In the depths of the mind of the Nazis

In the face of the aberrations committed by the Nazis before and during the Second World War, some questions have always arisen.

First, one wonders how one man, Adolf Hitler , could have dominated the minds and consciences of tens of millions of Germans . The second concerns how it was possible for a political movement to emerge whose only raison d'etre was hatred taken to its extreme consequences. Over all this, however, the question of questions dominates: "How is it possible that human beings could perpetrate such abject and abominable crimes, creating a sort of chain of death on an industrial scale, never produced before and exterminating millions and millions of other beings?" innocent humans of both sexes and of all ages, not sparing even the weakest categories such as the elderly, the sick and children?

With these words the criminologist Antonio Leggiero identifies in his book " The criminological profile of the Nazi hierarchs " (Mursia, 2023, euro 22, pp. 320) what is the heart of the problem when you try to investigate Nazism and its protagonists.

To find an answer to such a perturbing and disturbing question, Leggiero has chosen an unusual and poorly explored approach: that of the criminological analysis of the individual protagonists of the Nazi regime.

The volume, therefore, starting from a meticulous research work, provides us with a technical, in-depth and detailed analysis of the criminal personality of the most important Nazi hierarchs , thanks to a survey methodology that allows us to arrive at the elaboration of the socio-psychological profile -criminological of each of them.

Therefore, the personalities of characters such as Hermann Göring , refined as much as megalomaniac and cruel, pass under Leggiero's magnifying glass. Then Heinrich Himmler , sadistic lord of evil dedicated to the genocide of the Jewish people, and Albert Speer , great architect, but totally devoid of any form of morality. And again Martin Bormann, Rudolph Hess, Joseph Goebbels and several others who followed Hitler on his path of death and destruction.

Were these people suffering from a serious psychic disorder, madmen in the service of a madman? Leggiero unfortunately arrives at conclusions capable of putting a strain on faith in mankind: "In the course of the book, according to the most valid scientific criteria of contemporary criminology, the minds of all the most important black priests of Nazi terror were analysed. ; the deep and jagged depths of their perverse minds have been plumbed; the most recondite character, personological and psychopathological elements have been enucleated in detail. Unfortunately, and this is the most disconcerting fact that emerges from the research, beyond personality disorders (even severe ones), forms of paranoia, monomaniacal obsessions and the common denominator of the total enslavement of body and soul, in a sort of mystical consecration malignant, to Hitler, no 'monstrous forms of superhuman madness' have been found ".

The Nazi hierarchs therefore acted with full awareness and full awareness of wanting to exterminate their fellow men . They were not examples of monstrous madness. They were certainly mediocre, miserable, slimy profiteers strong with the weak and weak with the strong but, as Leggiero writes «these considerations have nothing to do with supposed devastating psychiatric pathologies. For which reason, all that remains is to come to a conclusion (that our consciences will never accept) that they were individuals, certainly of an extremely evil nature and prone to violence in a ferociously uncommon way, inclined to all cruelty, but from the point of view of the functioning of the psychic mechanisms and of the complex cerebral circuits not very dissimilar from ours».

They were therefore diligent executioners, efficient officials in the service of evil, unscrupulous and moral sadists and this is the worst monstrosity. A monstrosity that Leggiero translates into a truth that is difficult to accept when we look at Nazism: "The substantial normality, at a basic psychic level, of its greatest exponents".