The Jew in the death camp symbolized the idea of the oppressed soldier. Hitler presented a DEMONSTRATION of the abject condition of the soldier; an enactment that depicted the soldier’s experience in the First World War.

 HITLER: THE BASIC QUOTE: “If I don’t mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood, then I have naturally the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin.”

 Same quote translated in Joachim Fest’s HITLER (1975):  “Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?”

  If he had the “right” to destroy his own soldiers, if he was endowed with this right as leader of a great nation, did he not have the same right to send Jews to their deaths. Hitler thinks: “If I can send my soldiers to die, why can’t I send Jews to die as well.” The logic of the Holocaust becomes clear at the moment we recognize that leaders send the soldiers to die. And Hitler understood this—and built upon this insight. Almost as if the Holocaust was a satire of war: where the awfulness of mass-murder in warfare (nine-million dead in the First World War) is laid bare.

 Binding & Hoche: “If one thinks of a battlefield covered with thousands of dead youth and contrasts this with our institutions for the feebleminded with their solicitude for their living patients—then one would be deeply shocked by the glaring disjunction between the sacrifice of the most valuable possession of humanity on one side and on the other the greatest care of being who are not only worthless but even manifest negative value.”

 WHY DOES THE STATE SEND THE BEST OF MEN, THE HEALTHIEST TO DIE, WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST COMPUNCTION, and then spend so much money and energy taking care of those who are worthless?

 The thing “hidden since the beginning of the world (Girard)” is how society relies on the soldier as a sacrificial victim, who models himself after Christ--submitting to the god, society. To “awaken from the nightmare of history” is to show how we societies sacrifice the bodies soldiers in war.

 In killing Jews, the Nazis externalized and replicated their own masochistic obedience, portraying an extreme version of what occurs when the body of the individual is under the absolute control of the state.

 Hitler understood that waging war meant sending German soldiers into battle--where there was a substantial probability that they would be killed. Hitler generated the Final Solution based on the following logic: If  I have the right as commander-in-chief  to send the best human beings, German soldiers, to their deaths, why do I not have the right to send Jews, the worst human beings, mortal enemies of the German people to their deaths?

 Hitler reenacted his own experience of the First World War in the death camps, recreating the horror and abjectness, now inflicting it upon someone else. He could not bear to say that this is what his own nation had done to the young soldiers, to acknowledge the utter cruelty of it.

 This romanticizing of the Volk, making love and death into a single idea, lies at the horrible heart of Nazism. The dream revolved around Hitler’s denial mechanism: his refusal to acknowledge the ugliness and degradation of his experience in the First World War, and the fact that it was caused by his own nation and its leaders.

 What is depicted in the Holocaust is the ugliness of sacrificial submission to the state. Hitler reveals or enacts the true condition of the soldier in battle, depicts what happened to him and the other German soldiers in the First World War.

 Freud (1914): "The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.”