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ABSTRACT: Despite his infamous legacy, Adolf Hitler remains one of the most significant and well-studied figures of the last century, with well over 120,000 books and articles about him, and including his recorded speeches, writings, letters, memos, and directives, as well as anecdotes about him in publications about other Nazi figures. Yet, there remain tremendous gaps in our understanding of Hitler. This psychohistorical study partially addresses the gap and attempts to obtain a finer grained description of Hitler's progressively narcissistic behaviors and their outcomes. It utilizes historical data, Grapsas' episodic model of narcissist interactions (Grapsas, et. al., 2020), Williamson's (1964) "managerial utility" function, and Chatterjee and Hambrick's (2007) archival/unobtrusive measurement schema as an analytical framework. The authors, who are not clinicians, treat narcissism as a personality trait rather than a clinical diagnosis.
Emerging at the right historical moment with a popular message, Hitler relied on his natural oratory skills, studied impression management, and took personal control of party and government funds to facilitate his rise to power. Early successes provided further referent power. Hitler received little of what might be critical feedback from his in-group of unquestioning sycophants, and that little bit was apparently drowned out by the noise of his cult-like following. Rejecting inconvenient evidence, he narcissistically blamed others when failures occurred.
Keywords: narcissism, Hitler, psychohistory, leadership, personality
Despite his infamous legacy, Adolf Hitler remains one of the most significant leaders of the last century. He is also one of the most studied figures with well over 120,000 books and articles about him (Simms, 2019). There are several new classic general biographies (e.g., Bullock, 1952; Stein, 1968; Fest, 1975; Kershaw,1987, 1999, 2000, 2008; Stein, 1968; Kerrigan, 2017; Longerich, 2019). Other works stress his rise and leadership in the context of his culture and era (e.g., Drucker, 1939; Shirer, 1960; Peukert, 1978; Bracher, 1979; Flood, 1989; Davidson, 1997; Beisei, 2003; Roberts, 2010). During World War II, allied intelligence services commissioned later declassified special psychological studies of Hitler: The American Office of Strategic Services' (OSS) (the forerunner of today's Central Intelligence Agency) stud- ies by Langer (1972) and Murray (1943), the British study by Trevor-Roper (1945), and Stalin's Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) study (Eberle and Uhl, 1945).
Other research focused on Hitler's leadership of the...