



































The Mind of Adolf Hitler:


[Expositions 5.2 (2011) 111-125]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747-5376 
 

The Mind of Adolf Hitler: A Study in the Unconscious Appeal of Contempt 

 

EDWARD GREEN 

 

Manhattan School of Music 

 

 

How did the mind of Adolf Hitler come to be so evil? This is a question which has been asked 

for decades – a question which millions of people have thought had no clear answer. This has 

been the case equally with persons who dedicated their lives to scholarship in the field. For 

example, Alan Bullock, author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, and perhaps the most famous of 

the biographers of the Nazi leader, is cited in Ron Rosenbaum’s 1998 book, Explaining Hitler, as 

saying: “The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain” (in Rosenbaum 1998, vii). 

In the same text, philosopher Emil Fackenheim agrees: “The closer one gets to explicability the 

more one realizes nothing can make Hitler explicable” (in Rosenbaum 1998, vii).
1
 Even an 

author as keenly perceptive and ethically bold as the Swiss philosopher Max Picard confesses in 

his 1947 book, Hitler in Ourselves, that ultimately he is faced with a mystery.
2
 The very premise 

of his book is that somehow the mind of Hitler must be like that of ourselves. But just where the 

kinship lies, precisely how Hitler’s unparalleled evil and the everyday workings of our own 

minds explain each other – in terms of a central principle – the author does not make clear. 

    

Our Deepest Debate 

 

I say carefully, as a dispassionate scholar but also as a person of Jewish heritage who certainly 

would not be alive today had Hitler succeeded in his plan for world conquest, that the answer 

Bullock, Fackenheim, and Picard were searching for can be found in the work of the great 

American philosopher Eli Siegel.
3
 First famed as a poet, Siegel is best known now for his 

pioneering work in the field of the philosophy of mind.
4
 He was the founder of Aesthetic 

Realism.
5
 In keeping with its name, this philosophy begins with a consideration of strict 

ontology. It presents reality as having an enduring aesthetic structure: the oneness of opposites. 

The core concept of Aesthetic Realism is this statement by Siegel: “The world, art, and self 

explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites” (quoted in Kranz, 1969, 1).  

On first sight, my essay has a very different focus: not ontology, but ethics; not the nature of 

reality as a whole, but the psychology of a single and very notorious instance of humanity. Yet – 

and this is an insight of the Aesthetic Realism method – these matters are interdependent. It is 

how the world is in our minds, Siegel explained, which determines who we are: our very selves. 

In every person, he stated, there is on-going debate: Do reality and the people in it deserve my 

respect or my contempt? As Aesthetic Realism sees it, our deepest desire is to find authentic and 

enduring grounds for respect. For that reason, the “greatest danger or temptation of man is to get 



The Mind of Adolf Hitler  112 
 

a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is 

Contempt” (quoted in Reiss, 1997, 7).  

His classic text in the field of philosophic psychology is Self and World, written largely in the 

early 1940s – precisely when Hitler was close to succeeding in his desire to impose his will upon 

the rest of humanity. In this ground-breaking book, Siegel explains that every human being relies 

on two sources of pleasure and power (Siegel 1981).
6
 The first comes from finding meaning, 

value, and beauty in the world different from oneself. This is the pleasure of respect, and the 

power arising from it is completely healthy. It is an emotion earned through perception and in 

keeping with the facts of the world. It is honest. 

The other source of pleasure is contempt. When we are after contempt, we hope to see the 

world and other people as beneath us, whatever the facts truly are. People become things to 

manipulate; they exist nearly as “inanimate” objects we have a right to use for our own 

advantage, with hardly a thought about what is just to them. If, to “convince” ourselves of our 

superiority, we need to change the facts, well then, too bad for the facts! “Contempt,” Siegel 

wrote in Self and World, “is not interested in knowledge as knowledge, only in knowledge 

making ego the one thing” (Siegel 1981, 7). 

This second source of pleasure likewise gives a person a sense of importance and power. If 

one is only focusing on the immediate experience of pleasure, importance, and power it will be 

difficult to realize the difference between the two. Yet ethically there is all the difference in the 

world. When contempt is driving us, the power and self-importance we gain, and the pleasure we 

enjoy, are at the expense of outside reality. Contempt – or, put even more precisely, the hope for 

the victory of contempt over a world seen as different from oneself – is the source of all human 

evil.
7
  

It is just here that we can see our relation to Hitler and to the Nazi period. Contempt is a 

quantitative phenomenon. Just as a thin dime and a thick wad of thousand dollar bills are, each, 

money; and a large tank of water and a thimbleful identical in terms of chemistry, differing only 

in terms of quantity – so it is with contempt. There is a continuity; contempt can be, and most 

often is, seemingly trivial, so everyday and familiar we hardly notice it. Contempt can also be 

monumental in scope, and historically earth-shaking. The magnitude differs, not the fundamental 

ethics.  

