Nazism as Nationalism
(Call for a book-reviewer)

Everything Hitler did, he did in the name of Germany—his beloved nation. Hitler is thought of as an aberration. But his actions proceeded based on the most common ideology of them all. Nazism was patriotism on steroids. Hitler swallowed the ideology of nationalism—hook, line and sinker—and carried forth its premises to an extreme, bizarre conclusion.

The Jewish Enemy

The ideology of nationalism requires an “enemy.” The enemy is an other nation or group that is conceived as wishing to destroy one’s own nation. Political violence frequently grows out of the desire to protect one’s country from a nation or group that is imagined to be working toward the destruction of one’s nation. Nationalism is constituted by a rescue fantasy.

Hitler conceived Jews as a force of disintegration (Zersetzung) whose continued existence would lead to the death of Germany—indeed to the dissolution of all nations. The Final Solution—as well as war against the Soviet Union—sought to remove the “Jewish enemy” (see Jeffrey Herf) from the face of the earth. According to Hitler and his colleagues, the survival of the German Reich—and Western civilization—required destruction of the Jew.

Death to the Non-Believers

Jews posed no actual threat to Germany. The Nazi project was based on a phantasmagoria. However, the Jew possessed a profound symbolic meaning for Hitler and the Nazis. My book seeks to uncover what the term or word “Jew” meant to Hitler and the Nazis. I found that Hitler conceived of Jews as a class of people who did not love Germany enough; people who refused to or were incapable of attaching themselves to a national community. The free-floating, selfish, “individualistic” Jew was imagined to be working to undermine or destroy the very concept of nationhood.

Well before 9/11, I encapsulated my understanding of Nazi violence with the phrase “death to the non-believer.” Hitler was enraged by the idea that some people did not worship Germany as he did. Jews were conceived as infidels who would not embrace the grand and glorious Nazi dream of a perfectly united nation. The Final Solution was terrorism on a cosmic scale, declaring: “Death to the non-believers.”

Dying for a Country is not Sweet and Beautiful

People glorify the heroism of soldiers. Ordinarily, we think of submission to the nation-state as honorable and noble: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Nazism represented apotheosis of submission to the nation-state. German soldiers were asked to be “obedient unto death.” The German soldier was expected to willingly give over his life to his country.

Hitler insisted that Jews also give over their lives to Germany. But no one would claim that what occurred in the gas chambers was honorable and noble. The Jew in the death camp depicts the horrific fate of a body that has been given over entirely to a nation-state. The Holocaust existed in order to strip us of the illusion that it is sweet and fitting to die for a country.

I would be happy if a reader of our Newsletter reviewed Nations Have the Right to Kill. Please send an email to rakoenigsberg@earthlink.net expressing your interest. Of course, the final choice of a reviewer will be made by Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.

With best regards,

Richard Koenigsberg