One of the weaker perspectives on Nazi Germany is the idea of the “banality” of obedience to authority. There is nothing banal about willingness to abandon one’s  will--give over one’s mind and body—to an other. 

The willingness to be a slave to society was the illness or disease from which the Nazi suffered. Ordinarily, we condemn slavery. However, we look at obedience to one’s own nation—absolute submission—differently. We call it devotion. Devotion to one’s own nation—to the point of becoming obedient unto death—is considered honorable and noble.
 
The Jew was imagined by Hitler as a group of people insufficiently devoted to Germany. The Jew symbolized skepticism toward the sacrifices made by German soldiers during the First World War. The Jew represented Hitler’s own doubt—his realization that the death of two-million German soldiers had been in vain.

The Jew was the voice within Hitler telling him that the soldiers had been sent to die by Germany for no purpose or reason; that they had gone “like sheep to the slaughter.” The Holocaust was a repetition of the First World War: Jews too would be compelled to suffer a meaningless death.

The dead Jew in the gas chamber replicated the experience of the dead German soldier in the trench: do unto others as has been done unto you.

The Jew symbolized a human being external to the marching columns: not part of the German body. The Jew represented the idea of a someone who did not wish to be connected (an “incurable” who did not understand the “happiness of belonging to a great community."

The Jew symbolized the separate individual (the greatest “crime” in Nazi Germany): someone who wished to go his own way and do his own thing. The idea of the Jew shattered the idea of oneness between self and nation. The Jew destroyed the dream of the nation as an omnipotent object that contained and controlled everything.

Hitler’s hysteria revolved around his refusal to abandon the object to which he had devoted his existence. “Heil Hitler” was violent affirmation of devotion. There is violence in devotion because contained within hysterical affirmation is a struggle against the desire to abandon devotion: to separate from the sacred object. The affirmation of obedience (unto death) meant killing off the wish or will toward separateness, separation and freedom.

The will to separation and freedom was projected into the Jew. Why should everyone in Germany be compelled to submit--when the Jew remains a free-floating individual? Genocide is killing the desire for freedom and separation: killing a class of people into which this desire has been projected.

By killing Jews, Hitler was killing off his own wish for freedom and separateness: hysterically affirming “love” for Germany.

Hitler’s grandiose fantasy was that each and every German body was a cell in an enormous body politic. The Jew symbolized a cell that could not fuse with the body politic—a recalcitrant cell wishing to “go its own way;” refusal to conform to the requirements of the body politic (like a cancer cell that goes its own way).

The Jews were conceived as bacteria or parasites, cells that lived within the body politic but did not contribute to the well-being of this body, indeed whose continued presence within this body would lead to its destruction.

The Nazi sickness was obedience to his nation. The Nazi was crippled, paralyzed, dominated by his obsessive “love.” Excessive attachment was the disease. The devoted Nazi was symbiotic, codependent, addicted to his nation. Nazism was hypertrophy of the normal: nationalism or “love of country” carried to the nth degree and to a fantastic, bizarre conclusion. Killing in the name of “love of country.” 

The message of Nazism was that each and every human being was required to participate in and contribute to the life of the nation. No one was allowed to be separate. Totalitarianism was fanatic devotion. National life encompassed existence. Nazism meant denial that it was possible to separate from the community. 

The Jew symbolized precisely the idea of separation: the idea of a domain of existence or reality that was not encompassed by national life. The Jew represented the desire to disengage or withdraw from society; to live for oneself and not for one’s nation. 

The death camps demonstrated that  no one could escape the power of the nation-state; evade its reach. Genocide affirmed that the nation-state embraces and controls all of human existence. The Final Solution depicted the fate of those who believe one can live outside of national life. Killing Jews meant that those who thought that they could live apart from the community, evade the sacrificial obligation, would die.

Hitler is telling the world that the nation-state is an absolute from which no one can separate. The idea of individual existence, life outside the community, will be punished with destruction. Everyone must bow down. No one can escape the sacrificial responsibility. If you attempt to separate from mother, she will kill you. If you try to evade the nation, you will die. The nation is an omnipotent body to which all other bodies must submit. 

The Nazi loves his volk: is obedient and willing to die for it. The Jewish criminal is crucified as someone unwilling to embrace the absolute ideal: sacrificing one’s life for Germany.

The Jew is conceived as a certain kind of human being that thinks he can evade or ignore the responsibility to be devoted, and to submit. He does not love mother enough. He’s not a devoted son (willing to sacrifice his life when asked to do so); he is unwilling to submit. He does not worship the sacred object. Hitler cannot bear the idea of someone outside the orbit of the nation. 

The purpose of the death camps is to teach Jews a lesson; show that evasion of Germany is impossible. Everyone must submit: no one can escape the will of Hitler. The Final Solution demonstrated the power of the nation-state: one’s country encompasses, embraces, and pervades all of existence. No one can escape. The nation is everywhere and everything. Only mother exists. One exists only as a part of mother: Death to the non-believers. 

Where the soldier is a “voluntary” sacrifice, the Jew would be compelled to become an involuntary sacrifice. In each case, whether in war or the Holocaust, it is a question of a human being dying when the nation state requires that he (or she) do so. Jews symbolized rebellion against the obligation to submit. The Nazis turn Jews into an example of what happens when one tries to rebel against the obligation to submit.

Hitler's ideology, Nazi ideology, in a nutshell: "If you will not die for Germany, we will kill you."

As the Second World War progressed, Goebbels stated that German soldiers “go into a battle like a congregation going into a service.” Jews too, like German soldiers, would be sent “like sheep to the soldier.” Jews symbolized German soldiers in the First World War, sent by the leadership in vast numbers to a brutal, horrible death. We say that the death of the soldier is beautiful. The purpose of Hitler and the Holocaust was to demonstrate that dying for the nation-state is not beautiful.