  

Hitler, Germany, and the Evocation of Contempt 

 

 “Hitler,” wrote Siegel, “was perhaps the greatest evoker of human contempt in history” (Siegel 

1976c, 2). And he explained: 

 

The first victory of contempt is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other 

people and things pretty much as they please. For this reason, the viewpoint of 

Aesthetic Realism that we have an obligation to see everything as well as we can, is a 

critical matter.  



113  Green 

 

The fact that most people have felt there is no such obligation, that they had the right to 

see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort—this fact is 

the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world. It is contempt in its first universal, 

hideous form. (Siegel 1981, 3) 

 

To understand the evil of the Nazi era, we need to see the powerful unconscious appeal of 

contempt. It was not incidental to Hitler’s way of seeing reality; it was its bedrock. 

We see a hint of this in Rosenbaum’s observation that “blackmail [was] an aspect of his 

primary nature, his defining relationship to the world” (Rosenbaum 1998, 49). Rosenbaum never 

says, directly, what this “primary” nature is – but certainly a self which relies on blackmail has a 

deep stake in seeing others as weak; it is a self which enjoys others cowering in fear before it. 

The German author Sebastian Haffner offers further evidence. In his 1978 historical study, 

Anmerkungen zu Hitler, a book which stayed on the best-seller list in his country for 43 weeks, 

we are told that Hitler’s “positive characteristics – resolution, boldness, courage, perseverance – 

lie all on the ‘hard’ side. The negative ones even more so: ruthlessness, vindictiveness, 

faithlessness and cruelty.” Further, Haffner notes: “‘icily-cold’ and ‘lightning-quick’ were 

favorite expressions of his” (Haffner 1997, 7,118).  

What would make in a human self for such aesthetic and ethical disproportion? – such a one-

sided preference for hardness, coldness, and speed? Would it be the hope for respect, or its 

contrary? And as Ernst Hanfstaengl, who in the early years of the Nazi movement was its 

Foreign Press Secretary, notes in Hitler: The Missing Years: “He simply could not bear not to 

dominate any situation in which he found himself” (Hanfstaengl 1994, 60).
8
 What does that 

indicate? What attitude towards the world?  

What I am getting at, is that without the hope for contempt Nazism would never have come to 

be – first in the mind of Hitler himself and then in the millions who followed him. As Siegel 

wrote in a 1974 essay, entitled “Disliking the World, Continued,” one of a series on the subject 

“Contempt Causes Insanity:” 

 

We all have the unlimited possibility of seeing the world around us as an enemy; of 

despising it; of putting it aside…For the purpose of liking yourself exclusively, it is 

prudent to find the world only a welter, only an antagonistic mess. Hitler’s broodings in 

Vienna apparently made for the discovery which ever so many people have made: the 

world has no beautiful clue in it. Therefore, we are more sensible than it. Therefore, we 

don’t have to go by anything in the world. We are our own law. (Siegel 1974,1) 

 

It is worth noting that in recent years some aspects of what Siegel was explaining decades 

back have found resonance in fictional attempts to comprehend the Nazi phenomenon. The sense 

of the world as a “welter,” as “an antagonistic mess,” is crucial in Norman Mailer’s study of 

Hitler’s childhood and family life, The Castle in the Forest (2007). In Jonathan Littell’s recent 



The Mind of Adolf Hitler  114 
 

and much celebrated novel, The Kindly Ones, we see how the Führer’s abundant dislike of the 

world set off sympathetic echoes in the minds of millions of others. That novel’s main character, 

Dr. Max Auer, is an ex-Nazi official, and for nearly 1000 pages, he reminisces about the war and 

the party which he loyally served – reminisces, and defends himself. It takes only a few pages for 

the reader to see that this fictional Nazi had also made the “discovery… [that] the world has no 

beautiful clue:” 

   

For a long time we crawl on this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, 

diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. And then that time passes and the 

nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae – what do we do with such an appalling 

realization? (Littell 2010, 3)  

 

Historical circumstances, as well as painful events in an individual’s life, certainly make it 

easier for someone to rely on contempt. A world with injustice and disorder in it will likely fuel 

that preference. Nevertheless, contempt – the belief that reality is fundamentally ugly and 

inherently unjust – is a choice, if nearly always a sub-conscious one. 

