genes from one generation to another⁸³—or they say anti-Semitism was somehow “in German society,” which is just a tautological way of saying “it is common because it is common.” The most convincing study of Weimar attitudes toward Jews is Johnson and Reuband’s interviews with 3,000 Germans asking about prejudice in the 1920s and 1930s. They were surprised to find German Jews felt rather safe until quite late in the Nazi period, that they felt “love and gratitude” toward Germany and “were fanatical patriots” who were “totally assimilated” because “there is no Jewish race…[only] German citizens of Jewish belief.”⁸⁴ Hitler himself told his staff in the 1920s and early 1930s to keep their violence toward Jews at a minimum even after his takeover in 1933, so that “only 3 percent [of Jews said] that their families had unfriendly or mostly unfriendly relations” with their non-Jewish neighbors until after 1935.⁸⁵ As we will see shortly, when Germans and Austrians needed “internal enemies” in 1936 during Phase 5 and the majority switched into their violent alters and began shipping Jews to concentration camps, Jews said “it came to us as a tremendous shock that this anti-Semitic policy was introduced. It took us such a long time to grasp this new direction. It was unthinkable. Because we were so utterly German.”⁸⁶

Most German group-fantasies during the Weimar years centered on inner emotional threats from the progress of a new generation (new psychoclass), such as from women’s liberation. Because women could vote and many even held professional jobs, Germans began what I have elsewhere termed a “Purity Crusade”⁸⁷ against the “New Woman,” pictured in many Garbo and Dietrich films as phallic vampires (“vamps,” “flappers”), “dressed in unisex clothing [with] her hair cropped short” and threatening men’s masculinity.⁸⁸ Women in Europe began saying they had rights to sexual pleasure, even before marriage.⁸⁹ Hitler spelled out his fear of sensuality in Mein Kampf when he declared “Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters and window displays [in Wiemar Germany] must be cleansed.”⁹⁰ Males who were dominated by Killer Mothers in childhood had to dominate women as adults or they risked becoming “helpless children bound to predatory women” again, so as women gained new freedoms during Weimar men felt weak again.⁹¹ “Modernity was almost always represented as a woman” in political cartoons.⁹² Hitler called modern cities “abscesses on the body of the people—places where all evils, vices and sicknesses appear to unite.”⁹³ Nazis were not supposed to allow their wives to work,⁹⁴ and they dominated them like they dominated other threatening enemies, blaming “the weak males of modern society who had abdicated their responsibility to rule their women with an iron fist [for being] infected by effeminate humanism.”⁹⁵

Peter Gay portrays Weimar culture as producing “exuberant creativity and experimentation” but also as producing “anxiety, fear and a rising sense of doom,” what Erich Fromm termed “fear of freedom”⁹⁶ and what Mahler terms “separation and individuation anxiety.”⁹⁷ Democracy was seen as “a beast of a thousand heads” and Weimar Purity Crusades called for “emancipation from emancipation,” “a restoration of authoritarian rule,” a “rebirth of Germany” that would “unify and cleanse” them, “a national enema” that purged them of their more progressive “Bad Selves.”⁹⁸ The conquest of Germany by the Nazis had nothing to do with reactions to economic distress. In 1930 election, after the Depression hit, the Nazis only polled 18% of the votes. The poor and unemployed actually voted less for Hitler than the middle class and the wealthy.⁹⁹ Merkly’s study of Nazi storm troopers found that “those who grew up in poverty showed the least prejudice” against Jews.¹⁰⁰ In fact, the Nazis received their highest vote return before the Depression hit. Hitler was thoroughly disinterested in economics. Germany both in the late 1920s and 1930s enjoyed a higher standard of living than any other European nation. Economics were secondary in the Nazi takeover. German problems in the 19th and 20th centuries were those of all democratizing nations¹⁰¹—a lagging psychoclass majority that was driven to pathological authoritarianism by too much independence. Even the Pope backed Hitler’s takeover.¹⁰² It was only as Germans experienced too much freedom and their growth panic took over late in the 1920s and then occurred again during the 1930s recovery that all the “ghosts from the nursery” began to return and they plunged further and further into their need for self-destructive sacrificial wars and genocidal racism. They built new highways in Germany under Hitler and invented the Volkswagen, both of which could have produced new freedoms, new trade, new prosperity—so to avoid this dangerous individuation they instead took the money people paid down for their VWs and built tanks in the VW factories and then used the new highways to go to the borders and provoke self-destructive wars.

