This article is the first detailed discussion of the politics that determines the pseudo-religion which characterizes the mass leader that Hermann Broch describes in Die Verzauberung. I shall analyze Broch's assessment of fascist politics as the politics of sacrifice. So far critics have neglected the fact that, like Ratti, the narrator of the novel sacrifices a woman (Barbara). I shall show that Broch's critique of both science and politics as sacrifice has to do with his understanding of Judaism as a religious and political way of life in which the idealisation of the sacrificial is tabooed.