GENOCIDE GREW OUT OF THE IDEA THAT GERMANY WAS A BODY (POLITIC) POSSESSING AN IMMUNE SYSTEM
Richard Koenigsberg
  1. On the evening of 10 July 1941, Hitler declared at his table: “I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the fermenting agent of all social decomposition.”
     
  2. At Hitler’s table talk on 22 February 1942, the following statement was recorded: “It is one of the greatest revolutions there has ever been in the world. The Jew will be identified! The same fight that Pasteur and Koch had to fight must be led by us today. Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one bacillus: the Jew! Japan would also have got them if it had remained open any longer to the Jew. We will get well when we eliminate the Jew.”
  3. Speech: “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. Every German, whether he wants to be or not, is a representative of the form of existence of this very Germany.”
  4. Alfred Hoche, an early advocate of state euthanasia: “The state is a whole with its own laws and rights, much like one self-contained human organism which, in the interests of the whole-as we doctors know-abandons and rejects parts or particles that have become worthless or useless.”
  5. Extermination is the normal functioning of the German immune system.
  6. In Mein Kampf Hitler plaintively posed the question, "Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms?" Writing in 1972 in The Science of Self, David Wilson provides a sketch of the purpose and functioning of the immune system: "The only way in which the animal body can possibly cope with the enormous range of disease organisms threatening it," Wilson states, is by some mechanism that recognizes "what is its 'self’ and rejects everything else as 'not-self’." On every cell, Wilson reports, there is a 'flag’ or identification mark (expressing the nature of the nucleic acid inside the cell). Each body "knows its own flag" as signifying self and "knows all other flags as indicating not-self."
     
  7. The law to which Hitler believed Germany was subject, I hypothesize, was the law of the immune system. Insofar as the German nation constituted a "single organism," therefore one might expect it to act like every other organism—to reject cells identified as not-self. The Final Solution, it would appear, was generated based on this idea or fantasy that Germany was an actual body (politic) possessing an immune system. As a body possessing an immune system, the German nation would react like any other body—automatically destroying cells identified as foreign.
  8. One of the clearest explications of National Socialism’s immunological concept of the nation-state was presented by Konrad Lorenz (later to win a Noble Prize for his work in ethology) in the 1930’s in the "German Journal of Applied Psychology and Characterology." Lorenz explained that there was a close analogy between a "human body invaded by a cancer" and a nation "afflicted with subpopulations whose inborn defects cause them to become social liabilities." Just as in cancer the best treatment is to eradicate the parasitic growth as quickly as possible, the eugenic defense against afflicted subpopulations, Lorenz claimed, is of necessity "limited to equally drastic measures."
  9. According to Lorenz, when "inferior elements" are not eliminated from a healthy population, then—just as when cells of a malignant tumor are allowed to proliferate throughout a human body—they will act to "destroy the host body as well as themselves." Inferior elements or classes of people within a nation, Lorenz believed, were like malignant cells within a body. In each case, drastic measures were required in order to "eradicate the parasitic growth."
  10. EVERYONE MUST PARTAKE OF THE GERMAN ORGANISM: “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.” 
     
  11. PEOPLE ARE CELLS IN THE BODY: Similarly, Gottfried Nesse, Nazi political theorist writing in 1935: “In contrast to the state, the people form a true organism--a being which leads its own life and follows its own laws.  This living unity of the people 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.”
     
  12. To identify with nation is to relocate one's body and self.  Thus one is to sacrifice the life of one's concrete body in the name of the perpetuation and preservation of the immortal body:  The denial of death takes the form of identification of self with a self-perpetuating body which, unlike ordinary bodies, is not subject to death and decay.  But since the national body, the idea of the nation is a "mental representation," a psychic projection, then it is experienced, perceived in the image of one's own body:  As containing a force of disintegration, bacteria, parasites which will eventually lead it to die.  That is the true fate of all bodies:  To eventually disintegrate and to be consumed by microorganisms.  That is the truth, reality: The denial of death takes the form of the attempt to create a national body which is unlike other bodies:  A body which will not disintegrate, which will not, finally, be consumed by bacteria and parasites.  The Jew is the principle of death and the reality principle, the Jew is the Nazi's repressed realization that death occurs to all bodies.  The Jew is the return of the repressed death instinct.
     
  13. “The purpose of the National Socialist Movement is the maintenance of the people's life...This body formed by the people must secure in the future the maintenance of this body which is the people...Politics is and can be nothing other than the realization of the vital interests of a people and the practical waging of its life-battle with all means available...All of the functions of this body politic should ultimately fulfill only one purpose:  securing the preservation of this body in the future.”