Hitler proclaimed to his youth: “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. You are all one, belonging to me.” This was Hitler's deepest fantasy and his most profound desire (see photo of the Nuremberg rally directly below on the right): that each and every German would be united with him to constitute a single, omnipotent body. Hitler insisted that each German human being had to be bound to his body to constitute a single body: his flesh and the flesh of his people were one.

Hitler's idea was precisely the fantasy conveyed by the famous frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan (see left below), which depicts a gigantic man whose torso and arms are composed of tiny individual men crowded closely together.

Each of tiny man was bound to the body of the sovereign. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes stated that the way to create a Commonwealth is to “unite the multitude in one and the same person.”

Several observations about this image:

• The Sovereign does not exist without the little men bound to his torso and arms. Without them, he would be an empty shell of a man, a nothing-burger.
   
• Without the Sovereign, the little men could not exist: their very identity derives from the fact that they are bound to the body of the sovereign.
   
• The idea of "obedience to authority" is revealed through this image of the Leviathan. "Obedience" is not an abstract idea or form of cognition: it is a psychosomatic experience. If one's own body is part of the body of the sovereign, governed by his brain, then it is not possible to opt out--to resist submitting to this brain or body. One exists only as a part of the sovereign. One cannot escape the body of which one is a part. 

Richard Koenigsberg

The frontispiece of Leviathan depicts a man whose torso and arms are composed of tiny individual persons crowded closely together.

A massive rally at Nuremberg (1937) composed of thousands of men crowded closely together.