To understand Nazism, we need to acknowledge the impact of the vengeful Versailles Treaty, 

the ugly history of anti-Semitism and militarism in German culture, and the fear in German 

capitalists of Bolshevism. Yet without the desire for contemptuous victories over people seen as 

different from oneself, none of the factors just mentioned would have provided adequate reason 

for millions of Germans to become active Nazis. Hitler’s words would have fallen on unwilling 

ears. The world would have had no Auschwitz, no Buchenwald, no siege of Leningrad to 

remember with horror. 

 

Hitler’s Relish of Contempt 

 

That Hitler personally relished contempt is something well-testified to in the scholarly literature. 

I have already given some instances, and I will give more later. Yet I know of no one other than 

Eli Siegel who saw and asserted its central importance. Instead, the overwhelming tendency in 

Hitlerian scholarship has been to write of his contempt as an epiphenomenon, resulting from 

something supposedly more primal in Hitler’s mind – something deeper and more central.  

This is a mistake. The notion of Aryan supremacy, for example, did not cause Hitler’s 

contempt for people, it was its result. Just as certainly, his anti-Semitism didn’t precede his 

general relish of contempt for humanity, but was a manifestation of it: a ferocious, almost 

unimaginably brutal manifestation – but still a manifestation of something deeper, and more 

inclusive. 

That Hitler by no means left the “Aryan populace” out of his general scorn of his fellow-man 

was felt by biographer Helmut Heiber, who noted: 

 



115  Green 

[I]n the last resort the German masses served merely as a vehicle for Hitler’s thirst for 

power, as the basis of a pyramid whose purpose consisted in its topmost stone; and in 

moments of excitement during the second half of the war made no attempt to conceal 

the fact. As a rule, however, he took good care not to parade his contempt. (Heiber 

1961; quoted in Stein, 1968, 160) 

  

Give Hitler at least this much credit: he knew it wouldn’t be popular! What Heiber describes, 

once when gets past the extraordinary historical circumstances, is in fact a very ordinary and 

familiar thing. As anyone can verify from their experience of life, people tend to enjoy joining in 

“the fun” as contempt is had for a third party (preferably absent from the conversation). 

Everyday gossip depends on it; a good deal of contemporary politics (and media) do also. When 

Hitler pointed toward the Jews, the Russians, the Gypsies, Western parliamentarians, and . . . 

well, add your pick, the German people generally were happy to participate in the “contempt 

festival.” But no one likes being himself the object of contempt! So Hitler hid one aspect of his 

universal contempt for humanity, until – as the Soviet armies approached Germany – he knew 

his fate was sealed, and had nothing more to lose. At last, he felt free to show what he had 

always felt: disdain for the German people who so easily had yielded to his mastery. 

 

Contempt and the Youthful Hitler 

 

One way of seeing the beginning appeal of contempt to Hitler, preceding any particular set of 

political considerations, is to spend some time with him as a young man. Let us start with an 

observation of August Kubizek, the one close friend he had as a teenager. Kubizek writes in The 

Young Hitler I Knew, “All he wanted from me was one thing – agreement” (Kubizek 2006, 33). 

How ordinary this sounds: the association of friendship with approval; of great friendship with 

great approval. But to expect another person, as Hitler does, simply to adopt your point of view 

on all matters, is to turn that person into a mere appendage. Later, of course, Hitler would expect 

all of Germany to give up its independence of thought, and serve his will.  

It is important to keep in mind that Kubizek, who published the German original in 1953, had 

no desire to speak ill of Hitler. Instead, his book is shocking in its positive bias. Not a word about 

the millions who died in the war, or about the death camps. By contrast, we encounter many 

passages praising Hitler’s “overflowing” heart. As Ian Kershaw, the noted British historian, 

observed in his introduction to the book, we can see in how Kubizek writes that “an 

unmistakable current of admiration remains” (Kubizek 2006, 11).
 
Consider: Kubizek tells us that 

he first met Hitler when both teenage boys were at the Linz opera, watching performances from 

the standing-room section. Noticing each other, they struck up a conversation, and, as Kubizek 

notes, “We… rejoiced in our common adverse criticism” of the casting (Kubizek 2006, 28). 

“Rejoice” is the telling word. Others might regret finding weakness in an operatic performance. 

