Alongside the idea of one’s nation is the idea of an enemy. Countries want and need enemies. Without an enemy, national life becomes puerile and meaningless. In the United States during the Nineties—after the fall of Communism—there was Jerry Springer, O. J. Simpson, Michael Jackson and Princess Di.

September 11 rescued Americans from this vacuous world, producing a new enemy the nation could battle. The existence of enemies threatening one’s nation gives rise to the need for a leader (to act as protector). Nations come alive when there are enemies with whom to do battle. Collective anxiety energizes. Paranoia generates national unity.

What is the underlying fantasy that supports and generates the idea of the nation? It is the dream of unity or union or oneness. This is the fantasy that spurred Lincoln to initiate the Civil War. This is the fantasy that compels China to insist that Taiwan must return to the Motherland. The dream of nationalism is that citizens shall be united to constitute a single, omnipotent body (politic). Belief in the existence of an evil enemy spurs national unity. People unite to do battle. Many become one.

Hitler’s aspiration was to unite the German people to create a single, indestructible body (see “Hitler’s Body and the Body Politic”). In the face of forces working toward fragmentation, Hitler insisted that the German people had to be brought to a “unity of spirit and will.” The precondition for relieving the distress in Germany, Hitler said, was restoration of the “consciousness of belonging together.”

To bring men nearer each other, they had to be thrown into the “great melting pot,” the nation, so that they could be “purified and welded to one another.” Hitler’s dream of Nazism was to melt or weld each and every German into a single body—with the Fuehrer as head of this body.

The other side of the coin of Hitler’s dream of national unity was his fantasy of national disintegration. Hitler observed that political divisiveness was causing the will and life-struggle of the German people to be “split into forty or fifty sections.” To achieve national unity, therefore, it was necessary to eliminate political organizations that worked toward “disunion and disintegration.” Hitler was determined to create a body politic as “hard as iron”—to unify the German people so that the nation could never again “break into pieces.”

Hitler took Germany’s defeat in the First World War personally. He was traumatized. It seemed to Hitler as if Germany, Western civilization, indeed the entire world, was falling apart. “Only rarely do the life of peoples,” Hitler declared, suffer such convulsions that the “deepest foundation of the social order” are shaken. Hitler believed that nations and peoples were in the midst of a struggle revolving around the “maintenance or annihilation of the whole inherited human order of civilization.”

Attempting to comprehend Germany’s collapse and the breakdown of civilization, Hitler identified “the Jew” as the cause. From this paranoid insight, all else followed. The Jew became the evil enemy whose existence would lead to the death of Germany and the destruction of civilization. To rescue Germany and civilization, Jews had to be eliminated from the face of the earth. Jews were identified as a force operating in opposition to German unity. Nazism and the Final Solution grew out of a rescue fantasy.

The ideology of nationalism is constructed based on a binary. On the one hand is one’s own country, conceived as absolutely good. On the other is the enemy, conceived as absolutely evil. Absolute goodness is imagined to be threatened by absolute evil. In order to rescue goodness from evil, the source of evil (the enemy) must be destroyed. Collective forms of violence grow out of a myth or fantasy projected into reality.

In the name of rescuing the good object from the bad, any and all actions deemed necessary to achieve this objective are justifiable. Hitler declared, “We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have performed the greatest deed in the world.” Think of any case of political violence: Does this statement by Hitler apply? Hitler and Nazism represent a paradigm rather than an anomaly.

Why did Hitler and the Nazis experience Jews as a mortal threat? There were 550,000 Jews in Germany in 1933 out of a population of 66 million, far less than 1% of the population. Jews constituted no threat to Germany. The Jews, however, contained a profound symbolic meaning for Hitler and other Nazis. To understand the Final Solution, we must decipher this symbolic meaning. What was the nature of the Jewish “force” that Hitler imagined was threatening to cause the destruction of Germany?

Nazism was an instantiation of the ideology of nationalism, revealing the narrative or template that defines this ideology. Perhaps history “has to happen in a certain way” (see Howard Stein). Perhaps historical phenomena represent the projection and enactment of shared fantasies. The central fantasy of nationalism is that of a good country threatened by an evil enemy. Collective forms of violence seek to protect goodness against badness.

We imagine that collective acts of violence grow out of events occurring in the external world; that violence is a dependent variable. But what if it works the other way around? I hypothesize that certain forms of historical action occur by virtue of our desire bring into being violent political events. We engage in acts of violence in order to generate national unity. Acts of violence mobilize the nation in a struggle against the enemy. Enemies and the struggle against them give rise to nations.

The case of Hitler and the Final Solution demonstrates how the idea of threat that requires profound forms of violence can be constructed out of a fantasy. Jews posed no danger to the German nation and people. Yet Hitler and other Nazis believed otherwise. They imagined that the existence of Jews would lead to the destruction of nations and civilizations. Jews symbolized that which had to be destroyed if Germany was to survive.