PHASES THREE AND FOUR: FISSION AND FUSION
As Germany’s Purity Crusade successfully halted women’s rights and reversed political, social and sexual freedoms, other nations began to be split off and portrayed as Killer Motherlands and an all-powerful Killer Germania began to be seen as fused with a group-fantasy. The source of the new violent nationalism was the growing inner feelings of disintegration due to too much freedom and independence, needing the defense of fusion with and clinging to the Killer Motherland.¹⁰³ “You are nothing; the Volk is everything” became the central Nazi fantasy,¹⁰⁴ and the fusion with Germania, the Killer Mutterland, was so powerful that when Goebbels asked the Germans, “Do you want total war?” they screamed “Yes! Yes!”¹⁰⁵

Nazi plans for war with fissioned-off neighboring states preceded by years his unleashing of the genocide upon Jews. Although both sadists and masochists dominated in Nazi quarters, sadists dominated at first, then the more self-destructive actions of the masochists who killed German Jews.¹⁰⁶ At first, only “bad” children, the handicapped, the sick, and other “weak babies” and “useless eaters” were sent to the first gas chambers and killed by doctors “to cleanse the German national body.”¹⁰⁷ By 1933 the Nazis seized power by carrying out their first faked incident—the fire in the Reichstag started by a lone Dutch syndicalist—by throwing all the leading German Communists into prison, suspending civil liberties, and passing the Enabling Act that created Hitler’s dictatorship.¹⁰⁸ Jews were not made the target of violence, since when Goebbels called for a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops he had to call it off after a few days because “it had failed to arouse popular enthusiasm.”¹⁰⁹ The initial central task of the Nazis was not persecuting Jews; it was creating a powerful Killer Mutterland, a Volk that made Germans feel they were fused with the Killer Mother alters in their heads. This fused state was termed Gleichschaltung, a “total national unity.” Within a year of Hitler’s assuming power, there were six times as many storm troopers, numbering over four million warriors, dwarfing the German armed forces restricted to a mere 100,000 by the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler himself of course shared all the deadly child abuse described above prevalent in German and Austrian families. Most biographies of Hitler follow Binion’s statement that although “breastfeeding was rare in Braunau” where he was born, his mother must have “overfed, overprotected and overindulged Adolf” making him a “spoiled mother’s darling.”¹¹⁰ Neither Binion nor the over fifty other historians who claim Hitler was overfed and overindulged gave a single historical citation to back their claims. That he was tightly swaddled is historically accurate and that his father regularly kicked and whipped him “until he lost consciousness”¹¹¹ no doubt formed the childhood imprinting incidents for his fears that “Germans are exposed to the kicks of all the world” and of course for the physical kicking and whipping of his enemies. But that Hitler was regularly starved as he lay tightly bound in his swaddling bands, like other Bavarian infants of the time, and that this was imprinted on his life-long delusional fears of imminent German starvation is denied. Hitler’s words about the need to go to war revealed his and his nation’s bizarre fears of starvation: as early as in Mein Kampf he explained that the reason that they “needed to expand the motherland” was “so that the Germanic mother might nourish her offspring sufficiently,” a fear reaching back to all those starving swaddled babies and to the ones killed because the mother didn’t feel like nursing them. The source of his violent political program in infancy is obvious in his choice of imagery: “How can we feed the nation? [The answer lies in] the cradle…The child does not ask, when it drinks, whether the mother’s breast is being tortured.”¹¹²

