System in Madness – “Hollywood of the SS Victims”

The Third Reich is often portrayed as a delusional system based on racial mania; a system directed by the “carpet muncher” Adolf Hitler, i.e. a mad dictator. To dismiss not only “the Führer” or the regime, but the whole of society as sick or insane – this was already common practice in the 1930s. After his expulsion from Nazi Germany in 1942, CBS correspondent Howard K. Smith (1914–2002), stationed in Berlin, summarized his impressions thus: “Nazi society is rotten from top to bottom and through and through…A morbid interest in pseudo-science and crude superstitions of every conceivable kind has…given rise to the boom in all sorts of things: in phrenology…in astrology and in all sorts of fortune-telling” (Smith 1986, pp. 142–143). The advantage of such characterization of the Third Reich is that we, as bystanders, can draw from it the convenient conclusion – as sarcastically stated in the book title by Sinclair Lewis: It can’t Happen Here (1935) – nothing like this can happen to us, because we are normal, we are not insane, as a society we are not rotten, and a mad leader would be unthinkable in our country.