Not Kubizek and Hitler.  



The Mind of Adolf Hitler  116 
 

To those interested in the mind of the young Hitler, one of the most difficult issues is how to 

the place the fact that we do see – on occasion – that he appears to be going after kindness. As 

Alan Bullock once said, “Let’s have the rawness of it, which is that he was a person like you and 

me in many respects” (quoted in Rosenbaum, 1998, 85). We cannot paint an entirely evil picture 

of Adolf Hitler and be honest. Yet what emerges from a close study of these acts of kindness, 

and also those moments when he truly seems moved by beauty in nature and in the arts, is that 

invariably another motive shadows it – indicating that the pleasure Hitler got through respectful 

thought about others, and respectful emotion about the world, was not enough to satisfy him.  

Thus, when Kubizek’s viola teacher died (and Kubizek was later to be a graduate of the 

Vienna Conservatory and a serious professional musician) Hitler went to the funeral, “which,” 

says Kubizek, “rather surprised me as he did not know Professor Dessauer at all. When I 

expressed my surprise, he said, ‘I can’t bear it that you should mix with other young people and 

talk to them’” (Kubizek 2006, 34). The brutality of owning a person, and a desire to accompany 

that person in his private grief, are here co-mingled.  

  

Hitler in Vienna 

 

Some years later, sharing an apartment in Vienna, Kubizek observed the intensity with which 

Hitler thought through various architectural problems in order to improve the living conditions of 

the poor of that city. (Hitler was then imagining his professional future as having to do with 

architecture). “There was here a strange contradiction,” Kubizek wrote, “which always struck 

me: all his thoughts and ambitions were directed towards the problem of how to help the masses, 

the simple, decent but under-privileged people with whom he identified himself – they were 

ever-present in his thoughts – but in actual fact he always avoided any contact with people. The 

motley crowd in the Prater was practically repugnant to him” (Kubizek 2006, 164).  

The essence of respect, I learned from Eli Siegel, is the belief that other things, other people, 

deserve our precise thought: they have rights, the most important of which is the right to be seen 

accurately. Hitler plainly had unconscious scorn for this basic ethical principle. Then again, so 

do many people – perhaps even most people. We can, and often do, invent a person in our minds 

rather than try to see who that man or woman really is. A rather absurd instance of doing just this 

can be found in Kubizek’s book, as Hitler talks to his friend for years about his great passion for 

a girl from Linz named Stefanie, and about how they see eye to eye on everything. There’s only 

one problem: Hitler has never once spoken to her!              

This matter of whether reality has independence from our ego, including the reality of other 

people, is a pivotal matter – because the contemptuous mind will not allow it. Max Picard is at 

his best here, writing, “The Nazi…feels no responsibility towards reality because he feels no ties 

to it; that is why he does with it as it pleases him” (Picard 1947, 115). Thus, it is not surprising 

that the young Hitler, though a voracious reader, used books not so much to get an accurate 

picture of reality in his mind, as to glorify himself. “His attitude to books,” writes Kubizek, “was 

the same as his attitude to the world in general. He absorbed with fervour everything he could lay 



117  Green 

his hands on, but he took great care to keep at a safe distance from anything that might put him 

to the test” (Kubizek 2006, 182). It is also revelatory that despite his wide reading, Hitler kept 

away from the strict sciences; in particular, mathematics. These are fields, after all, that will not 

bend easily to one’s ego.  

To my knowledge, the only time Hitler ever admitted in print to being “at variance with 

himself” is when, in Mein Kampf, he tells of why he was unable to pursue an architectural career 

in Vienna. It was because earlier he had failed mathematics, and so lacked a diploma: 

  

…what I missed out of obstinacy at the Realschule now took its bitter revenge. 

Admission to the School of Architecture was dependent on attending a technical school 

for building, and entrance to the latter required one to have matriculated from a 

secondary school. I did not meet any of these conditions and, as far as could be foreseen 

therefore, the fulfillment of my dream to become an artist was impossible. (Quoted in 

Kubizek, 2006, 130)  

 

Note that in the word “obstinacy” there is even a flicker of self-criticism – the rarest of Hitlerian 

items. Even so, this self-criticism is the decorous version – smoothed-over-for-public-

consumption.   

