Freud’s concept of the death instinct points to the fact that whatever symbols human beings may construct, organisms inevitably move toward their demise. While organisms possess a life instinct working to “preserve living substance and join it into ever larger units,” living creatures also possess an internal force working to “dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic states.” 

Each of us is breaking down, day by day. You can feel it in your body and in your bones.

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

In the multicellular living organism, 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, Freud said, “take the (other) cells as their object.” They “partly neutralize the death instinct in these cells,” thus preserving their life.

The life instinct acts to "hold together portions of living substance within each organism," neutralizing that other force working to “disintegrate the cellular being.” The life instinct prevents organisms from falling into a condition of “inorganic stability.”

One discovers, with astonishment, that Hitler’s description of the struggle occurring within Germany was remarkably similar to Freud's description of the struggle occurring within each human body. It would appear that Hitler projected the experience of his own death instinct into the German body politic. He described Jews as “no element of organization,” but rather a “disintegrator of peoples” whose presence acted to bring about the “falling to pieces of the organic structure of the nation.”

While Freud understood the death instinct as a force working to “dissolve living units and bring them back to their inorganic states,” Hitler divined a process within the nation threatening to “dissolve the German people into its basic elements.” Hitler projected his own death instinct into the Jew. The Jew became Germany's death instinct. Unless actions were taken against this group, the Jew would lead to the "disintegration of Germany."

The purpose of German concentration (death) camps...was to destroy Germany's death instinct, that is, to destroy the Jewish death instinct whose presence within the nation would lead to Germany's disintegration. 

Rudolf Hess often declared at mass rallies, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Hitler identified his own body with the German body politic, relocating his body into the body politic. Hitler experienced his own death instinct in the form of his belief that the German nation was disintegrating.

Each living organism inevitably disintegrates and dies.  What was Hitler's aspiration, the center of his being and the source of the Nazi project? To forge Germany as a unique kind of organism that did not contain a death instinct and therefore was capable of living forever. His deepest aspiration was to kill Jews, thus eliminating Germany's death instinct and forging a body politic that would never die, the "eternal German Reich.

Hitler’s odyssey constituted a struggle to defeat the death instinct,  that is, to kill every Jew on the planet, thus overcoming the death instinct or force of disintegration which he imagined was working to destroy Germany and the entire world. He aspired to shape Germany into a unique organism that did not contain Jews--the death instinct or force of disintegration--creating an organism or body politic which could live forever.

Hitler's desire and for eternal life, however, was hopeless. Death comes to each of us. Even Frank Sinatra has disintegrated. The death instinct is always victorious.