The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees

The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History

By Laurence Rees

PublicAffairs, 2025

David Murphy

What do we make of Laurence Rees’s new book, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History? As a historian of the Third Reich, Laurence Rees has nothing but good credit to his name. He has given the public clear, thoughtful, and approachable books and documentary programs, such as Auschwitz: A New History and The Nazis: A Warning from History. On one dimension, this new book is straightforward enough: it is a chronological work of history that humbly utilizes modern psychological research to explain the nature and development of “various Nazi mentalities – not just the beliefs of card-carrying Nazis, but also those of others who supported the regime.”

The cover for the US edition uses a photograph from an early Nazi rally showing Adolph Hitler standing in front of several young men of the Sturmabteilung (the SA, or “Brownshirts”), all looking into the camera – and at the reader – seemingly on the verge of speaking out. How did they get there? – all of them. This book attempts to answer that and so many of the other disturbing questions we have about the Nazi regime and mind. For Hitler, we’re shown his early application of conspiracy theories (the ‘stab in the back’ myth), ‘Them/Us dichotomizing’, and creation of a ‘hero’ self-image. On the corruption of those young men, we are virtually given a prelude to that disquieting cover-photo and a good example of what Rees is doing here: 

While young people’s critical faculties are not yet completely developed before their mid-twenties, the parts of the brain which long for novelty and excitement are already shaped. . .’the most interesting thing about adolescence,’ says Professor [Robert] Sapolsky, ‘is that it’s not only the time in life when you’re most likely to become a murderer, but it’s also the time of your life you’re most likely to commit your life to becoming Mother Teresa. . .

. . .Hitler instinctively knew this. In a speech in July 1922 he explicitly called on young Germans to join the Stormtroopers and fight for the Nazi cause, and “if you are reviled and insulted, good luck to you, my boys! You have the good fortune already at 18 or 19 years of age to be hated by the greatest scoundrels. . . You are the defense of a Movement that is called one day to remodel Germany in Revolutionary fashion. . .”

The skin crawls at the little worm’s affectionate use of “my boys!” Like the history of the Nazi regime itself, as Rees’s book progresses these Nazi mentalities develop, their evil compounding with the conditions of war and politics. For example, we are told about a boy in the Depression who had spent his life in the city “was sent to a youth camp by the Hitler Youth” where “he saw a forest for the first time” and was “deeply touched” by this “real experience.” Years later he and other young men who might have undergone similar formative episodes found themselves sent on a war of conquest.

And what of those boys turned into deformed men who found themselves on the Eastern Front, perhaps in the Einsatzgruppen (SS death squads)? In a letter to his wife, the monster Reinhard Heydrich wrote that in the case of his death “she should ‘give the children another father, but it must be a real man, like the one I wanted to be.’” In a passage begging to be drawn out further than it is, Rees asks:

. . . what exactly was a ‘real man’? If you enjoyed killing innocent civilians, close up and in cold blood, did that mean you were no longer adhering to the ‘fundamental laws of the SS’? As we shall see, Himmler often emphasized that it was important for his men to behave ‘decently.’ But once you became involved in this kind of killing how was that possible? One Polish eyewitness testified that he had heard SS men come into a pub after shooting a group of Poles ‘boasting of their actions and saying ‘the damned brains just quirted everywhere.’ That was certainly ‘hard’ on the Nazis’ ‘enemies,’ but how could it be ‘decent’? it was an issue that would become still more problematic for the Nazis as the murders escalated.

And it is one of many issues Rees adeptly handles right through the end of his book. So, again, what is going on in this book is relatively uncomplicated. Still, the question of what to make of The Nazi Mind sticks. It is a history, sure; not one, however, that would have been published in the 1990s. Rees gives us “warnings from history,” writing that “many democracies are currently under threat and it is useful to be aware of the techniques that would-be tyrants are likely to use to subvert our freedoms,” adding at the end of the book that he “offer[s] them in support neither of the left nor of the right, but as someone who values democracy over dictatorship.” He doesn’t give any names or indicate any countries. But just as this book would not have been written two or three decades ago, would it have been written if the most important democracy in the world was succumbing to vengeful right wing-politics and to many of the very mentalities he illustrates here? Probably we shouldn’t expect a prudent historian like Rees to make explicit comparisons, but a purchase of this lucid book does seem to come free with a suggestive nod toward Washington. So, we can say, as a popular work of history, it is commendable; as a delivery of warnings from that history, it is lucid; and as a new release in 2025, it is a Trump book whether it likes it or not. Hopefully in 2050 that will not be the case.  

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.