ABSTRACT
It would be most difficult to overestimate the importance of our ability to understand our own emotional lives and those of others to probe the nature of the escalating problems throughout the world. This quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf illustrates the link between his emotions and what subsequently happened to the European Jews along with others deemed not worthy of life:
There is ground for pride in our people only if we no longer need be ashamed of any class. But a people, half of which is wretched and careworn, or even deprived, offers so sorry a picture that no one should feel any pride in it. Only when a nation is healthy in all its members, in body and soul, can every man’s joy in belonging to it rightly be magnified to that high sentiment which we designate as national pride. and this highest pride will only be felt by the man who knows the greatness of his nation…. Particularly our German people which today lies broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world, needs that suggestive force that lies in self-confidence….
If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. on the contrary, twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future (Quoted in Scheff 1994: 114, 116–117).
