Thanatopolitics & Absolute Victims.

As Richard Koenigsberg observes, Hitler's ideology was rooted in an immunological fantasy. In the same way that living organisms single out and recognize cells foreign to it and automatically destroy them, so did the German body politic.

At the heart of the National Socialist ideology lay the conviction that the German nation, a real political body, was suffering from a disease caused by a potentially deadly infection triggered by infectious agents identified as Jewish microorganisms.

Fascinated by these corporeal fantasies, Hitler and his followers conceived their mission as a sequence of therapeutic phases. After an accurate diagnosis of the disease, they had to act according to the most rigorous logic of cause and effect without shirking the weight of their responsibility for the treatment.

In speeches and writings, the Fuhrer conveyed the idea of Germany as a real organic body. Dazzled by the power of this metaphor, he continually returned to the relationship between cell and body: an "inextricable bond that charged every cell with the responsibility for the health of the whole."