The notion that Adolf was “overly nursed” and “overindulged” by his mother is without a shred of evidence. Like all war leaders, he was fused with her—claiming “My only bride is my Mutterland”—and he personally acted like a usual German/Austrian mother while speaking to his audience, screaming and bounding on tables and threatening others with death. One German who knew Hitler said, “Hitler is the most profoundly feminine man he has ever met, and there are moments when he becomes almost effeminate.”¹¹³ His listeners knew him as a perfect representative of their own Killer Mothers, Goebbels saying they “felt like a child in the arms of a mother” with him. As we pointed out earlier, Hitler saw his mother as a death-dealing Medusa, keeping both his mother’s and Medusa’s pictures near his desk, and saying of the painting of Medusa: “Those are the eyes of my mother!”¹¹⁴ That he was fused with her deadly eyes is shown by his practice of rehearsing in front of a mirror his own death-dealing stare that he believed was, like his mother’s, all-powerful, and that everyone remarked was “hypnotizing.” Even sexual abuse was likely for Hitler. Like other Bavarian children, he slept in his mother’s bed—at least for his first six years—and witnessed the sexual intercourse she had when his father was home.¹¹⁵ I consider it likely that he experienced maternal incest, since his father was away so much and since his mother was so lonely. He was often afraid his sperm would poison the blood of his female partner, he heard voices telling him to “rescue his Mutterland from the Jews who had violated her,”¹¹⁶ he was said to “talk by the hour about depraved sexual customs,”¹¹⁷ and he asked his female partners to “undress and squat down over his face where he could examine her at close range [so she could] urinate on him.”¹¹⁸

The fusion of Germans and Austrians with their Killer Mutterland was aided by the fact that at the end of World War I they were not invaded and occupied by the Allies, so they could retain the group-fantasy that they were still fused with their powerful, grandiose Killer Mother.¹¹⁹ This was one basis of their objection to the Versailles Treaty’s penalties, since emotionally they felt they had not lost the war.¹²⁰ Even the terms of the Armistice, “which required rapid German withdrawal behind the Rhine, had the unanticipated effect of tightening the German army’s grip on the nascent Weimar republic,”¹²¹ strengthening their delusional fusion. The projection of the Killer Motherland into other nations, even those that were not unfriendly, was everywhere evident, as in Heidegger’s declaration that Germany under Nazi rule could at last “save the world from annihilation [by] America and Russia.”¹²² The fission of all “Bad Mother” qualities onto neighboring nations left Hitler as Germania’s savior.¹²³ People felt “We all really loved him. We felt that he could do no wrong. He had the image of a savior. [We were] ecstatic when Hitler came to power.”¹²⁴ German mothers marched through the streets chanting “We have donated a child to the Fuehrer” and Hitler Youth sang: “We are born to die for Germany.”¹²⁵ They longed to “return to the bosom of the Mutterland” in death, saying as they went to war: “If I die, mother, your pride will conquer your pain because you have the privilege of offering a sacrifice.”¹²⁶ Fusion with Germania made one “freed from all sins, no longer a single suffering man, one with the Volk.”¹²⁷ And fusion with an all-powerful Germania was necessary because their childrearing made them feel so weak that they had to switch into their alter trance and die as Nazi soldiers to prove they were stronger and more devoted to Her than anyone else. They were “heroes” who—like “enemies”—became sacrificial victims to the Killer Motherland.

