n of Rorschach ink-blot tests administered to 16 top-level Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg) that the "Nazis were not psychologically normal or healthy individuals." The findings of the Miale/Selzer study were challenged on methodological grounds, and a follow-up study was conducted by Molly Harrower, a Rorschach authority. In the Harrower study, the Rorschach records of eight persons, ranging in mental health from seriously disturbed to well adjusted, were added to those of the 16 Nazis included in the Mirale/Selzer study. Ten well known Rorschach authorities were then asked to evaluate various groupings of the 24 Rorschach records. The Rorschach authorities participating in this study did not identify any of the 16 Nazis as being mentally disturbed.
A concern with the psychological state of the perpetrators of The Holocaust is misdirected when considering how the activity could have been permitted to occur. The more relevant question concerns the sociological and psychological characteristics of the society itself, because the events, which grouped together comprise The Holocaust, were the systematic actions of a government, not the isolated actions of individuals within a government, whether or not those individuals who either directed or carried out the relevant actions were sane or mad. Not all analysts see the problem in a societal context. It is argued that it was the Nazi government, and not the German society which committed the atrocities. It is also argued that governments both before and since that of Nazi Germany have been implicated in the commission of heinous acts. Each of these arguments is true, as far as they go. Neither of the arguments, however, provides a satisfactory explanation of what occurred within the Third Reich.
It was the Nazi government that both instigated and directed the events which comprise The Holocaust; however, that government could have been stopped by pressures from the mass...