People say we shouldn’t mix church and state. But church and state already are mixed. The nation is the church. Nationalism is a profound, powerful religion. We don’t conceive nationalism as a religion because it is so pervasive and dominant.

One could go on a radio show and debate the existence of God. But if one sought to debate the existence one's nation, one might be considered psychotic. On this radio show, one could say that one didn’t believe in the efficacy of prayer. But if one declared that one didn’t vote or found it arduous to say the Pledge of Allegiance or preferred not to stand during the Star-Spangled Banner at baseball games—one might be denounced.

This isn’t a question of belief or disbelief. Because we are  deeply embedded within the fabric of “national life,” we rarely turn the idea of the nation into a problematic. Hitler implored the German people to embrace 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; your life is bound up with the life of your own people.”

Hitler put forth “Germany” as the basis for a national religion, declaring Deutschland über Alles (Germany above all) is a “profession of faith which is mightier than any earthly might.” He said, “You cannot be unfaithful to something that has given sense and meaning to your whole existence,” and proclaimed, “We want to have no other God, only Germany.” Nazism grew out of profound identification with the German nation. How did identification with Germany generate mass-murder?

NATIONALISM AS RELOCATION OF THE SELF

Nationalism involves relocation of the self. A nation is a double of the self. As I’m sitting here writing, occasionally I imagine that I’m connected to something “out there.” This something out there is my nation with its national life, e.g., “Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.” When one projects oneself into this entity—one’s nation—one imagines that one is larger and stronger.

My body becomes frailer as I grow older. But my nation—the body politic—maintains its power and seems to have the capacity to live on. By identifying with my nation, I overcome my frailty. Through identifying with one’s nation, one’s self and body expand. Nations embody the fantasy of an omnipotent, immortal self.

For the Nazis, human energies were directed toward glorifying and perpetuating the national body. The German body politic became a substitute for one’s actual body: “Even though we die, Germany must live.” Hitler devoted his existence to the idea of an immortal German nation. Here, the idea of sacrifice enters the picture. Sacrifice means renouncing one’s own life and desires in the name of the life and “desires” of one’s nation.

NATIONAL UNITY

Nazism and nationalism mean not only that the individual should identify with his or her own country, but that each individual should identify with every other citizen—and with the national leader. This fantasy of national unity is the dream that each and every individual should become fused with his or her nation, with each other and with the leader (who “represents” the nation). Under conditions of extreme nationalism (totalitarianism), the nation becomes an “omnipotent system”: Many fused to create a single, unified body (politic).

The mass rallies at Nuremberg convey the essence and apotheosis of Nazism. With tens of thousands of Germans gathered together, Hitler spoke at one of these rallies:

One day you all come into this city, leaving your small villages. You come from the small world that surrounds your daily fight for existence that you may, once in a while, gain the feeling that now we are together; we are with him and he with us, and we are now German! If a people is rent asunder, split up in classes, then it is essential that they should come to stand together and form one column on the march.

Then drum will join drum, flag will join flag, and at last the united nation will follow the might column. The people which once was torn asunder, it will then in these columns see its leadership, then it will render to this leadership its obedience.

Hitler was never more excited than when he was at Nuremberg. These rallies represented actualization and fulfillment of his fantasy of “national unity.”

Observing soldiers standing and marching in unison, Hitler could see the nation with his own eyes. Germany was no longer an abstraction. The German people had fused into a single, omnipotent body, controlled by his will. At these moments, speaking to his youth, he could say, “You are flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood. You are all one, belonging to me.” At the Nuremberg rallies, the German people came together to create a single, omnipotent organism. Many bodies fused to created one, gigantic body, with Hitler its head.

Insofar as Hitler imagined that he, the German people and the German nation were bound together and perfectly united, he believed that he was the most democratic of leaders. After having assumed absolute power, Hitler said that when he spoke

Now it is no longer a Führer or a man speaking: now the German Volk is speaking. If I am now the speaker of this German Volk, then I know: At this moment the entire Volk of millions agrees word for word with my word.

Hitler believed that when he spoke, the German people were speaking through him; that he embodied the desires and will of his people: “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.”

JEWS AS NATIONAL DISINTEGRATION

The other side of the coin of national unity is disunity or fragmentation—“disintegration” as Hitler called it. Disintegration refers to loss of the sense of unity. The fantasy of perfect oneness dissolves: people become separated from their country, from one another and from the leader.

The violence of Nazism grew out of fear that the fantasy or experience of oneness might dissolve. The Nazi movement represented rage against separateness or separation. Hitler’s hysteria was a response to his feeling that Germany was falling apart. 

Hitler felt he had created a perfect national community and brought into being an “eternal national ideal” that subordinated the interests of the individual to the interest of society. Hitler ecstatically affirmed the joy derived from “belonging to this great, inspiring community.” Nevertheless—in spite of his success—Hitler was filled with anxiety. He sensed the presence of “incurables” who had not embraced the glorious dream of national unity.

Incurables were those diseased beings that—Hitler imagined—would not or could not embrace his fantasy of national unity. Violence spiraled as a response to his rage against the idea that anyone could be separate from the perfectly united community. Separateness could come into being as a result of: individualism, which signified that one refused to abandon one’s own will in order to submit to the national will; or communism, that acted to draw one away from one’s nation by tempting one to identify with people from other nations.

REFUSAL TO SEPARATE

Nazism represented overidentification with and refusal to separate from one’s country. Hitler could not bring himself to contemplate his own desire to separate from Germany: to abandon that idea or entity to which he had sacrificed his existence. It was onto the Jew that Hitler projected the desire for separation. “The Jew” symbolized all of the forces (individualism, capitalism, communism, etc.) that seemed to work in opposition to the dream of national unity.

Jews symbolized separation, but this doesn’t mean that they themselves wanted to be separate. Jews in Germany would have joined the Nazi party had they been allowed to. Whatever Hitler may have believed, Jewish German soldiers fought and died in the First World War in the same proportion as non-Jewish German soldiers.

Nevertheless, Jews became a symbol of disloyalty, doubt and lack of faith in Germany. Jews represented disbelief in the idea of national unity. This is why they were conceived as a “force of disintegration.” Jews were the voice withinin Hitler telling him that his dream of national omnipotence was a delusion. The Final Solution was undertaken to kill off the voice of skepticism and doubt.

The German nation for Hitler symbolized perfect goodness. Germany and its leaders sent millions of men to be slaughtered in the First World War. Hitler fought in this war and saw hundreds of his comrades blown to bits. He knew that 2 million German soldiers had been killed and millions more wounded. In spite of what he had witnessed and knew, Hitler refused to condemn his nation. In Mein Kampf, Hitler said it would have been a “sin to complain,” because after all were the young men not “dying for Germany?”

Isn’t it strange how we continue to love and embrace countries in light of the monumental destruction they have wrought? Why do we wish to believe that our nations—these murderous entities—are the supreme embodiment of goodness?