Renate Flens, a German woman in her 60s who suffers from depression, tells her psychotherapist that she wants to love her children but just can’t. She and the therapist soon realize that both Flens’s problems may be rooted in her frustration at being unable to allow others to get close to her. After lengthy conversations, they realize something else: a contributing factor may well be the child‐rearing teachings of Johanna Haarer, a physician whose books were written during the [Fascist] era and aimed at raising children to serve the Führer.

Flens (a pseudonym) was born after World War II, but Haarer’s books were still popular during her postwar childhood, where many households had a copy of The German Mother and Her First Child—a book that continued to be published for decades (ultimately cleansed of the most objectionable [Fascist] language). When asked, Flens recalled seeing one of Haarer’s books on her parents’ bookshelf.

Flens’s story, told to me by her therapist, illustrates an issue troubling a number of mental health experts in Germany: Haarer’s ideas may still be harming the emotional health of its citizens. One aspect was particularly pernicious: she urged mothers to ignore their babies’ emotional needs. Infants are [normally inclined] to build an attachment with a primary care giver.

The [Fascists] wanted children who were tough, unemotional and unempathetic and who had weak attachments to others, and they understood that withholding affection would support that goal. If an entire generation is brought up to avoid creating bonds with others, the experts ask, how can members of that generation avoid replicating that tendency in their own children and grandchildren?

“This has long been a question among analysts and attachment researchers but ignored by the general public,” says Klaus Grossmann, a leading researcher in mother–child attachment, now retired from the University of Regensburg. The evidence that Haarer’s teachings are still affecting people today is not definitive. Nevertheless, it is supported by studies of mother–child interactions in Germany, by other research into attachment and by therapists’ anecdotal reports.

[…]

In The German Mother and Her First Child, Haarer wrote, “It is best if the child is in his own room, where he can be left alone.” If the child starts to cry, it is best to ignore him: “Whatever you do, do not pick the child up from his bed, carry him around, cradle him, stroke him, hold him on your lap, or even nurse him.”

Otherwise, “the child will quickly understand that all he needs to do is cry in order to attract a sympathetic soul and become the object of caring. Within a short time, he will demand this service as a right, leave you no peace until he is carried again, cradled, or stroked—and with that a tiny but implacable house tyrant is formed!”

[…]

Why did so many mothers follow Haarer’s counterintuitive advice? Radebold, whose research has focused on the generation of children born during the war, notes that Haarer’s views on child‐rearing did not appeal to everyone during the 1930s and 1940s but attracted two groups in particular: parents who identified strongly with the [Third Reich] and young women who had themselves come from emotionally damaged families (largely as a result of World War I), who had no idea what a good relationship feels like.

If, in addition, their husbands were fighting at the front—leaving them to fend for themselves and to feel overburdened and insecure—it may well be imagined that the toughness promoted in Haarer’s books could have been appealing.

Of course, strict child‐rearing practices had been commonplace in Prussia well before the [Fascists] came on the scene. In Grossmann’s opinion, only a culture that already had a tendency for hardness would have been ready to institute such practices on a grand scale. Studies on attachment conducted in the 1970s are consistent with this view.

He notes, for example, that in Bielefeld, which is in northern Germany, half of all children were shown to exhibit an insecure attachment; in Regensburg, which is in southern Germany and never came under Prussian influence, less than a third fit that category.

This dovetails with my statement that the Fascists theirselves were products of abusive parenting. Quoting Alice Miller:

Like every other child, Hitler was born innocent, only to be raised, as were many children at the time, in a destructive fashion by his parents and later to make himself into a [criminal]. He was the survivor of a machinery of annihilation that in turn‐of‐the‐century Germany was called “child‐rearing” and that I call “the concealed concentration camp of childhood,” which is never allowed to be recognized for what it is.

[…]

According to the reports of [Axis] criminals (and also of soldiers who volunteered to fight in Vietnam), their unconscious programming to be violent began in every case with a brutal upbringing that demanded absolute obedience and expressed total contempt for the child. I know of no example of this which is so well‐documented and which demonstrates so clearly the consequences of the psychological murder of children — bringing along with it a form of collective blindness — than the fateful success of Adolf Hitler.

The Führer once told his secretary that during one of the regular beatings given him by his father he was able to stop crying, to feel nothing, and even to count the thirty‐two blows he received.

In this way, by totally denying his pain, his feelings of powerlessness, and his despair — in other words, by denying the truth — Hitler made himself into a master of violence and of contempt for human beings. The result was a very primitive person, incapable of any empathy for other people. He was mercilessly and constantly driven to new destructive acts by his latent feelings of hatred and revenge. After millions had been forced to die for this reason, those feelings still haunted him in his sleep.

Hermann Rauschning reports nocturnal paroxysms of screaming on the Führer’s part, along with “inexplicable counting”, which I trace back to the counting he did during the beatings of his childhood. Hitler did not invent fascism; he found it (like so many of his contemporaries) prefigured in the [Reich] of his family. The [Third Reich’s] version of fascism, however, does bear unmistakable traces of Hitler’s childhood.

But his early experience was by no means an exception. Thus, neither Gerhart Hauptmann nor Martin Heidegger nor many other celebrated intellects of the day were able to see through Hitler’s madness. To do so, they would have had to be able to see through the madness of their own upbringing.

Hitler could make Europe and the world into the battlefield of his childhood because in the Germany of that time there were millions of people who had experienced the same kind of upbringing he had.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

I know that some of you want to roll your eyes at Miller’s psychohistory. To an extent, I agree with you: psychology cannot answer everything.

Nevertheless, I would not be so quick to dismiss her psychohistory as useless. Where I differ from Miller is that I see the unpleasant childhoods, common among Axis officials, as ingredients to Fascism, rather than their primary cause. Along with a military and petty bourgeois background, a history under abusive parents made a good candidate for a Fascist, as it damaged his empathy and taught him early on that violence is an acceptable solution to difficult subjects. This provided the Fascists with valuable training that they needed.

In other words, while abusive parenting might not have made the Fascists oppressive, it certainly prepared them for that rôle. It would be difficult to prove that the Fascists were imitating their parents when they beat prisoners (which happened often), but I have no doubt that the normalisation of violence that they suffered early on made it all the easier.