The response by Germany’s neighbors to Nazi plans to go to war was highly influenced by the kinds of childrearing they each had experienced. Eastern European nations, including the Soviet Union, have been shown by Puhar and Dervin to have had even more abusive and abandoning mothers than Germany, including tight swaddling, routine starving, incest, beating, submissiveness and humiliations.¹²⁸ The result was that these Eastern nations (plus of course Austria and Italy) at bottom admired the Nazis for their violence and even joined them in their violent ventures. Lenin and Stalin’s “Red Terror” produced even more millions of deaths “to clean Russia of all vermin, fleas, and bugs”¹²⁹ than Hitler’s genocide of Jews. The French had somewhat less abusive childhoods, but one central childhood factor determined what they were to re-enact in World War II: the majority were sent at birth to a wetnurse, whether the parents were rich or poor, abandoned and rarely visited, for years at a time. Like German wetnurses, French wetnurses were called “killer nurses,” since a majority of infants sent to them died from mistreatment. French films between the wars were filled with themes of abandonment,¹³⁰ and France’s reaction to Germany’s threats during this time was to create their own abandonment by other nations who might have been willing to join them in military defensive moves, plus cutting French defense expenditures rather than rearming when they saw the German military expanding. Daladier even admitted that only a firm military policy could stop Hitler, “but was at a loss how to do it,” since he and the French were acting out their infantile abandonment. Hitler responded to French self-isolation as if it were an invitation to Germany to invade. As one historian put it: “If a military alliance had been constructed in 1936 instead of 1939, a European war might have been averted,” and Hitler himself admitted to Speer: “If the French had taken any action, we would have been easily defeated.”¹³¹

British childrearing early in the 20th century had evolved beyond German and French, so that swaddling and sending to outside wetnurses were not common. Yet if the mothers could afford nannies and governesses, they turned the little children over to them to raise, and before long sent them to public schools where they were “fagged”—made slaves of older boys, including even sexual slaves—and “starved and bullied into subjection.”¹³² Beating for “discipline” rather than outright abandonment was the focus of British childrearing, beginning in infancy. British discipline was actually constant training in being humiliated, by bully parents, bully nannies and bully schoolmates, who “fragged” them and used them sexually. So when Hitler, the bully dictator, appeared on the international scene and threatened to beat them up once more, “Halifax praised Nazi Germany as the bulwark of Europe,” and, as Beisel summed up the period, “Britons came to admire Hitler and Nazism’s authoritarianism.”¹³³ Halifax met Hitler and thought he was “absolutely fantastic.”¹³⁴ In the House of Commons, Lord Winterton said: “The German nation possesses a mental and physical virility seldom exceeded in the world’s history.” Churchill admired Hitler—surely the most clinically grandiose narcissistic leader on earth—calling him “an indomitable champion [who could] restore our courage.”¹³⁵ Hitler returned the praise, saying he admired England’s ability to kill and dominate, vowing: “What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.”¹³⁶ Britain chose Chamberlain—“who was badly bullied as a boy”—as their leader, who was “compelled to arrange for Britons to be humiliated [and] badly bullied by the Germans ‘who are,’ he said, ‘bullies by nature.’”¹³⁷ They had been trained to “take it”—to consider themselves courageous to be bullied without defending themselves—and even conducted a Peace Ballot before the war in which half the nation voted not to defend themselves if attacked militarily by another nation.¹³⁸ A majority of Oxford students even passed a resolution that they would “in no circumstances fight for King and Country,” and over 100,000 British men signed a pledge “to renounce participation in any war” to defend Britain.¹³⁹ The Labour Party leader George Lansbury promised “to disband the Army and disarm the Air Force”¹⁴⁰ in case of war. Stanley Baldwin declared it was time for Britain to “proceed with unilateral disarmament,” and Anthony Eden visited Hitler in Berlin with a plan to allow Germany to triple their army and build hitherto forbidden tanks and artillery.¹⁴¹ Unbelievably, Eden thought France not Germany was a threat to peace, saying it was essential that “we must discourage any military action by France against Germany.”¹⁴² As British historian A. L. Rowse put it: “We were doing Hitler’s work for him.” As early as 1931, Chamberlain said “the whole of Europe is…locked in a suicidal embrace which will probably drown the lot of us,” and he proceeded to help carry out that suicidal embrace.¹⁴³ At Munich, when Hitler was handed over the western part of Czechoslovakia, England gave him tens of thousands more Jews to persecute. Since “the German Army was still unprepared for war, during the Sudeten negotiations, German generals offered to rebel against Hitler if the British would not sign the [Munich] agreement. But the British were not interested…”¹⁴⁴ Hitler was the delegate of every nation in Europe; “they all became Hitler, by identifying with him and encouraging his aggression. He was their delegate, the out of control raging child in them…”¹⁴⁵ Kagan summarizes the effects of the period before the war: “Had the democracies not disarmed both materially and psychologically but remained responsible and alert, Hitler’s plans of conquest would have been ludicrous. Neither he nor any other German leader could have posed a danger so long as France and Britain chose to prevent it.”¹⁴⁶

