The Holocaust often has been called "incomprehensible." This fantastic episode of human history, however, grew out of a very conventional ideology: that of nationalism--carried to the nth power. Building on this ordinary ideology, Hitler took it to an extreme, bizarre conclusion: reductio ad absurdum. 

Hitler preached to his people:

Your life is bound up with the life of your whole people. The nation is not merely the root of your strength; it is the root of your very life.

He asked Germans to acknowledge their profound dependence on Germany:

Our Nation is not just an idea in which you have no part; you yourself support the nation; to it you belong; you cannot separate yourself from it.

Hitler explained: "You are nothing, your nation is everything."

Each German was a singular human being--“nothing.” On the other hand, each human being who fused his or her being with Germany became “everything.” To become everything, one had to become nothing. Achieving a sense of omnipotence required absolute self-negation.

Nazism simultaneously was an orgy of self-glorification, and self-abnegation. What was glorified was the collective: the Volk. What was abnegated was the human being, who traded in his or her individuality to become "at one" with the German nation.

Rudolf Hess often introduced his Fuehrer at mass-rallies, declaring, "Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler." The core of Nazism was the mystical sense of "oneness" between Hitler and Germany. Hitler equated his being with the German nation. Lifting himself out of nothingness, he became everything.

Nazism did not differ from ordinary nationalism--that posits an intimate tie between the life of the individual and national life. What Hitler did was to carry this conventional ideology to an extreme, bizarre conclusion, revealing the heart of darkness contained within "love of country." 

Hitler's ideology built on the idea of Germany as a real body politic. "Our movement alone," Hitler declared, "was capable of creating a national organism." In place of the State must be set "the living organism—the people." For Hitler, Germany was an enormous body. His objective as leader was to bring the German people--as cells of this body--into a state of absolute oneness. 

It followed that the purpose of politics was to preserve the body politic. Hitler did not subscribe to the theory that nations are "imagined communities." He believed they were real, concrete things. He spoke of the "substance" of the German people, insisting it was necessary to "maintain the substance of the people"--in bodily and mental health, in good order and purity." The supreme test of every politic institution was: "Does this institution serve to preserve (the substance of) the people or not."

Germany, however, was beset by a profound problem. An otherwise sound and healthy body politic was being assaulted by forces threatening to bring about the demise of Germany. National Socialism was Hitler's response to this perception. He mobilized the German people to "save the nation." Hitler said he was determined to "prevent our Germany from suffering, as Another did, the death upon the cross."

Throughout his political career, Hitler was tormented by his conviction that an unprecedented force was working toward the destruction, not only of Germany, but of Western civilization. Hitler declared that it was only rarely that the life of peoples "suffers from such convulsions that the deepest foundations of the edifice of social order are shaken" and threatened with destruction.

Hitler experienced the assault upon Germany as a profound, cosmic threat:

Who will refuse to see or even deny that today we find ourselves in the midst of a struggle that is not concerned merely with the problems of frontiers between peoples or States, but rather with the question of the maintenance or annihilation of the whole inherited human order of society and its civilizations?

Jews, Hitler claimed, were working to bring about the "political disintegration of the body of a people." 

Given the possibility that Germany would disintegrate--fall to pieces--Nazism's central mission was to unite or unify the German people: bind them together into a single, indestructible body.

To solve the problems of Germany, Hitler said, it was essential to bring the people together so that "millions of individuals could be fused into a unity." Hitler would act to bring about the "inner welding together of the body of our people." Hitler's image of "the melting pot" was not simply a metaphor. He insisted that men throw themselves into the "great melting pot, the nation" so that they could be "welded one to another."

Nazi ideology was nationalism carried to a bizarre conclusion. Nazism grew out of a systematic fantasy projected into reality. This fantasy revolved around the idea of Germany as an actual body (politic). As a corollary to the fantasy of Germany as a body--was the fantasy that the nation was suffering from a potentially fatal disease.

Nazism was the struggle to come to terms with this potentially fatal disease contained within the body politic. Hitler imagined that the continued presence of bacteria, viruses and parasites within Germany would lead to the nation's demise. If these pathogenic organisms were not removed, Germany would succumb to a disease, and pass away.

The death camps enacted the fantasy of destroying Jewish bacteria, viruses and parasites. This institution--created by the Nazis--represents an excellent example of the "social construction of reality." But the institution was not constructed randomly. It represented a response to the fantasy that the German nation was beset with a disease that might prove fatal. The Final Solution was a desperate, hysterical, manic project: to destroy the source or cause of death--so that Germany might live.