I have presented data supporting this view, as well as analysis of this data (see Hitler’s Ideology, 2007; as well as my online publications, “Analysis of Metaphor” and “Ideology, Perception and Genocide”). The images and metaphors contained within his rhetoric defined Hitler’s ideology (“parasite” was only one of several “biological/medical metaphors” that appear endlessly in Nazi texts). Hitler’s ideology was contained within the metaphors he used to articulate and convey this ideology.

Musolff states that Hitler’s beliefs were, on the one hand, “absolutely fantastic,” the sort that ordinarily “only madmen have” (see Goldhagen, 1997). On the other hand, once one accepts Hitler’s premise that there is such a thing as a “national body”—and that this body has “fallen ill”—then the need to find a “cure” in order to destroy the parasite that caused this illness “appear uncontroversial.”

Having studied and been living with Hitler’s rhetoric for such a long time, I confess it no longer seems “fantastical.” Indeed, I imagine most historians feel the same way: everything that Hitler and the Nazis did revolved around the idea that the Jew was a “disease within the body politic” that had to be eliminated if the nation was to survive.

This idea first was presented in Hitler’s Ideology, and amplified in Robert Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (1986; 2000) and Robert Procter’s Racial Hygiene (1988). Since then, a flood of publications have developed this theme.

In contrast to certain analyses of Nazi imagery that view it as a “rhetorical trick” that was “instrumental to Hitler’s ideology and acted policy,” Musolff insists that the body-illness-parasite metaphor constituted not just a “propaganda ornament,” but was at the “core of Hitler’s racist ideology.” Hitler’s metaphors conveyed “fundamental cognitive processes.” The body-state metaphor was not a propaganda slogan, rather was an “integral part of the ideology that made the Holocaust happen.”

Consistent with Musolff’s perspective, Alex Bein suggests (in his classic essay “The Jewish Parasite”) that Nazi ideology appeared and took hold as a consequence of the repeated use of certain words and images that lead to “belief in the reality of a fantasy.”

In language, Bein explains, thoughts and conceptions are mirrored. Nazism crept into the flesh and blood of the masses by means of “single words, terms and phrases, and stock expressions” which, imposed upon the people a million times over in continuous reiteration, were “mechanically and unconsciously absorbed by them.”

The presentation of Jews as corroding and poison parasites as vermin, bacteria and bacilli—everywhere infecting and striving to destroy the body of the German people— “paralyzed any internal resistance on the part of the masses.” Paul de Lagarde’s metaphor of Jews as “bacilli not to be negotiated with but to be exterminated”: could—in the atmosphere of Bio-Mythology—“become a horrible reality.”

The denunciation of a group of people as parasites and one’s nation as body in danger of perishing, Musolff observes, were not vague or abstract descriptions, but “striking and spectacular.” Moreover, they were applied in a “horrifically ‘literal’ sense” by trying to “physically eliminate the Jewish people.” Nazi metaphors were not “mere” metaphors, but formed a discourse that was “non-literal and at the same time literal.” For Hitler, these metaphors “described reality.”

Given that Musolff is correct—that bodily metaphors and the idea of the Jewish parasite “framed” Nazi political discourse—we come to the fundamental question: how are we to understand the power of this metaphor? In her critique, Greenfeld returns to this question again and again: Why specifically did this metaphor (of the Jew as parasite) have such power? Why would this metaphor make it users “believe in assumptions they did not believe in earlier”—to the extent of participating in genocidal practice?

And a similar question: How (and why) were these metaphors chosen? Why did Hitler frame his ideology—convey his ideas—in terms of bodily metaphors? The idea that metaphor is a strategy of any kind, Greenfeld says, implies that these metaphors are “intentionally created by some mentally superior agent(s),” and are imposed on others who have “no power to resist them.” If Hitler was the strategist behind the anti-Semitic Nazi metaphors, we must “assume that he was a super brain.”

Musolff poses a question at the heart of the Holocaust: “How could a worldview based on the mapping of bio-medical onto socio-political concepts become so powerful and be taken so seriously that it turned into the reality of genocide and world war?” But, he does not answer it.

The best he can do is to conclude that Hitler’s metaphorical presentation of parasitic annihilation was a “natural, self-evident and necessary therapy for the existential problems of the German body politic” that “convinced the public of Hitler’s genocidal agenda.”

What were these “existential problems” that the parasitic metaphor sought to convey? How did genocide constitute a form of therapy? What was the “disease” from which Germany suffered—that allowed Hitler to put forth the idea of “killing Jews” as a cure for this disease?

Musolff, Greenfeld points out, assumes the effectiveness of Nazi metaphors, but does not explain their power. He is unable to account for the “extraordinary psychic appeal of Nazi anti-Semitic imagery;” its seeming “plausibility and conclusiveness.”

Why did many Germans resonate with Hitler’s ideas, and the metaphors he used to present them? How may we account for their capacity to generate radical forms of collective action? Why was Hitler so successful in propagating his “bio-social/political worldview”?