Warfare articulates devotion to the nation: the willingness to sacrifice young men in the name of sacred ideals. This willingness to kill and die for one's nation is viewed as the highest form of virtue. War exists to express this virtue, and the soldier is required to submit absolutely: obedience unto death. Hitler illuminates and reveals this fundamental ideology of the 20th century, the devotion to the nation-state, turning it from the highest virtue into a crime.

Nations are given "the right to kill" because sacrifice for the ideal is considered good. One proves one's love for one's nation by virtue of the sacrifices one is willing to make in its name. People prove their love by virtue of their willingness to die.

According to Nazi ideology, dying for Germany was the highest virtue and the apogee of devotion. The essence of Nazism—Hitler's deepest desire—was that Germans should die for Germany.

Hitler was not content that only soldiers die for Germany, as occurred in the First World War. He insisted that everyone should die for the country: millions of enemy soldiers and civilians, Jews, as well as his own people (both soldiers and civilians). What was unique about Hitler is that he took the political belief that defines the modern world—the idea that nations have the right to kill—and carried it to an absurd, bizarre conclusion. The central dynamic of warfare revolves around the will to kill or to sacrifice one’s life for one’s country.

This is how one proves that one believes in one’s nation and its sacred ideals. Fighting a war (killing others) and sacrificing one’s soldiers constitutes a demonstration of devotion. Jews for Hitler represented a negation of this proposition: they symbolized the idea that it is not sweet and fitting to die for a country—that death in war is meaningless and futile.

The idea that some people were not obliged to sacrifice their lives for Germany enraged Hitler. “Why had my comrades died in the First World War [2 million German soldiers perished]? Why was I blinded in a poison gas attack [Hitler almost died] while people at home were safe and secure?” In the Second World War, everyone—not just the young men—would have to submit to sacrifice. No one would get off scot-free.

If society gives me the right to kill my nation’s most valuable people, Hitler reflected, surely I have the right to kill the least valuable as well. In the Second World War, Jews would not be exempt. They too (like German soldiers) would be required to be obedient unto death. If German soldiers on the Eastern Front were undergoing a horrible ordeal, that suffered by Jews would have to be even more terrible. Jews in the death camps depict and reveal the abjectcondition of the German soldier in war, but where the soldier’s death was conceived as heroic and praiseworthy, no one would characterize the death of a Jew in the camp as such.

Hitler knew the actuality of warfare. He had been there and experienced the horror. But he could not say what he knew. He refused (as we all do) to say that his own country was cruel and evil—and that it had condemned millions of German soldiers to die and be maimed. He refused to abandon his beloved nation.

Rather, Hitler created the death camps in order to portray the ugliness of submission to the nation-state. Jews enacted the fate of a body that has been given over to—taken over by—the nation, depicting death at the hands of the state stripped of words like honor and glory. By subtracting these words, heroic sacrifice become abject, degrading submission.