 This seems the moment to mention that there is a degree of scholarly debate as to just how 

much of Kubizek’s book is directly by him and how much by editors. There is also a question of 

how much Kubizek altered his memories to suit his imagined audience of readers. For the sake 

of argument, let us stipulate that one (or both) of these possibilities is so. Yet what would that 

indicate? If he (or his pro-Nazi editors) changed the facts to make Hitler “more acceptable” to 

readers, it only supports my point: that contempt was so pervasive in Hitler’s life that even with 

whitewash liberally applied, the evil intent still comes through. 

 In Kubizek’s book, it is clear that Hitler found the situation vis-à-vis the School of 

Architecture tormenting. The entire structure of his self was built on the notion that reality had 

no rights he was obliged to acknowledge. And so, as Kubizek witnesses, “it only needed the 

lightest touch…for his self-accusation to become an accusation against the times, against the 

whole world” (Kubizek 2006, 158–9). 

The desire to blame others rather than honestly criticize oneself is clearly a sign of a 

preference in a self for contempt. Again, we must ask: how universal is this temptation? Is it only 

a Hitlerian weakness? Only a fault in the German character? Only a lifestyle choice of the 1930s 

and 1940s? Or is it present in everyone? It is; and let us have the courage to explore what that 

means. As Siegel has explained: “Contempt, it seems to us, is the foundation we need for our 

desire to be somebody; to matter [. . . Fascism] is the ego made metallic. It is the unwillingness 

to understand, as power” (Siegel 1976b, 1; Siegel 1982, 2; Siegel 1993, 2). In support of this 

view of the Nazi era, let me once again quote Max Picard: “The shouters – Hitler, Goebbels, and 

all the rest – wanted to prove by their shouts that they existed. The dictator [. . . ] felt his 

existence only by shouting some command” (Picard 1947, 36). Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and 



The Mind of Adolf Hitler  118 
 

Berel Lang have also documented richly the contemptuous relish with which the Nazis went 

about their work degrading other human beings (Goldhagen 1996; Lang 1992).  

 

Hitler’s “Table-Talk”  

    

I turn now to another remarkable book: Hitler's Secret Conversations: 1941–1945 (1953). It 

consists of transcripts of conversations Hitler had with his associates at his command center on 

the Eastern front, the “Wolf’s Lair.” Late night conversations, over pastry and tea; conversations 

like those many people have: to relax, to unwind after the day's work. Only this work was the 

attempt, literally, to conquer the world.  

 Let’s begin with a striking fact: the ruler of Germany feels impelled to tell, again and again, 

about schoolboy victories over teachers. It seems he loved to humiliate teachers in front of their 

classes: for example, Herr Koenig, who, in an earlier job, had endured an explosion from a 

nearby steam boiler that left him with a speech defect: the inability to pronounce the letter ‘h.’ 

“When he read out the names of the class,” said Hitler: “I pretended not to hear, although I was 

sitting right in front of him. He repeated it several times [. . .] When he had [finally] identified 

me, he asked me why I didn't answer. “My name’s not Itler, sir. My name is Hitler” (1953, 158). 

This is so ordinary. Something like it – one person trying to make another look ridiculous – 

happens hundreds of times today in Philadelphia, New York, Berlin. And that is what the child 

Adolf is doing: exploiting his teacher’s troubles for a cheap laugh.  

In “The Mind of Hitler,” a searching essay which also serves as the introduction to this 

volume of transcripts, the historian H. R. Trevor-Roper quotes Hitler as saying something whose 

very wording is a mocking paraphrase of Christ: “I have not come into this world to make men 

better, but to make use of their weaknesses” (1953, xxviii–xxix
 
). Now, truth to be told, everyone 

has played around – to a greater or lesser degree – with the terrible equation central to Hitler’s 

mind: that weakness in another means strength for ourselves. Not just Nazi dictators, but people 

generally like to imagine that we are superior: superior in cleverness, family background, 

intellect, etc. 

Throughout the book Hitler constantly pats himself on the back for all of these things. Simply 

being Aryan – his “family background” if you will – makes him, he tells himself, far above most 

other people. He praises himself for his clever ability to outsmart opponents: his deftness at 

lying. And he fancies himself as having more intellectual courage than anyone else: the only 

person unafraid of the utter cruelty of Nature. “One couldn’t imagine a better activity on nature’s 

part,” he tells those present, “than that which consists in deciding the supremacy of one creature 

over another” (1953, 321).   

The continuity of Hitler’s mind on the last point, concerning the cruelty of reality, can be seen 

in the fact that twenty years earlier, in a speech which John Lukacs cites in The Hitler of History, 

the Nazi leader says: “There is only defiance and hate, hate and again hate.” Only two things 

matter: “to hate and to be hard [. . .] a lesson devoid of love.”
 
