Hitler proclaimed to his youth: “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. You are all one, belonging to me.” This was Hitler's deepest fantasy and most profound desire (see photo of the Nuremberg rally directly below): that each and every German would be united with him--constituting a single, omnipotent body. Hitler imagined that each German human being was bound to his body: their flesh was his flesh.

Hitler's idea was precisely the fantasy conveyed by the famous frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan (see below), which depicts a gigantic man whose torso and arms are composed of tiny individual men crowded closely together. 

Each of these tiny men was bound to the body of the sovereign. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes stated that the way to create a Commonwealth is to “unite the multitude in one and the same person.”

Several observations about this image:

• The Sovereign does not exist without the little men bound to his torso and arms. Without them, he would be an empty shell of a man, a nothing-burger.
   
• Without the Sovereign, the little men could not exist: their very identity derives from the fact that they are bound to the body of the sovereign.
   
• The concept of "obedience to authority" becomes clear through this this image. "Obedience" is not an abstract idea or form of cognition: it is a psychosomatic experience. The image expresses the individual's desire to become at one with the sovereigh: the larger body. This fantasy lies at the core of history. Many human beings have a profound desire to become "at one" with the idea or a larger, omnipotent body--that presumably exists somewhere "out there," up above them.
   
•  If one's own body is part of the body of the sovereign, governed by his brain, then it is not possible to opt out (to separate from the sovereign, or the nation). One exists only as a part of the sovereign's body. Obedience and the inability to separate (from the body of the sovereign) are one and the same. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Richard Koenigsberg

The frontispiece of Leviathan depicts a man whose torso and arms are composed of tiny individual persons crowded closely together.

A massive rally at Nuremberg (1937) composed of thousands of men crowded closely together.