PART IV of: Nationalism, Nazism—Genocide
by Richard A. Koenigsberg
CONTENTS
- The Hypothesis
- Nazism and the Ideology of Nationalism
- Hitler’s Ideology
- Nazi Ideology
- The Dream of Nazism as the Dream of Nationalism
- Conclusion
IV. NAZI IDEOLOGY
My initial research on Nazi ideology focused on Hitler’s rhetoric. I subsequently turned to the writings of other Nazi leaders to develop a general theory of the relationship between ideology and fantasy. I had discovered a coherent fantasy at the root of Hitler’s ideology. Would it be possible to discern a similar fantasy within the rhetoric of other Nazi ideologues?
Robert J. Lifton’s book, The Nazi Doctors (1986) provides evidence that the fantasy that drove Hitler’s thinking drove the thinking of other Nazis as well. Lifton spent several years interviewing 29 men who had been significantly involved at high levels with Nazi medicine. Lifton’s reconstruction of the deep-structure of Nazi ideology is based upon these interviews, combined with analysis of written accounts, documents, speeches, diaries, and letters.
The central fantasy uncovered by Lifton was that of the German nation as an organism that could succumb to an illness. Lifton cites Dr. Johann S. who spoke about being “doctor to the Volkskorper (‘national body’ or ‘people’s’ body).” National Socialism, Dr. Johann S. said, is a movement rather than a party, constantly growing and changing according to the “health” requirements of the people’s body. “Just as a body may succumb to illness,” the doctor declared, so “the Volkskorper could do the same.”
When Lifton asked another doctor, Fritz Klein, how he could reconcile the concentration camps with his Hippocratic Oath to save lives, he replied “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”
Lifton mentioned this phrase “gangrenous appendix” to another Nazi, Dr. B., who quickly answered that his overall feeling and that of the other Nazi doctors was that “Whether you want to call it an appendix or not, it must be extirpated (ausgerottet, meaning also “exterminated,” “destroyed,” “eradicated”).
A number of Nazi doctors interviewed by Lifton expressed a fantasy, then, that closely resembled the fantasy that I uncovered as the core Hitler’s ideology. In this Nazi fantasy, the nation is conceived as a gigantic organism. Jews are imagined as diseased entities within this organism whose presence might cause the body politic to die. According to this Nazi fantasy, preventing the death of the German organism required the “removal” of these diseased entities.
Let me provide additional examples of Nazi rhetoric revealing this fantasy of (to use Lifton’s phrase) “killing as a therapeutic imperative”). Dr. Werner Best, Heydrich’s deputy in the Secret Police Office stated that the National Socialist State was an institution that “carefully supervises the political health of the German body politic.” The Nazi state, Best said, was quick to recognize all symptoms of disease and germs of destruction and to “remove them by every suitable means.”
In a Table Talk in 1942, Hitler referred to the transport of Jews to the eastern regions by asking what possible objection could be raised when in the interest of the state an “obvious canker of the people has to be eliminated.”
In 1943 when the policy of the gas chambers was operative, Hitler said to the Hungarian Regent Horthy that Jews should be treated like “tubercles which can infect a healthy body.” Nobody could call this cruelty, he said, considering the necessity of killing "innocent creatures of nature like hares and roes to prevent them from causing damage.”
Goebbels put it this way: “Our task here is surgical; drastic incisions, or someday Europe will perish of the Jewish disease.” Hans Frank, General Governor of Poland during the Nazi occupation, called Jews “a lower species of life, a kind of vermin, which upon contact infected the German people with deadly diseases.” When the Jews in the area he ruled had been killed, he declared, “Now a sick Europe will become healthy again.”
Finally, on February 22, 1942, Hitler made the following astonishing statement: “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle we are engaged in is of the same sort as the battle waged during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch.”
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 were a response to this fantasy, an enactment. 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 a fantasy contained within their ideology.
Hitler in Mein Kampf plaintively asks, “Could anyone believe that Germany alone was not subject to the same laws as all other human organisms?” In their influential book that laid the groundwork for what was to follow—The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life (1920)—German professors Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche advocated euthanasia or state killing. They described the state as an “organism with its own laws and rights, much like one self-contained human organism” which “in the interest of the welfare of the whole abandons and rejects parts or particles that have become worthless or dangerous.”
What was this organismic “law” to which these men alluded? I hypothesize they were referring to the “law" of the immune system, that bio-chemically based system operative within each organism acting automatically to “reject” entities that enter the body and are identified as foreign or “not self.”
The Final Solution enacted an immunological fantasy. According to this Nazi fantasy, genocide represented the “automatic” response of the German body politic to a “law of nature:” the national organism reacting to reject or destroy those alien cells (e. g., Jewish bacteria) that had entered its bloodstream.
The Final Solution and death camps, then, 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.”
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