Beisel captures the motivations behind Britain’s policy of appeasement: “Millions liked what they saw, and could participate in Nazi militarism and Hitler’s arrogance by proxy.”¹⁴⁷ Hitler of course took the British support as an invitation to rearm and move toward war. “Britain’s actions in reaching out its hand to Germans were surely elements in Hitler’s decision to strike.”¹⁴⁸ As Churchill said, “If ever there was an avoidable war, it was the Second World War.”¹⁴⁹ The outer circumstances of Europe did not require war, the inner alters of European psyches did. When England guaranteed Poland’s frontiers and then had to carry out their promise to go to war, Chamberlain at first backed down, then reluctantly declared Britain at war with Germany only because, as Beisel puts it: “The British had gotten a war they unconsciously wanted. It would allow them to discharge their own aggressive feelings…which had been driven by an unconscious need to relive earlier childhood humiliations.”¹⁵⁰

PHASE FIVE: FRACTURING OFF OF “BAD SELF” ENEMIES
As noted above, children—not Jews—were for several years the central scapegoats killed by the Nazis as “Bad Self” enemies. As early as 1929, Hitler mused that “if a million children a year are born in Germany and 700-800,000 of the weakest are eliminated the end result might be an increase in strength.”¹⁵¹ He was listening to his inner alter reflecting fearfully upon the families he saw around him killing off their “useless eaters” (and his own mother?—she lost four of her little children). He set his personal doctor, Theo Morell, to study the euthanasia of children, and Morell reported back advising the killing of handicapped children because they were “disgusting.” Children were sterilized as early as 1937 as part of the racial sterilization of Gypsies and others, in all about 400,000 sterilized as “worthless.” By 1939, long before Jews were being killed in quantity, “disinfection, cleansing” of “unfit” children—those born with deformities, those late in being toilet trained, those who were “slow learners,” began in what was called a euthanasia program, which gave lethal injections of gas in gas chambers and injected chemical warfare agents into the hearts to thousands of children “to cleanse the German national body.”¹⁵² Parents or guardians of the children often gave their consent to the murder of these “bad children,” and there was even a popular movie made of how wonderful their murder was for Germania.¹⁵³ The more “Bad Self” children were murdered, the more fused Germans felt with their Killer Mutterland. By the end of the 1930s, the designation of Bad Self enemies spread from children to Jews and other “useless eaters.” The economic downturn had long ago disappeared, thus disproving the theories that it was economic distress that caused the war and the genocide. Germans in the middle 1930s were feeling the grandiose “high” of fusion with their Killer Mutterland: “At a time when no foreign danger threatened and the national economy was robust…Hitler fulminated about hostile foreign powers and spineless liberals [but] said barely a word about Jewry [although] militant Nazis felt empowered to persecute Jews at will.”¹⁵⁴ Although Streicher’s Der Sturmer tabloid called for the “annihilation” of Jews during the 1930s, Rudolf Hess insisted in 1935: “Lawless outbursts against Jew must cease at once! The Fuehrer forbids Nazi Party members from undertaking unauthorized actions against individual Jews.”¹⁵⁵ In the 1930s, Hitler called for Jewish “deportation,” and Himmler in 1940 even asserted that “the physical destruction of a people [was] un-German and impossible.”¹⁵⁶ The problem was foreign nations didn’t want the Jews, so Nazis complained: “All we want to do is to get rid of our Jews. The difficulty is that no country wishes to receive them…[as the British senior officer said, ‘What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?”]¹⁵⁷ FDR turned Jews away as they tried to immigrate into the U.S.¹⁵⁸ He wouldn’t even back a bill taking in Jewish refugee children, as the British did.¹⁵⁹ Newspapers headlined: “Powers Slam Doors Against German Jews.”¹⁶⁰

