Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms?

What was the “law” to which Hitler referred? He was pointing to the biological mechanism of the immune system, which recognizes what is “self,” and rejects anything identified as “not self.”

Jews were identified as “not self” cells within the German body politic. It was necessary, therefore, that they be destroyed or eliminated—just as any other organism rejects not-self cells.

The Holocaust was generated based on this fantasy of the German nation as a body with an immune system. How astonishing that Hitler and the Nazis could have conceived this idea and enacted it in reality.

The metaphor of Germany as a body with an immune system appeared regularly in the rhetoric of leading Nazis thinkers. Alfred Rosenberg stated that the spirit of the German race needed to “assimilate everything racially and spiritually akin” and to “eliminate and suppress everything foreign.”

Heinrich Himmler declared that “alien blood lines had merged into the German people.” Yet again and again, Himmler said, the German people had gathered their strengthto “sift out and cast aside what did not belong to us.”

In a lecture on June 20, 1939, Professor Fischer Rector of the University of Berlin, said the following:

When a people wants to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien elements, and when these have already insinuated themselves, it must suppress them and eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defense. I reject Jewry with every means in my power.

According to Robert Lifton (1988), an influential manual by Rudolf Ramm of the medical faculty of the University of Berlin proposed that each doctor was no longer to be merely caretaker of the sick, but was to become a "physician to the Volk" and a "biological soldier." Dr. Johann S. spoke to Lifton with pride about the principle of being "doctor to the Volkskorper ('national body' or 'people's body')."

Ramm's manual specified that doctors were to be "alert biological soldiers" living under "the great idea of the National Socialist biological state structure." It claimed that "National Socialism is in accord with the biology of man."

Physicians, Lifton says, could thrill to this message. Dr. S., for instance, described joining the Party immediately after hearing Deputy Party Leader Rudolf Hess say, at a mass meeting in 1934, that National Socialism is "nothing but applied biology."

This idea gave rise to the Final Solution. Genocide was conceived as the application of biological laws to Germany--the national body. Genocide was killing Jewish bacteria in order to "save the country."

The thrilling message of Nazism was that Germany was a real body. Nazi doctors constituted the immune system of the national organism. Their task was to identify non-functioning, foreign or destructive cells dangerous to Germany's health--and to act to destroy them.