psychoanalyst Erich Fromm seventy years earlier. Fromm had fled Germany in 1934, and in 1941 he wrote an urgent book called Escape from Freedom, in which he attempted to describe the psychological origins of Nazism, though he was careful to note that “Nazism is a psychological problem, but the psychological factors themselves have to be understood as being molded by socio-economic factors; Nazism is an economic and political problem, but the hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds.”
