Melting human beings into a single mass of flesh:
The Nuremberg Rallies--or the gas chambers?
by Richard A. Koenigsberg

The essence of Hitler’s thought (see directly below) was that all Germans had to be united into a single body or organism.

Each human being was a cell in this organism. Each cell in the body was responsible for the organism. There could be no such thing as “apolitical” people—human beings outside the German organism; no such thing as separation from this organism.

Jews had to be killed because Hitler imagined that they refused—or were incapable of--being a part of the organism. Contrary to what theorist think, the Final Solution was not a means of “excluding” Jews, but just the opposite: by bringing them into the gas chambers and annihilating them, Jews at last become at one with the German organism: no longer separate.

The Melting Pot

The Nazi dream: In order to bring men gradually nearer to each other, Hitler explained, they had to be thrown into the “great melting pot, the nation”—that they might be “purified and welded one to another.” Organizations promoting disunion or disintegration had to be uprooted and “all those must be ruthlessly eliminated who disturb this community."

The following passage (from a Hitler speech) contains the central idea that defined Nazism:

My Movement encompasses every aspect of the entire Volk. It conceives of Germany as a corporate body, as a single organism. There is no such thing as non-responsibility in this organic being, not a single cell which is not responsible, by its very existence, for the welfare and well-being of the whole. Thus in my view there is not the least amount of room for apolitical people.