Wilhelm Reich on Nazism

“Italian and German National Socialism became international fascism. In the strict sense of the word it attracted masses on an international scale in the form of a perverse ‘nationalistic internationalism’. In this form it crushed genuine democratic revolts in Spain and in Austria.”

“We have already seen how the ideology of national honour derives from authoritarian ideology and the latter from the sex-negation regulation of sexuality. Neither Christianity nor National Socialism attacks the institution of compulsive marriage: for the former, apart from its function of procreation, marriage is a ‘complete, life-long union’; for the National Socialists it is a biologically rooted institution for the preservation of racial purity. Outside of compulsive marriage, there is no sexuality for either of them.”

“The basis of National Socialism’s mass psychology differs from that of Wilhelmian imperialism in that the former had a pauperized middle class, whereas the German empire had a prosperous middle class as its mass basis. Thus, the Christianity of Wilhelmian imperialism had to be different from the Christianity of National Socialism. For all that, the ideological modifications did not undermine the fundamentals of the mystical world view in the least; rather they intensified its function. To begin with, National Socialism rejected the Old Testament as being ‘Jewish’ - that, at least, was the position of its well-known exponent, Rosenberg, who belonged to the right wing. In the same way the internationalism of the Roman Catholic Church was regarded as ‘Jewish’. The international church was to be replaced by the ‘German’.”