Eastern Europeans—also swaddled and horribly abused as children—split off their “Bad Selves” and projected them into “Bad Baby” Jews who were then senselessly murdered:
One day, in July 1941, half of the population of Jedwabne, Poland, murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women, and children… They gouged out their eyes with kitchen knives, dismembered them… Infants were pitchforked in front of their mothers and thrown onto burning coals, all accompanied by the shrieks of delight, indeed the laughter, of their neighbors.¹⁶¹
The steady move from just resettlement to mass annihilation of Jews and other “Bad Selves” bubbled up from below during the 1940s as Germans, Austrians and others around the globe fused with their Killer Mutterland alters, turned off the empathy in their insulas, and heard the Mutterland’s voice demand death for all Bad Selves. Jews were more and more seen as the poisonous lice that they had been tormented with as swaddled children, lice that could poison their bloodstreams. As one little German boy said, looking at lice in a museum exhibition: “Jewish army, Jewish army!” Even though they were in no way threatened by any of their neighbors, and even though in 1938 the German Chief of Staff was opposed to starting any new war,¹⁶² by 1939 most Germans were certain that the “enemies” that “surrounded” them (they were really just in their brain alters) were about to strike. On August 22, 1939, as Van Evera put it: “Hitler explained to his generals that ‘We are faced with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation sooner or later.’ I think he and his supporters believed this paranoid group-fantasy. Ten days later he launched his lightning war on Poland, triggering World War II.”¹⁶³

PHASES SIX AND SEVEN: FAKING PROVOCATIONS AND FIGHTING
Germany faked many provocations in trying to justify their wars, from pretending that the single person who began the Reichstag fire in 1933 was the beginning of national revolution—jailing 100,000 Communists and Social Democrats—to blaming Jews in 1938 for a minor incident where a Pole shot a German diplomat in Paris—organizing the violence against Jews on “Crystal Night”—to putting Germans into Polish military uniforms in 1941 claiming they had attacked them—pretending this had provoked Germany into war.¹⁶⁴ Goering put the need for faked attacks bluntly when he explained: “The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked…”¹⁶⁵ Hitler too was filled with claims about supposed “conspiracies to overthrow the Reich,” all versions of earlier internal alters shared by Germans, still wishing they could overthrow their Killer Mothers, still blaming scapegoats for their dissociated rebellious childhood wishes.

We will not list all these faked provocations here; any textbook about WWII can provide many examples. But the most important faked provocation in starting the war was Franklin Roosevelt’s provocations to encourage Japan “to strike first” with the hidden self-destructive goal that U.S. forces would be tied down in the Pacific rather than available to fight in Europe. Since Japan was already fighting a war with China, it was true that, as Admiral Nomura said in 1940, “There are few Japanese who want war with the United States.” Therefore, FDR had to take hidden actions to provoke Japan into attacking the U.S. There are by now over 40 excellent scholarly books detailing how Roosevelt chose a group of advisers who created an eight-step program to bring about the so-called “unprovoked attack” on Pearl Harbor.¹⁶⁶ FDR’s program included embargoing oil trade to Japan—which got 80 percent of its oil from the U.S., and was about to run out in months—carrying out “pop-up” cruises in the territorial waters of Japan—which he said would “keep the Japs guessing” if the U.S. was about to attack—leaving the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor despite complaints from the U.S. fleet commander that it would leave them unprotected, hiding the fact that Japanese codes had been broken so the attack would appear as a “surprise,” and other faked provocations.¹⁶⁷ It is no wonder that the Japanese openly spoke of “suicide” when they finally attacked Pearl Harbor, saying that it was “better to jump off Kiyomizu Temple” and “commit suicide” than be “starved to death” by the U.S. FDR and his White House advisers literally cheered when they heard their provocations had worked and the Japanese had been provoked to attack.¹⁶⁸ FDR was cheered by Congress when he announced the new war, and forty-two percent of American soldiers said the U.S. should “wipe out all Japanese,” civilians as well as warriors.¹⁶⁹ After the attack, Roosevelt still refused to ask Congress to declare war on Germany. Many Americans agreed with Sen. Harry Truman, who had earlier said after the German invasion of Russia: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.”¹⁷⁰ Hitler, of course, was reported to be “in ecstasy” that the American military would be tied down for years in the Pacific.¹⁷¹

