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The term obedience unto is death is what Hitler and the Nazis required of his SS-men. The Holocaust victim too was required to become obedience unto death. The Jew had to become a slave, as even more abject than the SS-man was.
If soldiers can be killed in the name of the state, are obligated to die when the state acts them to do so, why should Jews be exempt from this obligation? This was Hitler's fundamental though: his primal thought: the source of the Holocaust. Jews were compelled to enact the stance of the SS-man: obedience unto death.
German soldiers were compelled to "die for their country;" for Germany. Now Jews too would be compelled to die at the hands of the German nation-state. As Germans were killed by poison gas attacks in the First World War, so Jews would be killed by poison gas. Jews in the death camps enacted the experience of German soldiers in the First World War. Hitler’s revenge: do unto other as has been done unto you.
A slave is forced to obey and to submit absolutely. The soldier's fate was worse than that of a slave. He was forced when asked to do this. And of this in the name of “love of country, honor and glory. Human beings are enthralled by the "nobility of the cause." They fail to notice—don’t wish to become aware of— the abject posture of the soldier.
The Jew in the death camps revealed what happened to the soldier in the First World War: Death and degradation, submission to the German nation-state. But without "honor" and glory. The degradation of the Jew in the death camps reveals the other side of the coin of the SS-man’s submission to the state; what the he could not see in himself: his own slave-like condition.
Jews did what German soldiers did: died when Germany asked them to do so. The loyal soldiers of the Second World War would go, as German General von
Rundstedt put it, "happily and as a matter of course to their deaths." Goebbels said that German soldiers would "go into battle with devotion like congregations going to a religious service."
German soldiers in the First World War were suckers: Transported in trains to the Western front, singing songs of patriotic glory. Then massacred by machine-gun fire. The soldiers imagined they were entering into something glorious, a "great adventurous." They ended up being slaughtered: a betrayal.
But Hitler could not bear to say that he had been betrayed by his leaders. He refused to complain. After all, were his comrades not "dying for Germany?” The idea of the German nation justified everything.
German Jews too were transported in trains to the death camps. They could not imagine that their own nation would murder them. This is the lesson of Nazi Germany: nations can be cruel and destructive.
Nations have a right to kill their own soldiers. If Germany had the right to send its own solders to die in battle, would not the German nation also have the right to kill Jews, mortal enemies of the German people? This was Hitler’s thinking, the logic of the Holocaust.
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