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What it all came down to was that Jews were identified by Hitler and the Nazis as the source of a "disease" within the German body politic. This was the source of the Final Solution: an extraordinary fantasy enacted in the real world.
This fantasy was the source of everything that subsequently occurred. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union (abandoning war against Great Britain) because he imagined that "Jewish Bolshevik bacteria" were located there.
Then Hitler and Goebbels decided that the United States also was controlled by Jews, leading to a World War. "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Fifty-five million people dead in order to destroy "Jews," imagined to be acting to destroy civilization.
A delusion enacted to create reality.
Following Nancy Korbin, I'm going to call Nazism a collective delusion, indeed a collective psychosis. I was having a conversation at a Holocaust conference with the great historian of Nazism, Jeffrey Herf. I told him I agreed with the findings he presented in The Jewish Enemy, which established that not only the Holocaust--but also the Second World War--was based on the Nazi delusion of a Jewish world conspiracy.
Then I said to him, "You might say, then, that the entire Nazi movement was a psychotic episode." He walked away from me.
Historians (and many others) have difficulty conceiving that an entire social movement--a gigantic episode of history--could be the manifestation of psychosis. People want to believe (one of the most profound delusions) that human behavior is governed by "rationality."
Somehow, we know the Nazis were "mad." But we want to attribute significance and meaning to these "world historic events."
I'm encouraged by the writing and thinking of Nancy Korbin who says that
Consensual validation has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is a folie a deux there is a folie a millions. The fact that millions of people share the same mental pathology does not make these people sane.
What a wonderful, excitement statement, marking the next phase in our study of society and history. No need to continue to pretend that certain historical phenomena--such as the Holocaust or the First World War--are "normal" just because they happened.
Deep down, we know that these events--and many like them that have occurred during the course of history--are manifestations of madness.
We might begin to conceptualize a good part of the story of civilization as the history of madness.
This is the next step.
Richard Koenigsberg
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CONCLUSION: The data I’ve presented suggests that the Nazis projected a fantasy into their ideology—allowing us to perceive the deep structure of their ideology. Nazism revolved around the idea of Germany as an actual body (politic); a concrete “substance of flesh and blood.”
Jews were conceived as bacteria or viruses, source of the disease within the body politic. The Final Solution was undertaken to eliminate pathogenic microorganisms from within Germany, thus removing the source of Germany’s disease and enabling the nation to survive. |
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IV. NAZI IDEOLOGY (B)
Nazi ideology grew out of a coherent fantasy projected into reality, a fantasy revolving around the idea of Germany as an actual body (politic) containing a deadly disease.
The Final Solution represented a response to this fantasy; an enactment. The death camps—a massive social institution—represents an excellent case study in the “social construction of reality.” The nature and shape of this reality constructed by the Nazis derived from the fantasy contained within their ideology.
Hitler in Mein Kampf plaintively asks, “Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to the same laws as all other human organisms?” In their influential book that laid the groundwork for what was to follow—The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life (1920)—German professors Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche advocated euthanasia or state killing. They described the state as an “organism with its own laws and rights, much like one self-contained human organism” which “in the interest of the welfare of the whole—as we doctors know—abandons and rejects parts or particles that have become worthless or dangerous.”
What was this organismic “law” to which Hitler, Binding and Hoche alluded? They were referring to the “law of the immune system,” that bio-chemically based system operative within each organism acting automatically to “reject” entities entering the body identified as foreign or “not self.” The Final Solution represented the enactment of an immunological fantasy. According to this Nazi fantasy, genocide represented the “automatic” response of the German body politic to a “law of nature:” the national organism reacting to reject or destroy alien cells (e. g., Jewish bacteria) that had entered its bloodstream.
The Final Solution and death camps, then, may be understood as a response to the idea that Jews constituted bacteria or viruses that had to be removed from the German body politic if the nation was to survive. One Nazi doctor stated that National Socialism was “nothing but applied biology.” What an astonishing statement.
Lifton suggests that this image of Nazism was not just one doctor’s perception, but was the “vision put forward by the movement.” The unifying principle of the biomedical ideology, Lifton concludes, was “that of a deadly racial disease, the sickness of the Aryan race: the cure, the killing of all Jews.”
V. THE DREAM OF NAZISM AS THE DREAM OF NATIONALISM
The National Socialistic movement was based upon an ideology that was a subset of the ideology of nationalism. Nazism represented a frenzy of nationalistic hysteria. Jane Roberts states that Hitler brought to flower all of the “most morbid nationalistic fantasies” that had been growing for centuries. The grandiose celebration of a nation’s “inalienable right to seek domination,” she says, focused finally in Hitler’s Germany. Nazism enacted the deepest, darkest dreams contained within the ideology of nationalism.
Adolf Jost, a theorist of scientific racism who had issued an early call for direct medical killing in his book, The Right to Death (1895) argued that “control over the death of the individual must ultimately belong to "the social organism the state.” Jost was pointing to the “state’s right to kill.” He pointed out that the state already exercised those “rights” in war, where thousands of individuals are sacrificed for the good of the State. The state must own death—must kill—Jost asserted, in order to “keep the social organism alive and healthy.”
Jost draws our attention to a fundamental theme at the heart of nationalism, namely the human tendency to reify nation-states; to relate to nations as if real entities that exist separate and apart from the individuals who constitute them. Such omnipotent nation-states or social organisms require—like the gods of the Aztecs—“sacrifices” if they are to be kept alive. This fantasy of the nation as an entity existing above and beyond actual individuals constitutes the fundamental political ideology of our time.
VI. CONCLUSION
The data I’ve presented suggests that the Nazis projected a fantasy into their ideology—allowing us to perceive the deep structure of their ideology. Nazism revolved around the idea of Germany as an actual body (politic); a concrete “substance of flesh and blood.” Jews were conceived as bacteria or viruses, source of the disease within the body politic. The Final Solution was undertaken in order to eliminate pathogenic microorganisms from within Germany, thus removing the source of Germany’s disease and enabling the nation to survive.
Identification of recurring metaphors and images reveals bodily fantasies as the source of Nazi ideology. This Nazi fantasy about the body (politic) was always present, part of the warp and woof of Nazi ideology. By paying attention to metaphorical language contained within Nazi ideology, we are able to perceive this fantasy. Having articulated the fantasy that was the source of Nazism, the next step is to interpret it; uncover its meaning; the source of the fantasy’s appeal and power.
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