LEADERS SEEN WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL EYE

CAPE GIRARDEAU -- Most historians agree that environment plays a primary role in the formation of world leaders' political ideas. An oppressive childhood, for example, likely would lead a world figure to different political and social views than would a happy upbringing.

But Robert G. L. Waite says that historians often mistakenly rely solely on environment when studying the thoughts and actions of past world leaders.

Waite, one of the world's leading authorities on National Socialism and Adolph Hitler, contends that the emotional and psychological character of world figures also affects their ideology and political policies.

Waite Saturday addressed members of the 33rd Annual Missouri Conference on History held at the Cape Girardeau Holiday Inn. The two-day event, hosted by the Southeast Missouri State University Department of History, featured nationally known speakers and local historians.

Waite is affiliated with the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College, Mass.

His 1977 book, "The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler," created a stir among historians who scoff at the study of psychology's affect in the forming of public policy in leaders such as Hitler.

But Waite said Saturday that the emotional and mental state of Hitler and leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm II before him, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein today, should be a key part of any historical analysis of their actions.

"Personal hang-ups become rationalized and projected as public policy," Waite said. "Hitler's incandescent hatred of Jews was, from his childhood, rationalized and projected into the horror of the Holocaust."

Waite said that while external circumstances play a part in understanding some of Hitler's actions, it's also important to study history in the context of his psychological condition.

"I think history is about geology, sociology, it's about a lot of things," he said. "But it's about people and personalities. People make a difference."

He compared Hitler to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany's Second Reich and said many similarities in the two men's public policies can be partly attributed to the similarities in their world-views.

He said Hitler and Wilhelm's childhoods were "strikingly different and amazingly similar.

"Hitler's mother was a peasant women, illiterate and he was a victim of tremendous oppression," Waite said. "Kaiser's mother was the brilliant, articulate, educated daughter of Queen Victoria. But both kids were battered children who suffered terribly."

Waite said Hitler and Wilhelm shared the same aesthetic tastes, and both wrote poetry and drama and preached sermons. Waite said it was ironic that Hitler's favorite text for speeches was the Gospel of John in the Bible.

"Both men were intellectuals and believed deeply in the power of ideas to move and shape history," he said. "Both were racists, and both were responsible, to some degree, for unleashing the two world wars."

Waite said Hitler and Wilhelm shares as many differences as similarities, but he said both made tremendous political and military blunders that can't be explained "reasonably" by looking solely at environmental influences.

"There are examples of how Kaiser and the Fuhrer could be brilliant as political leaders and others that showed how stupendously stupid they could be," Waite said.

"I detect both in Kaiser and the Fuhrer, a remarkable capacity for self-destruction: an impulse for courting disaster."

Waite said Hitler's meteoric rise to power from a jailed politico with no party in 1924 to the master of Germany and an empire "far more vast then any Charlemagne or Napoleon ever had," was a story book success story.

"He had brilliant success in early campaigns in the west," Waite said. "Yet there were distinct examples of the undertow of flirting with disaster.

"Hitler's mistakes were so gratuitous and so self-defeating they defy reasonable explanation."

Many historians have attributed Hitler's invasion of Russia to a need for land and resources. But Waite said those explanation's don't wash.

"Stalin was an ally and trying desperately to appease him, shipping thousands of tons of supplies to Hitler," he said. "As German troops crossed east they saw locomotives coming from Russia to feed the very military coming to invade."

Waite also said Hitler's declaration of war against the United States came at a time when Japan had declared war and U.S. efforts likely would have been focused in the Pacific, away from Europe and Hitler. By declaring war against the U.S., Hitler brought the world's leading industrial power into the war on the very day, Dec. 11, 1941, he was being defeated by the Russians.

But Waite said that by studying Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm II and other world leaders in a psychological context, historians can better understand why they acted unreasonably.

"I think the psychology can help," he added. "That's all it can do. But I think that it's helpful."

Professor Waite's study of Nazi Germany has spanned nearly 40 years with books including "The Vanguard of Nazism: The German Free Corps Movement, 1918-1923;" "Hitler and Nazi Germany;" and "`Afterword,' The Mind of Adolf Hitler."