“This brutal [. . .] view of the 

world,” comments Lukacs, is “by no means rare” (1998, 71).     



119  Green 

True enough; yet it was felt by Hitler and his ardent Nazi followers with a rare intensity: an 

intensity perhaps unmatched in human history. Wrote Siegel in a 1976 essay, “The Suppression 

of Good Will”: 

 

The Nazis around Hitler in l932 and later possessed strongly the feeling that kindness 

would be in their way [. . .] How much we can do in the field of annulling some 

consideration of another has not been measured yet. There is no limit to how rigid, fixed 

[. . .] merciless we can be. There is no limit, this means, to the suppression of good will. 

(1976a, 1–2) 

 

 Returning to the 1940s, it is important to see that for nearly 600 pages of conversation 

transcript, Hitler never asks a single question other than rhetorical ones which he intends to 

answer himself. And he hardly ever acknowledges learning anything. Moreover, he says he can’t 

read novels. “That kind of reading annoys me,” says Hitler (1953, 292). As Siegel once 

observed, to read a novel is to spend hours deeply affected by the inner lives of other people; and 

this is something the ego sees as a threat. Hitler is incapable of reading a novel because he 

doesn't want to give full reality to anyone. 

One segment of the human race which Hitler sees as very different from himself – and, of 

course, inferior – is women. “Intelligence, in a woman,” he says, “is not an essential thing.” And 

he continues: “My mother, for example, would have cut a poor figure in the society of our 

cultivated women. She lived strictly for her husband and children. They were her entire universe. 

But she gave a son to Germany” (quoted in Trevor-Roper 1953, 292). This is grandiose conceit; 

but how many children see their parents this way? More specifically: how many young boys see 

their mothers in that light? – and then go on later to view all women that way: as existing, not in 

their own right, but to serve us, to make us important? 

An aside: one form contempt for women can take, a form having in it at once the desire to 

blank her inner life out of existence as well as the desire to have her passively in one’s service, is 

pornography. So it is not at all surprising to be told by Ernst Hanfstaengl that Hitler had an 

interest in such publications. Not only did he own (among other such books) a “well-thumbed” 

edition of Eduard Fuch’s History of Erotic Art, but apparently Hitler himself sketched a series of 

pornographic drawings of his niece, Geli Raubal – “the sort of thing,” Hanfstaengl comments, 

“only a perverted voyeur would commit to paper, much less oblige a woman to model for” 

(Hanfstaengl 1994, 48, 163).
9
 

Returning to the main point: it is plain that Hitler judged people not by who they were, but by 

how important they made him. He was ruthless with anyone who questioned his importance. All 

through the 1920s in Bavaria, he had his political enemies murdered while the right-wing 

judiciary and the local police looked the other way; and once he became Chancellor of Germany 

in l933 – not through a clear election victory, but through a backroom deal brokered by wealthy 

people convinced he would defend their economic superiority – he continued to murder.
10

 

 



The Mind of Adolf Hitler  120 
 

Contempt and an Economic Viewpoint     

 

Hitler’s anti-Semitism was an important aspect of his politics. But there was a second element: 

from the very start Hitler took a key idea in leftist politics – that the land and resources of the 

world should be owned equitably – as a personal insult. Some scholars, notably Arno Mayer, 

have argued that his anti-Bolshevism was the more primal of the two hatreds (1988). The 

philosophy behind this new economics Hitler described in Mein Kampf as: “[a] doctrine [which] 

denies the aristocratic principle of Nature, and sets mass and dead weight of numbers in place of 

the eternal privilege of strength and power” (Hitler 2001, 60). This is raw contempt for people: 

seeing millions of other men and women as nothing but “dead weights.” Yet Hitler was hardly 

alone; contempt for “the masses” was arguably a key feature of industry at that time – not only in 

Germany, but in England, France, and the United States. There was a feeling among the 

defenders of profit economics that people exist, from a “business-point-of-view,” simply to make 

money for you. 

Stripped of pretence, the cruelty and ill will of this way of economics leaps out at one in sharp 

relief. It denies people their full reality, reducing them to the status of ready-at-hand tools whose 

function in life is to augment your private financial position; and if they can’t do that for you, 

well then, discard them, and search for greater profit elsewhere. “Fascism,” Siegel observed in a 

1970 lecture, “is an attempt to see that capitalism functions, by getting rid of its enemies. 

