Himmler informed his SS that everyone should be fully aware that “our lives do not belong to us, but to the Fuhrer and the Reich.” The same may be said of Jewish Holocaust victims. Like the lives and bodies of SS-men, Jewish lives and bodies did not belong to themselves.

Jews in the death camps represented a degraded version of the German soldier, conveying the abject condition of a human being whose body had been given over to—taken over by—a nation-state. The Holocaust depicted dying for a country—stripped of honor and glory.