Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War Publisher: Library of Social Science Author: Richard A. Koenigsberg Paperback ISBN: 978-0915042234 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0915042241 For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discount rate, click here. “Koenigsberg’s ideas cut through conventional notions about culture, the nation, and war, enabling us to see human institutions in utterly new ways.” —Ruth Stein, author of  For Love of the Father “If a case can be made that nationalism is a religion, few books rival Koenigsberg’s  Nations Have the Right to Kill. The author confronts the taken-for-granted world of nationalism and political realism, and makes them seem utterly bizarre. The force of Koenigsberg’s contention leaves little doubt that in analyzing nationalism and warfare, we are treading on a sacred ground.” —Matthew Eddy,  Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

Jews in the Holocaust—like German soldiers during the First World War—were compelled to give their bodies over to the state.

Just as German soldiers had been subjected to poison gas attacks in the First World War (Hitler was almost blinded by such an attack and lying in a hospital bed when the war ended), so Jews would be subject to poison gas attacks.

The Jew had to become a slave—submit to the state and become as abject as the German soldier had been during the First World War. 

The camps convey the degraded condition of soldiers, a parody of military life. The death-camps reveal a truth about nation-states: they have the right to ask individuals to die.

If the state can ask its own soldiers to die, Hitler reflected, why can’t it also require the death of Jews (enemies of the German people)? The death camps force Jews to replicate the abject submission of the German soldier. The Jew in the death camps is a caricature or satire on the life of a soldier.

To be a soldier means that your body is at the disposal of the state, which may use one's body as it sees fit. The hero is actually a slave. The Jew in the death-camp enacts of the idea that the body of a human being is at the disposal of the state. 

Hitler says that in spite of the fact that his comrades were dying in great numbers in the First World War, it would have seemed a “sin to complain” because, after all, "were they not dying for Germany?" Hitler accepts the fact that his buddies are dying in great numbers and that he might die. He doesn't complain. But then he asks: "OK we are dying but why are others not dying? Why are  inferior ones allowed to live while we are dying?

Hitler understood that nation-states kill soldiers. Hitler poses the question: "Why can't the state kill "others" as well?" Why can’t the state kill mental patients? Why can’t the state kill Jews? If the state has the right to kill its best people, why doesn’t it also have the right to kill its worst people?

The Holocaust was enacted to reveal the condition of the soldier in battle, the condition of human beings who are compelled to give their bodies and souls over to the state. The Holocaust depicted the abject, pathetic quality of those obligated to submit to the state, in contrast to the depiction of soldiers as “heroic.”

The Holocaust replicated or depicted the slaughter of the First World War: When young men were sent by nation-states to die in massive numbers.

The Aryan, Hitler believed, was a human being who sacrificed himself willingly for the nation-state. Hitler understood Jews as a people who were unwilling to sacrifice themselves for a state. 

The meaning of the Holocaust, for Hitler, was that Jews too would be compelled to submit to the nation-state, even if against their will. Their death, however, would not be the death of a noble hero.

Hitler: “If the best men were dying at the front, the least we could do was to wipe out the vermin.” “Those who are afraid of an honest death in battle deserve the mean death of cowards.”

The Jews of the Holocaust--like German soldiers of the First World war-- went "like sheep to the slaughter:” innocent believers in the goodness of society. German soldiers in the First World War (as well as Hitler himself) were gullible believers in the goodness of society. 

The death camps enact a cynical realization: This is what happens when you trust too much in the goodness of the state. Holocaust victims were shocked when they realized what was going to happen to them: However, soldiers of the First World War must similarly have  been shocked upon realizing they were entering a slaughterhouse.

Historians of the First World War (and most others) like to imagine that of it all happened more or less "accidentally." Generals loved and wanted to protect their soldiers but, unfortunately, war is necessary--and bad things happen.

The Holocaust demonstration that the killing power of the state is intentional. It is not an accident when human beings are slaughtered by the state.

The Jew in the death camps was the debased version of the German soldier. The Jew enacted the experience of the soldier, but without noble words. The death of a Jew in a gas chamber was neither beautiful nor honorable. "It is not sweet and fitting to die for a country."

The Holocaust shows what actually happens when the body of an individual is taken over by a nation-state. The death of the Jew in the camp reveals the disgusting, brutal, abject and pathetic nature of  death at the hands a nation. The Jew in the death camps “tells it like it is.”