The following passage (from a Hitler speech) contains the central idea that defined Nazism:

My Movement encompasses every aspect of the entire Volk. It conceives of Germany as a corporate body, as a single organism. There is no such thing as non-responsibility in this organic being, not a single cell which is not responsible, by its very existence, for the welfare and well-being of the whole. Thus in my view there is not the least amount of room for apolitical people.

Nazi political theorist Gottfried Nesse (1935) wrote, similarly, that in contrast to the state, the people form “a true organism—a being that leads its own life and follows its own laws.” The living unity of the people, he said, has “cells in its individual members.” And just as in every body there are cells to perform certain tasks, “this is likewise the case in the body of the people.” The individual is bound to “the people”—physically, mentally and spiritually.

The Nazi dream of "unity" was rooted in a fantasy conceiving of the nation as a gigantic "body politic" consisting of the German people as the flesh and blood or cells of this body. Margaret Mahler defined symbiosis (1969) as the fantasy of "somatopsychic omnipotent fusion:" delusion that two separate organisms are “contained within a common boundary.”

Nazi ideology recreated the delusion of symbiosis in the individual's tie to his nation. Nazism imagined that German bodies were bound to a "national organism," and that separation from this organism was inconceivable. The fantasy of fusion was enacted in mass rallies where tens-of-thousands of bodies massed together to create the illusion of a single body acting in unison.

The Nazi identified his body with the body politic, or more precisely substituted the idea of the nation for his own ego. In substituting the nation for himself, the Nazi negated himself. James Grotstein suggests (1977) that one of the functions of projective identification is to permit the individual to disappear. The Nazi strove to disappear: abandon his own ego by fusing with a collective body.

According to Hitler, what united the German people was good, and what separated Germans from one another was bad. The whole German nation, Hitler declared, must once more be brought to a “unity of spirit and of will.” The pre-condition for relieving the distress in Germany was the “restoration of the consciousness of belonging together.”

In order to bring men gradually nearer to each other, Hitler explained, they had to be thrown into the “great melting pot, the nation”— that they might be “purified and welded one to another.” Organizations promoting disunion or disintegration had to be uprooted and “all those must be ruthlessly eliminated who disturb this community.”

The struggle to achieve unity in the face of forces working toward disunity is a theme appearing repeatedly in Hitler's speeches. What brought the National Socialist Movement into being, Hitler said, was the yearning for a “true community of the German Volk.” Fate had given National Socialism the great task of eliminating the “disunity of the German Volk, the roots of its misfortune.” Yet the Movement could fulfill its one great mission only if it “uncompromisingly exterminates the things which tear our Volk apart.”

It would appear that the quest for absolute good and creation of absolute evil went hand in hand. The ideal of creating a unified community could be achieved only if Germany “exterminated the things that tear our Volk apart.”

The Nazi's symbiotic fantasy of oneness was projected as a bodily fantasy. Hitler conceived of Germany as an organism with which his own body—and the bodies of all other Germans—were fused. The good Nazi would so completely identify with Germany that he would experience the nation as a part of himself,thus would not hesitate to submit to and do the bidding of this object.