Meanwhile, Hitler and the Germans were busy committing suicide in their sacrificial war against every neighbor they could provoke, Hitler promising parents he would “sacrifice ten million German youth” as mothers held up their little ones over the heads of the enthusiastic crowd, as if they wanted to say: You belong to him!”¹⁷² German mothers marched through the streets chanting, “We have donated a child to the Fuhrer,” and Hitler Youth sang: “We are born to die for Germany.”¹⁷³ Hitler avoided any peaceful concessions that might limit the blood sacrifices of war, telling his soldiers: “We want war. I am only afraid that some Schweinehund will make a proposal for mediation” like at Munich.¹⁷⁴ Hitler’s speeches, says Beisel, were “filled with images of things collapsing, of “internal disruption,” “isolation,” “disintegration” and “sacrifice.”¹⁷⁵ He overruled his military in launching a suicidal assault against the Soviets, saying they would “collapse within a month” and surrender, so that winter supplies were not even given to the troops.¹⁷⁶ Grandiosity had overcome reality; powerful dopamine infusions of their basal ganglias made them feel “high,” extraordinarily powerful. Hitler told German officers that invading Russia “would be like a child’s game in a sandbox”177 although in fact Soviet tanks, artillery pieces and aircraft were at least three times as numerous as German.178 As one historian put it: “Because Hitler’s strategic ends were infinitely expansive, no military doctrine could keep up with his policy in the end.” The leading historian on Hitler, Ian Kershaw, simply called Hitler’s decision to attack so many powerful nations “sheer madness…a death-wish for himself and his nation.”¹⁷⁹ Hitler had declared war on the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, whose combined productive ability was six to ten times that of Germany.¹⁸⁰ Germans were simply re-enacting their embedded childhood feelings that they deserved being liquidated because they were “bad.” They were fully in their war trance, possessed by their inner childhood alters, solving their childhood despairs, their fears of dying, by choosing to die. Hitler was their tribal shaman; he would cure the inner despair of Germans by exorcising it through suicidal blood sacrifices. War was chosen by Germans as a massive suicidal ritual that would quiet their explosive inner voices.¹⁸¹

Hitler’s gratuitous declaration of war against the U.S. for no reason after Pearl Harbor was particularly suicidal. Before he invaded Poland, he gave orders that all the Germans who were inmates of mental hospitals should be exterminated.¹⁸² His speeches during the war contained more suicidal imagery: “Either we will be the master of Europe, or we will experience a complete liquidation and extermination.”¹⁸³ When the end came, Hitler ordered Germany destroyed completely, ordering “it must disappear!” When German women and children sought refuge in Berlin subways, he ordered them flooded.¹⁸⁴ Finally, the German people in April 1945 continued to carry out the suicidal intent of the war: “As the war wound down, a generalized suicidal mania rippled across Germany. Hundreds of thousands were gripped with thoughts and talk of suicide as tens of thousands killed themselves in perhaps the single largest mass suicide in history.”¹⁸⁵