Hitler had ‘Messiah complex,’ obsession with ‘Jewish poison’: Wartime report

Adolf Hitler showed signs of a “Messiah complex” during World War II, in which he became increasingly obsessed with what he called the “Jewish poison,” a classified British intelligence report revealed earlier this week.

The 1942 report, a recently rediscovered psychoanalytic assessment of Hitler, found that the Nazi dictator had a developing paranoia in his speechmaking and a preoccupation with the perceived “Jewish enemy within,” the Daily Mail reported on Friday.

Written by Joseph MacCurdy, a Cambridge academic, the analysis categorized Hitler as having a “Messiah complex,” in which he believed he was leading a chosen people on a crusade against an evil incarnate in the Jews, the paper noted.

MacCurdy wrote: “Hitler is caught up in a web of religious delusions.
“The Jews are the incarnation of evil, while he is the incarnation of the spirit of good.”

“He is a god by whose sacrifice victory over evil may be achieved. He does not say this in so many words, but such a system of ideas would rationalize what he does say that is otherwise obscure.”

MacCurdy’s analysis also referred to earlier signs of “morbid tendencies,” classifying these as “Shamanism” and “epilepsy” alongside the “paranoia.”

“Shamanism” referred to Hitler’s hysteria and compulsion to feed off whipped-up crowds, which was in decline. MacCurdy’s report pointed to the “dull flatness” of delivery in Hitler’s broadcast.

By 1942, MacCurdy said, Hitler’s hysteria was in decline, and his report refers to the “dull flatness of the delivery.”

The other developing tendency, epilepsy, was in reference to Hitler’s cold and ruthless streak, but also a tendency to lose heart when his ambitions failed, the newspaper reported.

The outcome of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World Warm (which failed in its overall strategic goal of defeating the USSR) had exposed Hitler’s fatalism, McCurdy found.

He wrote that Hitler’s speech portrayed “a man who is seriously contemplating the possibility of utter defeat.”

Experts say the papers show British secret services sensed that, as the war turned against him, Hitler would resort to increasingly drastic measures, the newspaper reported.

“At the time that it was written, the tide was starting to turn against Germany,” Cambridge historian Scott Anthony, who led research into the analysis which resulted in the paper being unearthed in a family collection, told AFP.

“In response, Hitler began to turn his attentions to the German home front.”

“This document shows that British intelligence sensed this happening.”
“MacCurdy recognized that, faced with external failure, the Nazi leader was focusing on a perceived ‘enemy within’ instead – namely the Jews,” said Anthony.

Just weeks after the analysis was compiled, senior Nazis set in place plans for the Final Solution -- the attempted extermination of the entire Jewish population.

“Given that we now know that the ‘final solution’ was commencing, this makes for poignant reading,” Anthony said.

The analysis notes an extension of the “Jew phobia” and says that Hitler now saw Jews not just as a threat to Germany, but as a “universal diabolical agency.”

The wartime report, now made public by the University of Cambridge, was commissioned by social scientist Mark Abrams.

Abrams, a world-renowned pioneer of market research and opinion polling, worked with the BBC’s Overseas Propaganda Analysis Unit and the Psychological Warfare Board during World War II.

The document has been added to an archive on Abrams’ work held at Cambridge and is now available to researchers.


(Written by Eman El-Shenawi)