Thanatopolitics & Absolute Victims. According to Richard Koenigsberg, Hitler and his men expected Germany to conform to the law of the immune system, and it did so. In the same way any other organism singled out and recognized cells foreign to it and automatically destroyed them, so did the German body politic.

At the heart of the National Socialist ideology, there apparently lay the conviction that the German nation, as a real political body, was suffering from a disease caused by a potentially deadly infection—triggered by infectious agents that were identifiable with the Jewish microorganism.

"Fascinated by the power of these corporeal fantasies, Hitler and his followers conceived their mission as a sequence of therapeutic phases. After an accurate, but ruthless, diagnosis of the disease, they had to act according to the most rigorous, scientific logic of cause and effect, without shirking the weight of their responsibility for the treatment.

At various points in his speeches and writings, the Fuhrer used the idea of Germany as a real organic body. Dazzled by the power of the metaphor, he continually returned to the relationship between cell and body: it was an inextricable bond that charged every cell with the responsibility for the health of the whole."