Freud’s concept of the death instinct points to the fact that, although we human beings are embedded within a symbolic order, finally we (like all other animals) are organisms and therefore inevitably move toward our demise.

Freud observed that the life instinct acts to “preserve living substance and join it into ever larger units.” We also, however, possess a death instinct, an internal force working to “dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic states.” 

 The aim of the life instinct, Freud said, is to establish “ever-greater unities and to preserve them,” to “bind together,” whereas the aim of the death instinct is to “undo connections and so destroy things.”

In the multicellular living organism, Freud observed, the libido meets the death instinct working to “disintegrate this cellular being and bring each elemental primary organism into a condition of inorganic stability.”

The life or sexual instincts active in each cell “take the (other) cells as their object,” partly "neutralizing the death instinct in these cells,” thus preserving the life or the organism. In other words, the life instinct holds together "portions of living substance” within each organism, neutralizing the other force working to “disintegrate the cellular being.”

The life instinct prevents the organism from falling into a condition of “inorganic stability."

Based on a lifetime of research (see, for example, Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology), I have found that Adolf Hitler developed and put forth a theory astonishingly similar to the one put forth by Freud.

The maintenance of the life of the German body politic was the fundamental objective of Hitler's political career. Or one might say that killing Jews was the fundamental objective of Hitler's political career. 

Actually, maintaining the life of the German body politic and killing Jews were two sides of the same coin. Hitler identified Jews as Germany's death instinct, that is, the death instinct operating within the German body politic.

 In his writings and speeches, Hitler described Jews as “no element of organization” but rather a “disintegrator of people.” The presence of Jews within the German body politic, Hitler said, was the cause of the “falling to pieces of the organic structure of the nation.”

Freud understood the death instinct as a force working within bodies to “dissolve living units and bring them back to their inorganic states.” Hitler, similarly, divined a process within the German body politic threatening to “dissolve the people into its basic elements.

At mass rallies, Rudolph Hess often described the Fuehrer with the words “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.”

Hitler profoundly identified his own body with the German body politic. I would say he relocated his body within the German body politic. Consequently, he experience his own death instinct in the form of a projection, his belief that Germany was disintegrating.

Living organisms gradually disintegrate (age) and subsequently cease to exist. This is our fate. Hitler aspired to create a unique kind of organism, the German nation, an organism that did not contain a death instinct (would not disintegrate) and consequently was capable of living forever (or at least for a thousand years).

 Hitler projected his death instinct into the Jew. His life's work, consequently, was to defeat Germany's death instinct, that is, the force of disintegration he imagined was operating within the German body politic.

The "final solution" was Hitler's solution to the problem of death. Killing Jews was necessary in order to destroy Germany's death instinct. Hitler's project was to kill that force within the nation that was leading to the nation's demise. He aspired to shape Germany into an organism that did not contain a force of disintegration (the Jew), and therefore would never die.

But killing every Jew in the world was, of course, an "impossible dream." And as long as a Jew existed on the face of the earth, the death instinct would continue to exist, and finally, would prevail.