One of my most robust findings is on the relationship between the First World War and the Holocaust. Omer Bartov wrote about this in 1996 (see directly below) but did not follow up on his initial insight.

My hypothesis is simple: Jews in the Holocaust repeated the slaughter of German soldiers in the First World War (Scroll down for information on and reviews of NATIONS HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL: Hitler, the Holocaust and War). Hitler was the master-planner and was conscious of what he was doing.

The Holocaust was not "mindless" violence or aggression. There was a concept underlying the slaughter. As German soldiers died in the First World War, so Jews would be required to die and be slaughtered in the Holocaust. The Jews slaughtered in the  Holocaust  symbolized German soldiers who had been slaughtered in the First World War.

The Holocaust was a symptom of the repetition compulsion: do unto others as has been done unto you. As Hitler's comrades gave their lives for Germany in the First World War, so Jews would die for Germany in the Holocaust.

But now with a negative rather than positive valence. The death of the German soldier was conceived as honorable and noble. In spite of two-million deaths, Hitler refused to complain: "After all, were his comrades not dying for Germany?"

The death of the Jew in the Holocaust was not honorable and noble. The Jew's death was pathetic and degrading.

On some level, Hitler knew what he was doing. He knew that the death of the German soldier in the First World War was pathetic and degrading. He had observed at close hand the mutilated  and decayed bodies of his comrades. But his devotion to Germany--his fanatic nationalism--prevented him from knowing (and telling) the truth.

Hitler created the Holocaust as a symbolic representation of the truth: Death at the hands of the nation state is not honorable and noble. It is degrading, pathetic and disgusting.

RICHARD KOENIGSBERG
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In Murder in Our Midst (1996), Omer Bartov notes that the Holocaust was the almost “perfect reenactment of the Great War,” with the important correction that “all the perpetrators were on one side and all the victims on the other.”

Everything else was there:  the barbed wire, the machine guns, the charred bodies, the gas, the uniforms, the military discipline, the barracks. “But this reenactment had the great advantage that it was totally safe for the guards.”

The death camps repeated what had occurred in the trenches. Hitler and his colleagues produced a massive re-enactment, compelling Jews to experience what Hitler and his colleagues had experienced during the First World War.

Hitler—blinded by poison gas at the end of the War—declared in Mein Kampf that if twelve or fifteen thousand of the “Hebrew corrupters of the people” had been held under poison gas, “as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best Germans,” then the “sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”

Hitler created the Holocaust in order to subject Jews to the same treatment to which German soldiers had been subjected.  The Jew in the Holocaust symbolized the German soldier—sent to suffer and to die by the German nation-state and its leaders.

The Jew repeats the pathetic, abject condition of German soldiers in the First World War: conveyed to a distant location in box cars; hardly imagining that death would be their fate.

Like German soldiers, Jews were compelled to adopt a stance of absolute submission. Jews symbolized the fate of a loyal German soldier whose body has been taken over by the nation state—to be used as the nation and its leaders see fit.
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“Richard Koenigsberg is an intrepid generator and disseminator of ideas regarding the psychodynamics of human violence and destructiveness, ideas that are startling all the more for being self-evident once they have been absorbed. Koenigsberg’s ideas cut trenchantly through conventional, rationalized notions about culture, the nation, and war, and enable us to see through the psychic machinations of human institutions in utterly new ways.”

—Ruth Stein, New York University, author of For Love of the Father

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“Two terrors from long ago haunt. First, the Holocaust: that cold-blooded massacre of millions. Second, the ability of political leaders during two World Wars to convince ordinary people that slaughtering their neighbors was patriotic. A half-century later, we continue to ask: how was this possible? Richard A. Koenigsberg offers provocative answers. Koenigsberg’s analysis ranges from gender identity, to the First World War, to Aztec warfare. No single answer will exorcize our terrors. But Koenigsberg’s bold and original approach, clearly and precisely presented, will help us, if not to expel them, at least, finally, to comprehend them.”