Fascism is the desire to kill good will if it is a fight between good will and our ego” (quoted in 

DeFilippis and Kestenbaum, 1984, 2).
11 

 

*** 

 

As I worked on this article, I had a chilling memory. As a teenager, growing up on Long Island, 

in a town that was perhaps 80% Jewish, the board-game I loved most was “Stalingrad” – a 

detailed reconstruction of the war between Hitler and the Russian people. Either side could win. I 

remember with shame that I preferred to play the Nazi side. Certainly, I knew what Hitler had 

done. I knew about the gas chambers, the ovens; I knew about Auschwitz. But Hitler also 

fascinated me, and for a terrible yet logical reason: he embodied, in a near-ultimate degree, a 

desire I also had – to have the world and other people bend to my will. It is not accidental that at 

this same time, though I was young, I was also a fervent supporter of the Vietnam War – in my 

opinion the most terrible instance of international ill will America has ever had. It was a war 

which in which thousands upon thousands of innocent people died; a war which arose not from a 

need in America to defend itself, but from a desire to impose our economic system on people 

who didn’t want it. 

This essay was written to shed light on the evolution of Hitler’s mind, and why that mind, and 

the political ideas which emerged from it, had the powerful appeal it, and they, did for millions 

of ordinary, representative people. Though what I write about took place three-quarters of a 

century ago, it matters enormously to our world today. For two reasons: First, because in terms 



121  Green 

of everyday life we all need to examine our personal reliance on contempt – question it, criticize 

it, lessen it, simply in order to like ourselves on an honest basis, and be thoughtful about, and 

kind to, other people. But there is a second reason: the world, once again, is deeply turbulent. 

Hitler came to power during a period of much financial unrest; a period, too, in which faith in 

democracy was weak. Once more, we are hearing fascist-like appeals from some politicians. As 

Robert O. Paxton noted in The Anatomy of Fascism:  

 

Fascism [. . .] is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One [the creation 

of political movements] within all democratic countries—not excluding the United 

States. “Giving up free institutions,” especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is 

recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. 

We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march” on 

some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of 

national “enemies” is enough. 

And he adds: “Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle 

is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, 

however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past” (Paxton 2005, 220). Paxton is 

right. The world needs an education which can enable it to be in the clear, ethically. The key to 

achieving that clarity is studying what Eli Siegel explained: the hope for contempt is the 

beginning point, the precondition, of all human evil; fascism, included. 

 

Notes 

 

1. Fackenheim was a German-born rabbi, imprisoned for a year in the Sachsenhausen 

concentration camp before fleeing to England just before the outbreak of the war. 

 

2. See, in particular, “The Face of Hitler” (Picard 1947, 78–85) where Picard speaks 

about Hitler and “nullity.”  

 

3. For a compact biography, see this Google Knol which I authored: 

http://knol.google.com/k/eli-siegel#. 

 

4. Siegel won The Nation’s poetry prize in 1925 for his poem “Hot Afternoons Have 

Been in Montana,” a work about which William Carlos Williams wrote in 1951, “I 

say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past 

quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world” (quoted in Siegel, 1958, xvi; 

see also: Breslin, 1985, 229–252). 

 

5. For a short presentation of the fundamental concepts of his philosophy, and how they 

are to be differentiated from other, and more recent uses of the term “aesthetic 

realism,” see: Green, 2005. 

http://knol.google.com/k/eli-siegel


The Mind of Adolf Hitler  122 
 

 

6. Though first published as a whole in 1981, various chapters were in print separately 

as early as 1946. See, in particular, the “Preface: Contempt Causes Insanity” (Siegel 

1981, 1–20) and the chapter “The World, Guilt and Self-Conflict” (Siegel 1981, 81–

122). 

 

7. Perhaps the closest Max Picard comes to a definition of evil is on page 16 of his 1947 

text. There he equates “the germ of evil” with “selfish isolation” and “the disease of 

fragmentation.” That the ground upon which we justify our isolation is the belief that 

we are superior to other people is not said. And that belief arises from the hope for 

contempt.  

 

8. By 1937, Hanfstaegel, having gotten on Hitler’s bad side, and in fear for his life, fled 

Germany. During WWII, he lived and worked in Washington D.C., and was useful to 

the war effort in providing “inside information” about the Nazi leadership. 

