Praise “The best critical analysis in English of Hitler's thought.” —Colin Day “Such a great book. Incredibly precise—so challenging. Reminds one of Einstein.” —Konnilyn Feig, author of Hitler’s Death Camps Hitler's Ideology is available now at a very special price. If you are researching Hitler, Nazism, the Holocaust or totalitarianism, you can't afford to miss this essential book: Please click here for information on ordering at the very special price of $7.98 (listed on Amazon at $25). “Presents an ingenious technique for identifying the psychological origins of political and social events.” —The Village Voice “An instant classic…Koenigsberg's genius has unlocked the secrets of a timeless drama.” —Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology • Presents the technique of “analysis of metaphor.” • Articulates the biological fantasy that led to the Holocaust. • A “dictionary” of Hitler’s ideas: used by scholars around the world. Hannah Arendt said, “Anti-Semitism explains everything, and therefore nothing.” Hitler’s Ideology interrogates the psychological meaning of anti-Semitism. Hitler’s Ideology presents in tabular form the central images, metaphors and themes in Hitler’s writings and speeches. • The Country as a Living Organism • Disintegration of the National Body • The National Body is Diseased • Germany is Rescued from Death • Sexual Threats • Purity • German weakness • War as a Struggle for the Nation’s Existence • “Protecting the Rear” • The Psychological Structure of the Nationalist Ideology Please see directly below for a complete list of the Tables in Hitler’s Ideology

Hitler’s view of the “Aryan” was not what many people imagine. What was “most strongly developed in the Aryan,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, was his willingness to sacrifice himself for the community: to “give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s life for others.”

The Aryan was “not greatest in his mental qualities,” but in the extent of his willingness to “put all his abilities in the service of the community.” The Aryan “willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.” The “superiority” of the Aryan race grew out of the capacity of the Aryan to sacrifice his own life for the sake of the community.

The idea that one should sacrifice one’s own life for the sake of one’s community or nation was the bedrock of Nazi ideology: the anlage out of which everything else grew. Nazism meant absolute devotion to Germany: willingness to die for one’s country. Hitler’s “will” revolved around actualizing this ideology—bringing it into being.

Nationalism, Hitler believed, meant acting with a “boundless and all-embracing love for the people,” and, if necessary, dying for it. A man proves his love for his people “solely by the sacrifices he is prepared to make for it.” Giving one’s life for the community constituted the “crown of sacrifice.”

Military service meant consciousness of the duty to fight for the existence of the German people by “sacrificing the life of the individual, always and forever, at all times and all places.” To be a Nazi, in short, was to be endlessly, eternally willing to die for Germany.

Hitler was deeply disturbed by Germany’s loss of the First World War (or, rather, by her surrender). On the other hand, he idealized the death of the German soldier in battle. The young regiments went to death in Flanders, Hitler wrote, crying Deutschland ueber Alles in der Welt (Germany above everything in the world). With “fatherland love in our heart and songs on our lips,” Hitler’s regiment had “gone into battle as to a dance.”

More than once, Hitler said, thousands of young Germans had stepped forward to “sacrifice their young lives freely and joyfully on the altar of the beloved fatherland.” Having died in battle, the best comrades—“still almost children”—slumbered in the sacred ground having “run to their death with gleaming eyes for the one true fatherland.”

Nazism was an ideology of sacrificial death. To be a Nazi was to be willing “to die for Germany” (the title of a book by Jay Baird). “Obedience to authority” does not convey the meaning of Nazism. Rather, the willingness to submit and to sacrifice one’s life grew out of faith: love for one’s country and loyalty to Adolf Hitler, who was conceived as the perfect embodiment of Germany.

When a boy entered the Hitler Youth at age 10, he swore to devote all his energies and strength to Adolf Hitler, vowing that he was “willing and ready to give up my life for him.” The Wehrmacht soldier swore by a sacred oath that he would render “unconditional obedience” to Hitler, willing at all times to “give my life for this oath.” And the SS-man famously vowed “obedience unto death.”

Nazism was a cult of sacrificial death. Willingness to die for Germany constituted the core of Nazi ideology. “Obedience unto death” was the fount of morality: a vow to surrender one’s life when Adolf Hitler asked one to.

Hitler explained to his people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Nazism was the will to nothingness: negation of the self in the name of glorifying one’s nation. Sacrificial death was the highest ideal. Dying for Germany was the summum bonum: the end in itself (at the same time containing all other goods).

Warfare constituted a vast arena giving Germany the opportunity to sacrifice young men. When the war against Russia began, German General Gerd von Rundstedt admonished the soldier of the Second World War to emulate his brothers of the First World War and to “die in the same way”: strong, unswerving and obedient, going “happily and as a matter of course to his death” (cited in Baird, 1975). Goebbels was satisfied that German soldiers went into battle “with devotion, like congregations going into service.”

As he required that his own people die for Germany, so other nations were sucked into Hitler’s orgy of world-destruction. World War II embodied Hitler’s Wagnerian dream of a “world in flames”: a massive, monumental drama played out on the stage of “history.”