Ernest Becker hypothesized (in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil) that denial of death is the source of culture building and creation of ideological systems. Human beings attach desperately to symbolic systems  promising one will “live on” after one dies. The ego attaches to an ideology, equating self-perpetuation with perpetuation of the ideology. We bind to “immortality systems” and defend them hysterically and violently.

For Hitler, Germany was the immortal object with which he identified. Denial of death took the form of attempting to forge an indestructible body politic that could live forever. Ordinary organisms break down or disintegrate. The Nazis imagined they could shape a German nation that could become a different kind of organism.

But Germany contained, like all bodies, a death instinct, which was identified as "the Jew" lurking within the body politic. The Holocaust was the struggle to destroy the death instinct, the Jew. If the Jewish death instinct was destroyed or eliminated, Germany could live forever.