Psychology and Sociology

The Holocaust inflicted traumas of unprecedented length, scope and intensity on its victims as we see from Spiegelman’s Maus I and II. Hitler and the Nazi Party (and other totalitarian regimes) used bureaucracy and psychology to systematically destroy their victims physically and mentally, in order to fulfill his design. Hitler also used mass psychology effectively. His tremendous rallies of brown shirts, his emotional fiery speeches and his unrelenting propaganda machine drew in ordinary people as well as the lost and the confused and turned them into true believers. The loss of WWI, a subsequent economic crisis, and a modern world that was difficult for the average person to understand or accept, created a public mood that Hitler exploited successfully.  He offered his public simple answers: an ideology incorporating a strong national identity based on raceand a militaristic purpose. In order to keep the public in a terrorized frenzy and fuel his killing machine, he presented scapegoats, mainly the Jews. In his propaganda, Jews were presented as less than human, as vermin to be exterminated. Though Hitler’s propaganda was extreme, it is common for governments to dehumanize their enemies.

As for individuals who miraculously survived like Anja and Vladek, enduring the stress of violent persecution and then the death camps, changed many of their attitudes toward life; though not always negatively. We now call the lingering effects of such events Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and studies show that it may be passed along through the next two generations. Survivors who managed to forge normal lives after their liberation did demonstrate a higher risk for suicide in middle age. Spiegelman’s mother, subject to depressions earlier in her life, was one case. The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and the writer Primo Levi are famous survivors who much later committed suicide.

Evelyn Burg