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The disease of individualism
The Final Solution or Holocaust grows out of Hitler’s profound identification with Germany. The term "identification with the nation" has become a cliche. But in the case of Nazism, this is where it begins. Rudolf Hess declared, "Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler." Hitler equated his own body with the German body politic.
Hitler conceived of National Socialism as profound faith in the German nation, constantly declaring his "love" for his people, insisting this love would "never falter." Our "faith in this Germany of ours is imperishable," Hitler said. Deutschland ueber Alles a profession of faith, which today “fills millions with a greater strength, a faith which is "mightier than any earthly might.”
The opposite of faith in the German nation was individualism or individuality or separation or separateness. Nationalism for HItler meant “overcoming bourgeois privatism," unconditionally "equating the individual fate and the fate of the nation.”
The key word is "unconditionally." Hitler's totalitarianism insisted that every single German unite absolutely with the community; share a common fate. This Volk, Hitler explained to the German people, is “but yourselves.”
National Socialism railed against "selfish individualism." Hitler’s Official Programme, published in 1927 (Feder, 2013), put forth as its central plank: “The Common Interest before Self Interest.” The fundamental complaint was that the the leaders of public life "all worship the same god—Individualism. Personal interest is the sole incentive.”
For the Nazis, there would be no such thing selfish individualism. Human efforts would be directed toward "Germany:" the community of the people, the Volk. The nation would be everything.
At mass-rallies, the German community came alive. Hitler was joyful at these events. For him, the "imagined community" was insufficient. At the rallies, he saw the German people massed together as one body. At these rallies, Hitler felt, there was no separation individual human beings and the group.
He declared at one rally:
Our aim is the dictatorship of the whole people, the community. I began to win men to the idea of an eternal national and social ideal—to subordinate one’s own interests to the interest of the whole society. There are, nevertheless, a few incurables who had never understood the happiness of belonging to this great, inspiring community.
There it is! Now we know! To be "incurable" was to lack understanding of what it meant to "belong to the great, inspiring community." This was Hitler's concept of "disease." This was the nature of the disease that Hitler endlessly fulminated against. For Hitler, to be incurably ill was to be incabable or unwilling to belong to a national community.
Hitler's complaint against the Jew was this precisely: that they were unable to fit in, to merge with the community. Yes, it's not as if Hitler invited the Jew to join the German community, and then they refused. Rather, in Hitler's mind, the inability to fuse with a community was a biologically give trait of the Jew. This is what "Jew" meant for Hitler: a certain kind of human being who, by his very nature, could not join or participate in a national community.
We now understanding the meaning of terms like "virus" and "bacteria," metaphors that defined Nazi ideology. Hitler conceived of Germany as an organic entity. Human beings were as if cells in this community or body politic. In the ideal situation, these cells blended and worked together to constitute a unified body, capable of concerted action.
To be a virus or bacteria was to be a certain kind of cell within the body politic that was incapable of fusing or merging with this body; of working together with the other cells. For Hitler, the was the essence of the Jew: a cell within the body politic incapable of fusing with this body; of merging with the national community.
Destruction of the Jew meant destruction of a cell that could not fuse with the body politic, that insisted on "going its own way;" doing its own thing. Like a bacteria or virus or cancer cell, the Jewish cell within the body politic had its own ideas--was incabable of fusing with other cells. Unless destroyed, the Jewish cells would divide and multiply--killing the other cells within the body politic, thus spelling the death of the the nation.
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