Joseph Goebbels understood the Law of Sacrifice. With the devastation of the German nation underway, he wrote in his pamphlet of September 26, 1943 that the duty of the individual during war extends to “sacrificing his life for his nation.” Only such willingness to sacrifice, Goebbels explained, “transforms a collection of individuals into a people, and in a higher sense a nation.” He realized, as Carolyn Marvin says, that “blood sacrifice creates the nation.” Or as I put it, “As the soldier dies, so does the nation come alive.”

As bombs rained down upon Germany, Goebbels was pleased. The people, he said, have “surpassed themselves as a result of the bombing raids, heroically overcoming fear.” At last, that which Nazism despised—concern for the survival of the individual self—was fading from the scene.

The bourgeoisie, Goebbels declared, is “dead or at least in its death throes.” Pettiness, a clinging to possessions, stalwart egotism, “perpetual fear and feeble hopes,” the “whole gamut of wretchedness that characterizes the bourgeois and philistines” had “vanished into thin air.” As a result of the bombing raids, Germans were on the “verge of becoming a real Volksgemeinschaft.”

Hitler and Goebbels embraced and promoted the dream of the “community of the German people:” all Germans united as one to constitute a single body. In Hitler’s Germany, there would be no such thing as separateness or individuality. Hitler implored his people to grow nearer and closer to one another. The German people, Hitler declared, had to be thrown into “the great melting pot, the nation” in order to be “purified and welded one to another.” In the firebombing of Dresden and other German cities, the Nazi fantasy of melting people together reached its climax or fulfillment.

The goal of Nazism from the beginning was not conquest, but collective sacrifice or suicide in the name of national unity. Hitler and Goebbels worked fanatically to achieve this goal and were successful. Beneath the sound and fury of violence lurked the dream of national self-destruction. Compared to the Nazis, suicide bombers are pikers.

With regards,
Richard Koenigsberg