Preventing the disintegration of Germany

It begins with Hitler…within Hitler’s mind and body. It began with Hitler, and then radiated outward into Germany, and the world. To understand what occurred and why, we begin with the source: the mind and body of Hitler. Germany was inside Hitler’s mind and body; the Jew was inside Hitler’s mind and body. Miraculously, Hitler was able to convey what was inside himself to the German people.

Hitler wrote and spoke continually about the “disintegration” or decomposition of Germany. The German people, he said, found itself in the midst of a “process of dissolution.” A chaos of views had “torn asunder the German people.” Internally the “body of the people began to dissolve.”

The bourgeois world had failed to notice a process that threatened to “dissolve the German people into its basic elements.” This increasingly rapid “falling to pieces of the organic structure of the nation” acted to “destroy the people’s trust in their leaders.”

What to do about the incipient falling to pieces of the German nation? This is what Nazism was. Hitler’s struggle (Mein Kampf) was a struggle to prevent Germany from disintegrating. It was necessary to overcome or destroy those forces within the body politic that might lead to the death of the nation.

The following passages convey the depth and intensity of Hitler’s experience of the threat, a threat simultaneously directed again Germany, society—and civilization itself.

This attack is leveled against the very substance of peoples as peoples, against their internal organization: it is leveled, too, against the leaders of these peoples, against those who represent each people's own race, against their intellectual life, against their traditions, against their economic life, in a word against all those other institutions which determine the picture of the individuality, the character, and the life of these peoples and States. This attack is so embracing that it draws into the field of its action almost all the functions of life, while no one can tell how long this fight may last.

It is only rarely that the life of peoples suffers from such convulsions that the deepest foundations of the edifice of social order are shaken and that this social order itself is threatened or destroyed. But to-day who will refuse to see or even deny that we find ourselves in the midst of a struggle which is not concerned merely with the problems of frontiers between peoples or States but rather with the question of the maintenance or the annihilation of the whole inherited human order of society and its civilizations? The organization of human society is threatened.

According to Hitler, the “attacks” were an attack against the “very substance of peoples as peoples.” These attacks were so embracing that they drew into the field of action “all the functions of life.” No one could tell “how long the fight might last.”

It was only rarely, Hitler explained, that the life of peoples suffered from such convulsions that the “deepest foundations of the social order” were shaken. Who could refuse to see or would deny, Hitler said, that peoples were now in the midst of a struggle that was concerned with the question of the “maintenance or annihilation of the whole inherited order of society and its civilization.”

These passages convey the psychic world that inhabited Hitler. He imagined that Germany was threatened with destruction. He took it upon himself, somehow, to rescue the nation; prevent the dissolution of Germany, and civilization itself.

Hitler’s aspiration to save Germany and the world would have been amorphous—had he not identified the cause of national disintegration: Marxism, or “the Jew.”

Hitler claimed that Marxism was a conception of the world with “disintegration as its aim,” leading to the “splitting up of the body politic.” The Jew, Hitler said, was a “ferment of decomposition” among races,” a “dissolver of human culture.” The Jewish “demon of disintegration” symbolized the “unceasing destruction of peoples’ lives.”

Hitler’s struggle (Mein Kampf) was, fundamentally, a struggle against a force of destruction that he experienced within Germany and himself. The Nazi movement was, fundamentally, a desire to destroy or remove this destructive force from within the body politic.

Given that Germany was involved in a struggle of “life against death,” no actions were off limit. Hitler declared: "We want to prevent our Germany from suffering, as Another did, the death upon the cross. We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany, we have achieved the greatest deed in the world."