On March 24, 1882, the German physician and scientist, Robert Koch, presented his discovery of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Subsequently, the causal organisms of a great number of bacterial diseases were isolated. Writing on the history of German medicine, Paul Weindling (1989) describes how bacteriologists aligned with the state—through the use of military analogies. Koch described how “alien parasites” entered the body. Bacteriology was glamorized, describing laboratory researchers as “Warriors against Disease.”

Hitler conceived of himself as a political physician, insisting that every distress has "some cause or another.” His mission as a politician was to “penetrate to the cause” of Germany’s disease and to effect a cure. On the evening of July 10, 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.
 

At Hitler’s Table Talk on 22 February 1942, the following statement was recorded:

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, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only be eliminating the Jew.

These extraordinary ideas were the bedrock of the Holocaust--Hitler's phantasy of Jews as "bacilli" or "viruses," the source of a "disease" from which Germany was suffering which would lead to the dissolution and death of the nation unless radical actions were undertaken.

Of course, these statements, seeming psychotic, were metaphors that led to the Holocaust. We must analyze political statements as if manifest content of a dream to unearth the latent content or unconscious meaning of these political statements.

Robert Proctor notes that Hitler was celebrated as the “great doctor” of German society and as the “Robert Koch of politics.” As Robert Koch had discovered the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, Hitler imagined that he had discovered the Jewish bacterium (or virus): cause of Germany's disease and suffering. The Final Solution was enacted in order to cure Germany’s (and Europe’s) disease by removing or eliminating its cause.