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In Mein Kampf, Hitler posed the question, “Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same law as all other human organisms?” What was the law to which Hitler referred? It was the law of the immune system.
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The German Organism
At the core of Nazism was Hitler’s fantasy of the German nation—as an organism: “My Movement,” Hitler said, “encompasses every aspect of the entire Volk. It conceives of Germany as a corporate body, as a single organism.” It followed that there could be no such thing as “non-responsibility in this organic being,” not a single cell that was not responsible “for the welfare and well-being of the whole.”
Totalitarianism grew out of this fantasy of Germany as an actual body. If the nation were a single organism, then human beings were cells of this organism, and thus there could be no such thing as a separate individual. Each and every person—as a cell—was bound to the German organism. Each German human being had no alternative but to behave according to the requirements of the entire organism.
The Nation Possesses an Immune System
An early advocate of state euthanasia, Alfred Hoche, claimed that the state was a “whole with its own laws, much like one self-contained human organism which, in the interests of the whole—as we doctors know—abandons and rejects particles that have become worthless or useless.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler posed the question, “Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same law as all other human organisms?” What was the law to which Hitler referred?
This was the law of the immune system. David Wilson (1971) observes that the only way an animal body can cope with the enormous range of disease organisms threatening it is by some mechanism that “recognizes what is ‘self’ and rejects everything else as ‘not self’.” Physician Ronald Glasser (2012) explains that the theory of immunology depends on the “ability of one cell to recognize a cell unlike itself.” Recognition precedes destruction. Once a cell has been identified as foreign, different, or not-self, the attack upon this cell begins.
Nazi genocide grew out of the fantasy that Germany was an organism possessing an immune system. This organism—like any other organism—would proceed naturally to destroy foreign cells. Jews were identified by Hitler as the not-self cells within Germany—bacteria or viruses, cause of the nation’s suffering—that had to be eliminated from within the body politic if Germany was to survive.
The Final Solution: Destroying Jewish Bacteria
Himmler stated that “alien bloodlines” had merged into the German people. Yet Germans had the strength to sift out and cast aside what “did not belong to us.” In a speech before the Reichstag on January 30, 1937, Hitler explained that his anti-Jewish policy was designed to make the German people “immune against this infection.” Germans had to avoid contact with the “carriers of this poisonous bacillus.”
Robert Lifton (1986) shows how Nazi doctors grasped and embraced this idea of Germany as a body with an immune system. Dr. Rudolph Ramm explained to Lifton that physicians in Nazi Germany were to be concerned “with the health of the Volk even more than with individual disease.” The health of the Volk depended on identifying and destroying pathogenic cells. National Socialism was “nothing but applied biology.”
In his 1935-6 booklet on the SS as an anti-Bolshevik battle organization, Himmler stated that the life and death struggle between Jews and other peoples was part of the “natural course of life on our planet.” The struggle of Jews against nations was a law of nature, similar to the struggle of “the plague bacillus against the healthy body.”
Just as Jews—by their very parasitic nature—attached themselves to organisms, so it was natural that Germans would fight to destroy Jews. A pamphlet issued by Alfred Rosenberg in 1941 compared the state to a “body that can be invaded by parasites, such as bacteria.” These bacteria can “live in a body, multiply, and secrete their poison.” A nation or body thus afflicted must “defeat the bacteria which have penetrated it;” otherwise they will be defeated by them.
With regard to processes of this kind, the pamphlet says, "Humanitarian principles cannot be taken into consideration at all." Humanitarian measures do not apply when one is in the process of "disinfecting a body or a contaminated room." In such cases, it is necessary to clear a path for a "completely novel way of thinking." Only such thinking could lead to "the final decision” which must be made in our time so as to “safeguard the existence of the great creative race."
The “final decision” was the “Final Solution”—a “completely novel way of thinking.” Genocide grew out of the fantasy of Germany as an actual body containing Jewish bacteria that had to be destroyed if the nation was to survive. Jews were identified as foreign cells—alien to the German self—generating an immune response.
Hitler as Robert Koch
Goebbels noted in a diary entry on March 27, 1942—as the Final Solution was underway—that the procedure was “pretty barbaric. Not much would remain of the Jews.” Such actions, nonetheless, were unavoidable—given the reality of the “life and death struggle” that was being waged between the “Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.” In his speech to SS leaders in 1943, Himmler claimed that Germany had the moral right—the “duty toward our people” to “destroy this people that wanted to destroy us.” We do not want to be “infected by this bacillus and to die.”
Germans often called Hitler the “Doctor of the German people.” On July 19, 1941, he declared:
I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and fermenting agent of all social decomposition.
On February 22, 1942, Hitler reiterated his mission:
This is one of the greatest revolutions there has ever been in the world. The Jew will be identified! The same fight that Pasteur and Koch had to fight must be led by us today. Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one bacillus: the Jew! We will get well when we eliminate the Jew.
“We Have Lanced the Jewish Abscess”
The Final Solution grew out of the idea of Germany as an actual body containing Jewish bacteria—conceived as the source of Germany’s disease. Genocide represented a desperate, hysterical, manic struggle to destroy Jews—in order to save the life of the nation.
As the war wound down—with Germany defeated—Hitler dictated his “Testament” to Martin Bormann (published,1961, as The Testament Of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945. In spite of everything, Hitler embraced and reaffirmed the mission that had driven and guided him from the beginning of his political career, reflecting upon what he had “achieved.”
He asked the German people to respect the racial laws that the Nazis had laid down. In a world becoming “more and more perverted through the Jewish virus,” a people that remained “immune to the virus” must “in the long run remain supreme.” Though the war was lost, National Socialism justly could claim the “eternal gratitude of the people” for having “eliminated the Jew from Germany and Central Europe.” Hitler remained unrepentant: “We have lanced the Jewish abscess; and the world of the future will be eternally grateful to us.”
Bibliography
Glasser, R. (1976). The body is the hero. New York: Random House.
Hitler, Adolf. & Stevens, R. H. & Bormann, Martin. & Genoud, Francoise. (1961). The testament of Adolf Hitler : the Hitler-Bormann documents, February-April 1945. London: Cassell
Lifton, Robert J. (1986). The Nazi doctors : medical killing and the psychology of genocide. New York: Basic Books.
Wilson, D. (1972). The science of self: a report of the new immunology. London: Longman.
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