Hitler

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NOV 2, 1998

It might seem there is nothing more to be learned about Hitler and the Holocaust, but Victor (Invisible Men: Faces of Alienation) provides a psychotherapist's analysis of the personality disorders he deems responsible for the Fuhrer's ruthless destruction of the Jews. Reviewing Hitler's childhood, the author concludes that Hitler hated himself and his father because he believed his father to be part Jewish and the Jews to be evil and likely to take over the world. Furthermore, his father cruelly abused young Adolf, with the result that Hitler craved revenge against what he thought to be the racial source of such cruelty. War allowed him to project his personal problems as Germany's problems, which he believed arose from supposed Jewish influence and led to the defeat in WWI and the national humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. The author's psychoanalysis seeks to link many of Hitler's principal traits to the insecurity engendered by his upbringing by an abusive father and an overprotective mother: hypochondria, insomnia, procrastination, scapegoating, violence and ruthlessness. Hitler's obsession, Victor stresses, was so great that exterminating Jews superseded all else, including the attainment of military objectives; when forced to allocate scarce resources, the Nazi dictator devoted everything he could to advancing his obsession. Although using largely familiar data, Victor enables readers to view history from a new perspective while writing with a minimum of jargon.