The essence of National Socialism was set forth on February 22, 1942, eight months after the "Final Solution" had been set in motion. Hitler declared:

"The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew."

This was the purpose of the Final Solution: to destroy the Jewish virus. If the Jewish virus was destroyed, Germany could once again become healthy.

This was the purpose of the "war of extermination" waged against the Soviet Union: to discover or uncover "Jewish-Bolshevik viruses" within that vast living space; to prevent these viruses from flowing into the Reich.

The essence of Hitler's project was to "kill Jews," that is, to eliminate pathogens from Germany, Europe, the Soviet Union, and eventually the world. What Hitler did grew out of this psychotic fantasy.

The Holocaust had no other purpose but to kill the Jewish virus. The fundamental purpose of the Second World War, from Hitler's perspective, was to eliminate Jewish bacteria (he turned away from the Battle of Britain and attacked the Soviet Union--because that's where the communist virus originated).

Kill the Jewish virus = save the world.

This psychotic fantasy was the origin and bedrock of the Holocaust, and of the Second World War. A psychotic fantasy played out upon the stage of social reality.  Full of sound and fury.

March 24, 1882: Robert Koch announced the Discovery of the Tubercle Bacillus—the cause of tuberculosis—to the Berlin Physiological Society.

Writing on the history of German medicine, Paul Weindling (1993) describes how bacteriologists became aligned with the state—through the use of military analogies. Koch described how "alien parasites" entered the body. Laboratory researchers were compared to soldiers: "Warrior against disease."

There was widespread adulation of Koch. Thousands of handkerchiefs on which his face was embroidered were sold. Just as the bacterium causing tuberculosis had been isolated, so it was hoped that the germs of mental illness, criminality and feeble-mindedness could also be located.