The shared childhood trauma of Hitler, Stalin and Mao

According to late Professor Rudy Rummel from the University of Hawaii, the world's worst megamurderers Josif Stalin (Soviet Union), Mao Zedong (China) and Adolf Hitler (Germany) were responsible for the killing of 62, 78 and 21 million civilians in their own countries, respectively. These staggering numbers do not include military casualties from WWII. The gruesome legacy of these criminals is an eternal warning to mankind. We should never give similarly deranged individuals power to govern people again.

I had always wondered what Hitler, Stalin and Mao had in common. What made them so mad? What made them lose their capacity for love, kindness and compassion for other human beings and unleash such murderous terror? They obviously had personality disorders. Literature presents an array of assumed diagnoses for these men, which, however, are contested by medical doctors, because Hitler, Stalin and Mao were never examined by a psychiatrist. This is the eternal dilemma which makes the discussion of personality disorders so difficult - a psychopath, narcissist, or sociopath will never voluntarily go to see a psychiatrist because of their lack of self-reflection, and so we will never know their proper diagnosis. The best we can obtain is a "diagnosis by proxy". But does that really matter? Will finding a consensus today that Hitler was a "psychopath with psychotic symptoms", that Stalin was a "paranoid sociopath" and Mao had "multiple personality disorders" help to prevent the rise of potential new megamurderers to power? It will not. Candidates for political office with personality disorders will not undergo a psychiatric examination, as explained above. Instead, I recommend to take a deeper, compassionate look at people's childhoods.

Somewhere along my healing journey from burnout, it dawned on me. I started to see the big picture and the human world started making sense: The reason for all human suffering is CHILDHOOD TRAUMA.

Then I looked at Hitler, Stalin and Mao, their family and childhood, and a striking pattern emerged (1). Do you know what Hitler, Stalin and Mao all had in common? They suffered identical traumatising family conditions in their childhoods. Here is what I see:

1) Their mothers each had born two older children - two boys or a boy and a girl, who died in infancy before Hitler, Stalin and Mao, respectively, were born. Stalin and Mao's mothers lost two earlier-born boys each, Hitler's mother lost a boy and a girl (2).

2) All three mothers doted on their oldest surviving son and probably were overanxious. They had lost previously born sons, in an era and in cultures where boys were valued much more than girls.

3) All three mothers were very religious / pious.

4) All three fathers were grossly abusive, they beat and harmed their sons (and most certainly the mothers and other siblings too) and were absent a part of or most of their childhood.

Growing up under such conditions, this might be how young Hitler, Stalin and Mao would have been traumatised in childhood:

1) For the parents and especially the mothers, the boys had to make up for the loss of older brothers, starting with the first-born son. They had to fill in the dead brothers' shoes, so to speak - which was an unattainable target creating a lot of pressure, since the dead brothers would always be a step or two ahead of them. We know from family constellations that dead children place a heavy burden on the family system, unless the issue is addressed and healed. The mothers had to face the subsequent deaths of their first-born and second-born child, before Hitler, Stalin and Mao came to the world. These boys would have had to struggle to ascertain their own individuality.

2) The mothers were excessively attached to these first surviving boys, stifling their healthy personal development.

3) The boys were emotionally and physically abused by their fathers, they were certainly beaten and maybe abused even worse, leading them to hate their fathers.

4) The boys had to witness their fathers abusing their mothers and younger siblings too, which can be extremely traumatising, even more than being abused (Hitler's and Stalin's fathers were alcoholics, Mao's might have been one too).

5) Because the fathers were abusive, the eldest surviving boys would have had to take on the unhealthy role of surrogate partners for their mothers.

6) The boys would have repeatedly experienced helplessness, fear, shame and rage over not being able to protect themselves, their mothers or siblings from their fathers' abuse.

7) In adolescence, they grew up without their fathers, with either the fathers or themselves having left.

8) Their mothers might have physically and emotionally abused the boys too, since using violence against children was normal at the time.

9) They had to cope with the crazymaking contrast between the religious moral teachings of the mothers and the violent reality of domestic abuse (e.g., God did not step in to prevent the abuse).

Children need unconditional love in order to develop healthy personalities, a natural self-acceptance and self-love. Children who experience ill-treatment and abuse from their primary caregivers automatically believe there must be something wrong with them. With worsening abuse they develop an increasing lack of self-love, which can lead to self-loathing. In order to be able to face the world, such a depraved child then develops a false persona, as the only way to cope with the scary world, which is strong, faultless and has all kinds of remarkable survival qualities, while the injured, self-detesting self becomes arrested at a childhood stage of emotional development and forever encapsulated inside this shell. This is how a personality disorder arises - narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy. The abused child who did not experience unconditional love from its primary caregivers will not be able to offer it to others in turn. This has to do with the development of the brain. Sadly, once a personality disorder sets in, it is incurable, because the false persona of these people prevents them from realising that they could profit from therapy.

Personality disorders develop as a result of childhood trauma. (They may appear hereditary, because trauma gets passed on to new generations, however this happens in an epigenetic way, not involving changes in the genetic code). It was the family circumstances and the behaviour of both parents that led to the irreversible traumatisation of young Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Being born as a "replacement" for dead older brothers placed a familial burden on them. The mothers were unhealthily attached to the boys. Experiencing the violent father get his way taught young Hitler, Stalin and Mao to employ violence as a means to assert themselves, even if they hated their fathers. Experiencing the failure of their mothers' religious dogma to protect them, they resorted to atheistic dogmatic ideologies instead (Nazism, Communism).

So what do we learn from the unhealed childhood trauma of Hitler, Stalin and Mao?

Men who display no empathy, whose two older siblings (at least one of which a boy) died before they were born, who had religious, doting mothers and violent, largely absent biological fathers may have a propensity to inflict terrible harm on others.

There are two ways to prevent such traumatised people from rising to power. Firstly, we need spread awareness about the potentially lethal consequences of an individual's childhood trauma for the safety of society and the world. Secondly, we all need to heal ourselves first, so that we do not unwittingly spread trauma in our families and negatively affect people around us.

All Truth lies within us. If we want to heal the world, we need to start by healing ourselves.

(1) See e.g. Wikipedia for the biographies of Hitler , Stalin and Mao.

(2) Hitler's deceased older baby siblings were called Gustav and Ida, those of Stalin were Mikhail and Georgii, while the names of Mao's two dead infant brothers cannot be found in accessible sources, e.g. here or here. Hitler's mother also lost two baby sons born after him, called Otto and Edmund. Only two of her six children survived.