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The death camps represented proof of a belief system. The Holocaust was useless from a practicial perspective...nothing to do with economics or personal gain. Hitler wanted to show how deeply the Nazis believed in their ideals; how far they would go to prove their "love" of Germany.
The Nazis were willing to do something massive and monumental--for no reason at all, rather, to prove their devotion to Germany. The Holocaust came into being to make a "statement:" This is what happens to people who are insufficiently devoted to the German nation.
Jews were conceived by Hitler as a people hostile to Germany; as "non-believers" in the greatness of Hitler and the Nazi state. The death camps represented punishmnet of infidels: "death to the nonbeliever."
Through the vehicle of the death camps, the Nazis sought to prove that Jews too must submit to the omnipotent nation-state. The destruction of Jews constitued a demonstration, Hitler declaring, "This is what happens to people who imagine they can escape the grasp of the German nation." The Jew is killed to prove that the power of Germany is absolute and inescapable.
Hitler required blind trust in Germany. During the Second World War, Goebbels declared that German soldiers "go into battle like a congregation going into service." He was gratified by this demonstration of blind trust; the willingness of his soldiers to sacrifice their lives for Germany. Millions of Germans died based on their blind trust in Hitler.
What happened to the German people--in the First World War and again in the Second--demonstrated what happens when a people trust their country and its government too much.
There is a natural tendency for people to believe in the "goodness" of their own society and its leaders. The German people paid a heavy price for their faith: destruction of millions of Germans and of German society itself. The death-camps produce a disillusioning effect: demonstrating that governments may be murderous. Yet people still have "faith" in government.
The nightmare of history is precisely the belief in omnipotence objects such as nations--conceived as superior to existence itself. People are willing to die for these sacred entities.At the core of the narrative of "history" is the story of millions upon millions upon millions of people who died in the name of some sacred ideal. Each society produces massive death as the vehicle for proving the "truth" of a sacred value.
Today, most of my readers are living within a societal nightmare created by its own political leaders. It is nearly impossible to awaken from this dream. One participates in a society by dreaming the same dream with other members of a society. Really, the only way one can wake up...is to separate from the shared dream. However, then you become separated from the others who are dreaming the same dream.
National ideals become sacred when people are willing to die for them. General Douglas Haig of Great Britain--in the battle of the Somme and others--threw young men into the furnace of death...in the name of his belief in his Great Britain. Hitler created his own furnace of death--into which he threw all kinds of people, not just soldiers. These people died "in the name of the Volk."
World politics revolves around competion between sacred objects. The slaughter of human beings is conceived as proper and just because it is undertaken in the name of a sacred object. What is war? The destruction of human bodies in the name of devotion to a sacred ideal conceived as more significant than life itself. Political "history" is the story of slaughter or sacrificial death in the name of sacred ideals." Human existence is sacrificed for the sake of a sacred ideal.
Hitler said: “I propose with icy clarity the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of his continued existence in the visible immortality of the nation.” There it is in a nutshell: everything you need to know. Extreme forms of nationalism declare that the lives of individuals are inconsequential...compared so the significance of maintaining the "immortality" of the nation. Nations produce "endless death" as proof of existence.
The death camps show what it means to turn an individual into “nothing” or nothingness. Entering a camp, a Jewish man asked a Nazi official what would happen to him. He pointed to smoke coming out of a smokestack and said, "You will go out the chimney." TO VAPORIZE A HUMAN BEING; TURN HIM INTO SMOKE. This is what the death camps were all about. To turn an individual into nothing...in order to demonstrate the power of the nation-state.
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