 

9. That Hanfstaengl is outraged at these drawings, which he says have “every 

anatomical detail,” is clear from his calling them “depraved.” He knew something of 

the ethical and aesthetic difference between art and pornography; one of the most 

prestigious fine art publishing houses in the world was owned by Hanfstaengl’s 

family, and for several years he worked in it. The difference, often forgotten now-a-

days, is that art exists to satisfy humanity’s desire to have more respectful for reality; 

pornography, the reverse. It is not a matter of the degree of nudity; it is a matter of 

ethical purpose – in the artist, and in the viewer. 

 

10. Early in the 1930s, the Nazi Party allied itself with the German National People’s 

Party. As George Stein notes: “this party of the far right represented Germany’s 

conservative establishment: the aristocracy, the East-Elbian landowners, the officer 

corps, the great industrialists, and the high-ranking civil servants” (Stein 1968, 10). 

 

11. In support of this perspective, note the following by Helmut Heiber: “[T]o the very 

end, Hitler indeed succeeded in maintaining a stable level of prices through his price-

stop policy, but the wage-level also remained unchanged and what organized body of 

workers would have accepted that at a time when profits were rising continually!” 

(Heiber 1968, 163). 

 

 

Works Cited 

 

Breslin, James E. B., ed. 1985. Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger 

Poets. New York: New Directions Publishing. 

 



123  Green 

DeFilippis, Ernest and Barbara Kestenbaum. 1984. “Pride, Regret, Fascism.” The Right of 

Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, No. 595 (August 29). [This is a report of Eli Siegel’s 

lecture “How Did Mr. Roosevelt See?” given on August 14, 1970.]  

 

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. 1996. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the 

Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 

 

Green, Edward. 2005. “A Note on Two Conceptions of Aesthetic Realism.” British Journal 

of Aesthetics, Vol. 45:4 (October): 438–440. 

 

Haffner, Sebastian. 1979. The Meaning of Hitler. Trans. Ewald Osers. Cambridge: Harvard 

University Press. 

 

Hanfstaengl, Ernst. 1994. Hitler: The Missing Years. New York: Arcade Publishing. 

 

Heiber, Helmut. 1961. Adolf Hitler: A Short Biography. Trans. L. Wilson: London: Oswald 

Wolff Ltd. 

 

Hitler, Adolf. 2001. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Intro., D. Cameron Watt. London: 

Pimlico, 2001. 

 

Kranz, Sheldon, ed. 1969. Aesthetic Realism: We Have Been There – Six Artists on the Siegel 

Theory of Opposites. New York: Definition Press. 

 

Kubizek, August. 2006. The Young Hitler I Knew. Trans. Geoffrey Brooks. London: 

Greenhill Books, 2006. 

 

Lang, Berel. 1990. Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

 

Littell, Jonathan. 2010. The Kindly Ones. Trans. Charlotte Mandel. New York: Random 

House. 



The Mind of Adolf Hitler  124 
 

 

Lukacs, John. 1998. The Hitler of History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 

 

Mailer, Norman. 2007. The Castle in the Forest. New York: Random House. 

 

Mayer, Arno. 1988. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History. 

New York: Pantheon Books. 

 

Paxton, Robert O. 2005. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage Books. 

 

Picard, Max. 1947. Hitler in Ourselves. Trans. Heinrich Hauser. Hinsdale, Ill: Henry 

Regnery Company.  

 

Rosenbaum, Ron. 1998. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. New 

York: Random House. 

 

Riess, Ellen, ed. 1997. The Modern Quarterly Beginnings of Aesthetic Realism: 1922–1923. 

New York: Definition Press. 

 

Siegel, Eli. 1974. “Disliking the World, Continued.” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be 

Known, No. 70 (July 31). 

 

---. 1958. Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. New York: Definition Press. 

 

---. 1981. Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism.New York: Definition Press. 

 

--- . 1976a. “The Suppression of Goodwill.” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, 

No.160 (April 21). 

 

--- . 1976b. “The Two Pleasures.” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, No. 162, 

(May 5) 



125  Green 

 

--- .1982. “Toward Stalingrad Day.” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, No. 500 

(November 3). 

 

--- . 1976c. “What Caused the Wars?” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, No. 165, 

May 26. 

 

--- . 1993. “What We Do with Sameness and Difference.” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to 

Be Known, No. 1047 (April 28).  

 

Stein, George H., ed. 1968. Hitler. Great Lives Observed Series. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-

Hall. 

 

Trevor-Roper, H. R., ed. 1953. Hitler’s Secret Conversations: 1941–1945. Trans. Norman 

Cameron and R.H. Stevens. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young. 


