I. NAZISM AS NATIONALISM

Nazism represented an extreme form of nationalism. Hitler preached to his people: "Your life is bound up with the life of your whole people. The nation is not merely the root of your strength; it is the root of your very life."

He asked Germans to acknowledge their profound dependence upon Germany: “Our Nation is not just an idea in which you have no part; you yourself support the nation; to it you belong; you cannot separate yourself from it.”

Hitler explained: "You are nothing, your nation is everything." Human beings in and of themselves were “nothing.” One became everything--by incorporating the nation into one's emptied out self.  Nazism was sumultaneously an orgy of self-glorification and an orgy of self-abnegation.

Rudolf Hess often introduced his Fuehrer at mass-rallies declaring, "Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler." At the core of Nazism was this mystical sense of "oneness."

Nazism did not differ from ordinary nationalism that posits an intimate tie between the life of the individual and national life. What Hitler did was to carry the ordinary idea of "identification with one's nation" to an extreme, bizarre conclusion, revealing the heart of darkness contained within the idea of "love of country."
 

II. HITLER'S IDEOLOGY

Hitler's ideology grew out of his fantasy of the German nation as a real body politic: "Our movement alone," Hitler declared, "was capable of creating a national organism." In place of the State must be set "the living organism—the people." Hitler conceived of Germany as a body politic consisting of German people as cells.

It followed that the purpose of politics was to "maintain the substance of the people in bodily and mental health, in good order and purity." According to Hitler, the supreme test of every politic institution was: "Does it serve to preserve the people or not."

Germany had a problem, however. An otherwise healthy body politic was being assaulted by forces threatening to bring about the nation’s demise. National Socialism represented a response Hitler's idea that he was acting to save the life of the nation. He wanted to "prevent our Germany from suffering, as Another did, the death upon the cross."

Throughout his career, Hitler was tormented by a conviction that an unprecedented, cosmic force was working toward the destruction, not only of Germany, but of Western civilization. It was only rarely, he said, that the life of peoples suffers from such convulsions that the "deepest foundations of the edifice of social order are shaken:"

• Who will refuse to see or even deny that today we find ourselves in the midst of a struggle that is not concerned merely with the problems of frontiers between peoples or States, but rather with the question of the maintenance or annihilation of the whole inherited human order of society and its civilizations?

Given the danger that the nation might fall to pieces, Hitler's strategy was to unite the German people: bind them together into a single, indestructible body. To solve the problems of Germany, it was essential to bring people together so that "millions of individuals could be fused into a unity." Hitler would bring about the "inner welding together of the body of our people," insisting that men throw themselves into the "great melting pot, the nation" so that they could be "welded one to another."
 

III. CONCLUSION

Hitler's ideology represented a coherent fantasy projected into reality. This fantasy revolved around the idea of Germany as an actual body (politic) containing a deadly disease, the Jew. The Final Solution enacted this fantasy. The death camps—a massive social institution—represents a case study in the "social construction of reality (Peter Berger)." The nature and shape of the reality constructed by the Nazis derived from the fantasy contained within their ideology.