Hitler has set his stamp on the word (Volksgemeinschaft). This word is to make completely clear to the members of our people that the individual is nothing when not a member of a community.

Nazism was an orgy of nationalistic self-exaltation, but also an orgy of masochistic self-abnegation. According to Nazi ideology, human beings could not exist for themselves—could attain existence only through and in the nation.

Nazism was the quest for omnipotence through identification—leading to the adoption of a subservient, masochistic posture toward the state. The Nazi simultaneously is enhanced and diminished by his dream of symbiotic unity with an omnipotent nation.

Hitler himself was enthralled, mesmerized by the idea of Germany. The aspiration of national unity, of course, is at the heart of many nationalist movements, expressed in phrases like "bringing the people together" and "overcoming differences that keep people apart." Hitler, however, was not content with the abstract form of this dream.

A unique aspect of Hitler’s Nazism was its quest to actualize the dream of national union—symbiosis— as bodily experience. Speaking to his youth, Hitler declared: “You are flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood. You are all one, belonging to me.” Hitler’s fantasy was that all Germans would become “one:” a single “substance of flesh and blood.”

The mass-meeting and rallies expressed Hitler’s desire to create the physical experience of oneness—as thousands, tens-of-thousands of human beings massed together, concentrated in a single space. Hitler describes this experience:

The individual who at first feels lonely and easily succumbs to the fear of being alone— for the first time gets the picture of a larger community, which has a strengthening, encouraging effect. But the community of the great demonstration not only strengthens the individual, it also unites and helps to create an esprit de corps.

Man needs that strengthening which lies at the conviction of being a member and fighter in a great comprehensive body. And he obtains an impression of this body for the first time in the mass demonstrations. People came to my speeches as my enemies, but gradually it transpired that after my speech lasting three hours, adherents and adversaries fused into a single enthusiastic mass.

By virtue of these rallies, individuals abandoned autonomy, uniting with the group. But Hitler’s fantasy went deeper. The climax of his speeches occurred, Hitler says, when listeners "fused into a single enthusiastic mass." It was at that moment that individuals united to constitute a "great comprehensive body."

The Nazis architectural structures were designed in order to enhance this experience of people as a unified body. Scobie writes in Hitler's State Architecture (1990) that Hitler's vast stadia & assembly halls were part of his plan to establish domination over masses of people by molding them into a single unified body enclosed within a single, all-embracing building.

The objective of the mass rallies was to bring into being an omnipotent, indestructible community. Discussing the Volksgemeinschaft, Scobie notes that this concept in turn generated the “concept of the enemy of the Volk,” that is, any person (or group) conceived to be hostile to the commonly pursued goals of the nation, for example, the Jews, who were branded enemies of the state.

Such people were excluded from participation in national rituals and festivities that took place within the confines of the community buildings in Nuremberg since, as outcasts, “their presence would have hindered the creation of the feeling of oneness between leader and led,” which it was Hitler's aim to create.

The Jew, Hitler declared, is the “ferment of decomposition in peoples,” which meant that the Jew “destroys and must destroy”—because he “completely lacked the conception of an activity which builds up the life of the community.” Jews, by their very nature, acted to tear down the national community.

The Nazi's symbiotic fantasy of oneness was projected as a bodily fantasy. Hitler conceived of Germany as an organism with which his own body—and the bodies of all other Germans—were fused. The good Nazi would so completely identify with Germany that he would experience the nation as a part of himself,thus would not hesitate to submit to and do the bidding of this object.

According to Wegner (1990), the SS saw the individual as an “integral element of a social organism.”  The individual's personal value and justification for his very existence depended solely on the advantages he furnished the national community. The individual was, in the eyes of the SS, only a “fragment of the body politic to which he owed allegiance.” Himmler informed his SS that everyone should be fully aware that “our lives do not belong to us, but to the Fuhrer and the Reich."

As a fragment of the body politic, the SS-man could not rebel against the body of which he was a part. His life belonged to “the Fuhrer and the Reich.” The SS-man was compelled to abandon the subjective willing function and to internalized the “will of the Reich," the state's destructive power, as his own will. When the SS-man dominated Jews in the death camps, he externalized the state’s destructive power, turning the Jew into someone precisely like him: A slave compelled to obey the will of the state.