FINAL SOLUTION AS THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY: Enacting a fantasy of Jews as foreign cells that had to be "removed" if Germany was to survive
  1. Goebbels: "The Jew represents an anti-race among the races of the earth. He has the same function as a poisonous bacillus has in the human organism: to mobilize the resistance of healthy forces or ensure that a living being whose days are numbered dies more quickly and more peacefully.”
  2. Nazi ideology grew out of a systematic fantasy projected into reality. This fantasy revolved around the idea of Germany as an actual body (politic) containing a deadly disease. The Final Solution and death camps represented a response to this fantasy; an enactment. 
  3. The death camps—a massive social institution—represents an excellent case study in the "social construction of reality." The nature and shape of the reality constructed by the Nazis derived from the fantasy contained within their ideology.          
  4. The Final Solution and death camps may be understood as a response to the fantasy that Jews constituted bacteria or viruses that needed to be removed from the German body politic if the nation was to survive. One Nazi doctor stated that National Socialism was "nothing but applied biology." Lifton suggests that this image of Nazism was not just one doctor's perception, but was the "vision put forward by the movement."  The unifying principle of the biomedical ideology, Lifton concludes, was "that of a deadly racial disease, the sickness of the Aryan race: the cure, the killing of all Jews."
  5. In the Final Solution, the Nazis treat the fantasy, "nation as organism which contains a life-threatening disease" as if it were an actuality; as if the nation really actually contained "bacteria" that threatened the life of the nation. The Nazis enacted the fantasy of "disinfecting" the body politic by killing the Jews.
  6. The Nazis created history based on a fantasy about the body externalized into social reality. The Nazi’s fantasy was that of the nation as a gigantic body politic with the people as cells of the organism--and Jews as bacteria threatening the life national body--that had to be "removed" if the nation was to survive.