Hitler's ideology was a radical form of nationalism—revolving around the fantasy of the German body politic in a state of disintegration. Insofar as Hitler identified profoundly with his nation, he experienced Germany's disintegration as the disintegration of himself. Hitler was unable to separate political ideas from his inner state of being. He articulated inner states of being through his ideology.

What is this ideology of nationalism, still so powerful that we barely recognize it as or call it an ideology? The song, America the Beautiful: "Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesty above the fruited plain!"

Nationalism revolves around the quest for narcissistic omnipotence. The ego of the nationalist seeks to expand by imagining that it is fused with a vast geographical territory; the entire "space" of national life.

The ideology of nationalism suggests that the entirety of one's country—it's history, people and accomplishments—exist within the self. Nationalism implies the absence of a boundary between self and country. According to this ideology, self and nation are inextricably bound. To be a "man without a country" seems inconceivable.

However, if the ego's wish for narcissistic expansion is projected into the idea of one's nation, so is the ego's vulnerability and tendency toward fragmentation. Hitler externalized anxiety into the idea of Germany and believed his nation was in danger of disintegrating. He experienced the idea of death (his own death) as a perception that Germany—the body politic with which he identified his own body—was falling apart.

Language shapes the mind and structures thought, but also constitutes a vehicle for externalizing mind and thought. Each of us possesses a force of disintegration operating within our mind/body. Each of us is in the process of moving toward our demise. Hitler experienced and articulated the idea of death in the form of a belief that his nation was disintegrating. The Nazi project was to defeat Germany's force of disintegration: to overcome death by creating a body politic that could live forever.

One of the ways human beings deal with the issue of mortality is through the creation of nations or "omnipotent bodies politic:" entities that seem to exist in a dimension separate from organic existence. We project the idea of our small, frail bodies into the idea of these imaginary, omnipotent bodies, then imagine that we will "live on" as if contained within these immortal bodies.

Hitler’s ideology revolved around the denial of death, suggesting that the bodies of individual Germans could fuse into one to create a single, immortal body. In Hitler's fantasy, the German people were united (massed together as cells of an organism) to create one, indestructible body that could live forever. In this typical nationalist fantasy, the country or body politic is imagined as an entity that exists above and beyond the lives or bodies of individuals.

In spite of his effort to embrace Germany as "vesture for the eternal" (Fichte), Hitler's sense of the reality of death continued to return in the form of a perception that the national body was in the process of disintegrating or decomposing. Hitler projected the idea of death into the idea of the Jew. The German body politic could become immortal if it were not for the Jewish principle of death operating within it.

The purpose of Nazi ideology was to split off the idea of death and to locate it in a symbolic representation, the Jew. Hitler and the Nazis then committed themselves to a struggle against death. This struggle against death took the form of an effort to "kill off" the symbolic object into which the idea of death had been projected. If only the Jew could be eliminated, then Germany would live forever.

The Holocaust was a struggle to defeat death. The idea that bodies become diseased and die was projected into the Jew. Hitler then committed himself to a monumental (futile) "struggle" (Mein Kampf) that took the form of attempting to "kill off" death. Hitler aspired to destroy that symbolic entity (the Jew) into which the idea of death had been projected.