—Robert Whalen, Queens University of Charlotte, author of Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1939

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“Despite the vast body of research devoted to the Holocaust, Nations Have the Right to Kill marks a seminal contribution to our understanding. Koenigsberg challenges the belief that Hitler was a uniquely inhuman monster, placing him squarely within the narrative of the nationalist ideology that claims dying for one’s country represents the apogee of love and devotion. The Holocaust thus became ‘a perverted, degraded version of dying for the country—sacrificial death at the hands of the nation-state stripped of words like honor, heroism and glory"’”

—Brian A. Victoria, Antioch University, author of Zen at War
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“In Nations Have the Right to Kill, Richard Koenigsberg poses disturbing and often ignored questions: ‘How can humans sacrifice millions for an abstract concept of “nation?” Is destruction and self-destruction the actual purpose of war?’ The answers are both insightful and unsettling. The strength of Nations is the use of original artifacts to support claims. Koenigsberg always begins with data. He takes a rhetorical approach by grounding his arguments in a careful analysis of Nazi writings, speeches and recorded correspondence and conversations. The point that nations grant their leaders the right to kill is powerfully documented.”

—E. Sam Cox, University of Central Missouri
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“Richard Koenigsberg’s Nations Have the Right to Kill reminds us in clear and incisive prose that sacrifice and total war are inextricably linked. Drawing on a broad range of knowledge spanning the social sciences, Koenigsberg asks us to conceive of the Holocaust as the product of an ideology that demanded the sacrifice of both Germany’s male population and European Jewry.”

—Brian E. Crim, Lynchburg College
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“Koenigsberg’s thesis is that there is a ‘fundamental dynamic that leads nations to go to war,’ independent of political circumstances. This purpose or driving force is destruction and self-destruction: a mass human sacrifice that elevates the nation to a sacred place at the expense of its people. In war, Koenigsberg says, ‘human bodies sacrificed in the name of perpetuating a magical entity, the body politic.’ This is a thoughtful, sometimes startling, well-written book: important and challenging.”

—E. James Lieberman, M.D.
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“This is psychological inquiry of great depth and tragic urgency. A deep humanity and ethical urgency informs this book which is full of original and provocative insights.”

—Walter A. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Ohio State Universityz

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“Richard Koenigsberg represents an entirely orthogonal and de novo vantage on war. His academic lens is Psychology, and he has penetrated to a still-obscured truth of war in Modernity: That it is in essence the sacrificial—and thus transcendental—celebratory vessel of all human sacred identity. His essay is in its way a call-to-arms: To see at last our own buy-in culturally to a boundlessly destructive essence within our own humanity.”

—Michael Vlahos, United States Naval War College, author of *Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change
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“Filling a gap in the scholarly narrative, Nations Have the Right to Kill uses a comparative framework to offer an intriguing exploration of the philosophical connections between war and genocide. Focusing on the Nazi case, Koenigsberg concludes that both the sacrifice of German soldiers in glory on the battlefield, and the sacrifice of victims in the gas chambers, served essentially the same purpose: to feed the sacrificial bloodlust of the national deity.”

—Journal of Genocide Research Volume 12, Issue 1 (September 2010). Review by Megan D. Lee, University of South Carolina.

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“Nations Have the Right to Kill offers a riveting examination of the ideology of political violence. Dr. Koenigsberg observes that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the 20th-century has been so continuous that it is taken as an immutable characteristic of history. To interrupt our historical attachment to war, we might begin by examining the mentality and ideology of those who perpetrate political violence. Through careful analysis of Hitler’s writings and speeches, Koenigsberg makes us aware of the ideology that was the source of both warfare and genocide. Dr. Koenigsberg’s is a message that anyone with an interest in changing the course of human history should internalize and reflect upon. Can human beings transcend war? If so, Nations Have the Right to Kill will be one of our most important guides. Its striking lucidity will be a catalyst for our collective evolution.”

—Lee Hall, JD