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Excerpt below is from Geyer's paper, "There is a Land Where Everything is Pure: Its Name is Land of Death"
"Death was talked up as the only way for soldiers to redeem themselves. In the cruel metaphysics of the Third Reich, the only way to be a man was to be dead. Collective death as a deliberate gambit to ascertain immortality was very much at the heart of the Nazi politics of self-destruction.
General Jodl’s apologia for Hitler, in 1945: “He acted like all heroes have acted in history and like they will always act. He had himself buried on top of the ruins of his empire and his hopes.”
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Click the following link for additional excerpts from Geyer's paper: "There is a Land Where Everything is Pure: Its Name is Land of Death: Some Observations on Catastrophic Nationalism." In Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany. Arlington: Texas A&M University Press.
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