This paper builds upon a unique method for uncovering the sources of ideology: examining images and metaphors contained within political rhetoric and texts--to reveal an ideology's latent meaning.

Focusing upon specific words, phrases, images and metaphors bound to the central terms of Nazi ideology, Koenigsberg discovers that Hitler's ideology revolved around the metaphor of the German nation as an actual body or "living organism." The Jew was identified as a force within this body working toward its destruction.

In his writings and speeches, Hitler continually referred to the Jew as a force of disintegration or decomposition; as the cause of Germany's disease (a bacteria or virus); and as a "parasite on the body of the people." The nature of these recurring images and metaphors constitute data revealing the fantasies contained within Nazi ideology.

This method grows out of the Freudian assumption that behavior expresses psychic meaning. The words, phrases, images and metaphors that appear in the writings and speeches of Nazi leaders do not occur by chance. Rather, these symbolic constructions express ideas, desires and fantasies that were present in the minds of Hitler and other Nazis. Koenigsberg theorizes that ideology is a social construction brought into being in order to express or articulate dimensions of the psyche: ideologies allow shared fantasies to make their way onto the stage of social reality.

This idea of the nation as a gigantic organism—with each individual constituting a cell—lay at the heart of Nazi totalitarianism. For if the nation is a single organism and each individual a cell, then no individual can escape this organism; each individual is responsible for the health of the organism; and the health of each individual (or cell) impacts upon the health of the entire organism.

The fantasy of Jews as bacteria or virus generated the Final Solution, whose purpose was to destroy these pathogenic cells, and thus to save the life of Germany. Hitler identified the Jew as the source of Germany's disease, a pathogen whose continuing presence within the nation would lead to its demise.

The Final Solution followed as a consequence of this perception of reality contained within Nazi ideology. Jews were depicted as bacteria or virus, source of a "disease within the body politic" that needed to be cured if the nation was to survive. Hitler was "Doctor of the people" who diagnosed Germany's disease, and prescribed the cure. The cure that Hitler prescribed and carried out was destruction of the Jewish bacteria – the genocide.