What did it mean to say that National Socialism—politics—is applied biology?

The idea of the nation as a body possessing an immune system lay at the heart of Nazi extermination policies. Unfit people, the mentally ill, homosexuals, Gypsies—and particularly Jews—were conceived as if defective or diseased cells within the body politic, incapable of contributing to the development of the national organism. The mission of National Socialism was to maintain the health of the body politic by eliminating dangerous or unproductive cells.

What an extraordinary fantasy! How fantastic that the Nazis were able to enact this fantasy! What a bizarre, monumentally destructive world grew out of this idea--to imagine that the entire German nation was a body: "Good Germans" were the healthy cells of this body and Jews were pathogenic cells--that had to be removed from this body.

From the beginning, the Nazi project was racial purification: cleansing the national bloodstream through the elimination of unhealthy and foreign cells. The Final Solution was the last, frenetic, hysterical effort to destroy disease-creating pathogens to prevent the incipient death of the nation. If only the Jews could be killed quickly, Hitler imagined, the Germany could survive.

The death camps were an institution—a form of culture. The vast network of camps created by the Nazis is an example of the social construction of reality. The death camps were created by Hitler and his henchmen--who brought this creation into being.

The reality created by the Nazis was constructed based on the fantasy of the nation as a body containing dangerous microorganisms that had to be destroyed. The death camps symbolized Germany’s immune system: capable of identifying and destroying foreign or alien organisms within the body politic.

According to immunologists (see Emily Martin, 1990), every cell in the body is equipped with “proof of identity”—a special arrangement of protein molecules on the exterior of the cell. These protein molecules constitute identity papers, protecting cells identified as "self"--against the body’s own police force, the immune system.

The body's police corps is programmed to distinguish between bona fide residents and illegal aliens—an ability fundamental to the body's powers of self-defense.

What happens to “illegal aliens” (not-self cells) when they are detected? They are "executed" in a "death cell.” When the walls have closed around the alien cell, execution—phagocytosis—takes place. “The prisoner is showered with hydrogen peroxide or other deadly toxins. Digestive enzymes are sent into the death chamber to dissolve the bacterium."

Ronald Glasser (1976) describes the final phase of the attack of the white blood cellson alien cells:

Once a killer T lymphocyte couples to the surface of an infected cell, its own internal protein cell-killing machinery turns on. The coupling with the infected cell is the chemical switch that transforms the T cell into a killer cell. Chemicals are produced; compounds begin to be made within the lymphocyte that diffuse out of these killer cells like poison gas out of a canister, entering the infected cell, killing the virus, stopping the viral spread, giving our body the chance to regenerate itself.

Chemical compounds “diffuse out of killer cells like poison gas out of a canister,” destroying the virus and stopping the viral spread—so that the nation might live. Like poison gas out of a canister.