PTSD Made Heydrich into a Serial Killer

Serial mass murderer, sure – but still a serial killer. Textbook mission-oriented serial killer. Now the existential (for four million Jews and millions of other Nazi victims) question is:

"How on bloody (literally) earth did smart, talented (genius even), cultured, well-integrated into German society, with normal loving family become serial mass murderer??? What the hell (literally) happened?"

Actually, the key objective of this book is to provide a comprehensive (and thus inevitably quite long) answer to this genuinely existential question. However, it is already possible to provide a short one.

To provide this answer, we must turn to the studies performed on such well-known serial killers as Ted Bundy, Westley Allen Dodd, Arthur Gary Bishop, Keith Jesperson, and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber).

It turned out that these individuals acquired at some point in their lives a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In other words, they received either one colossal emotional trauma – or s series of such traumas over weeks, months or even years.

One of the consequences of PTSD is “fight-or-flight response”; another is the development of various phobias. In religious terms, it means that victims of PTSD often develop a lethal combination of rage and fear – two in this case literally deadly sins. In extreme cases, PTSD can make its victims deadly aggressive.

It appears that this is exactly what happened to Heydrich, Hitler, Himmler, other Nazi leaders, other Nazis… and lots of other Germans (the latter could be rightfully called the “PTSD nation”).

Hardships of war (first and foremost, hunger caused by Blockade of Germany), humiliating defeat in First Great War; grossly unfair terms of a criminal Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, Great Depression; constant fear of being invaded from the West (by France) and from the East (by the USSR) … no wonder they got PTSD.

As all these highly emotionally traumatic events were directly or indirectly associated with Jews, it is no surprise that Nazi leaders (as well as other Nazis and ordinary Germans) developed acute Judeophobia: fear of and hatred for the Jews.

Heydrich got additional traumas from a “local civil war” in Halle in 1919 – and from being unfairly thrown of the Navy in 1931. No wonder, he escalated, snapped and then escalated again… ultimately becoming a serial mass murderer. Obviously, it does not absolve him of his crimes – it only explains them.