The Roots of National Socialism and Germany's Reckoning with its Past

Some Provisional Conclusions

For some kind of explanation for the large-scale propaganda, brainwashing, and moral quiescence of large sections of the German people, we turn once again to the psychological insights of Carl Jung, who wrote in 1928 that hiding behind the explanations of "mass psychosis" cannot absolve the individual of his or her responsibility: 

"It is a notorious fact that the morality of society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which depends entirely on the moral sense of the individual and on the freedom necessary for this. Hence every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone; for he is carried by society and to that extent relieved of his individual responsibility. . . . The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity." --cited in Epilogue to "Essays on Contemporary Events," 1946: 228


". . . the tide that rose in the unconscious after the first World War was reflected in individual dreams, in the form of collective, mythological symbols which expressed primitivity, violence, cruelty: in short, all the powers of darkness. When such symbols occur in a large number of individuals and are not understood, they begin to draw these individuals together as if by magnetic force, and thus a mob is formed. Its leader will be found in the individual who has the least resistance, the lease sense of responsibility and, because of his inferiority, the greatest will to power. He will let loose everything that is ready to burst forth, and the mob will follow with the irresistible force of an avalanche.” "The Fight with the Shadow," 1946: 220
 

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