Boaz Neumann states (in “The Phenomenology of the German People’s Body”) that the German body politic—or Volkskörper—was “positioned at the center of the Nazi Weltanschauung;” was “perceived, understood and experienced in the Nazi world as a real, concrete body.”

The German body politic or Volkskörper, Neumann says, should be viewed as the manifestation of an “actual, concrete body.” In fact, the Nazis “understood and experienced this body in such a way”—in philosophy, politics, literature, the plastic arts, and stadium displays. Adolf Hitler and members of the party elite, Nazi philosophers, anthropologists, and experts in numerous other fields of inquiry—as well as the “man in the street”—all “reported on their concrete experience of this body.”

Indeed, Chapter I of my Hitler’s Ideology (2007) begins with “Table 1: The Country is a Living Organism.” In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote, “Our movement alone was capable of creating a natural organism.” He stated that Germany was “subject to exactly the same laws as all other human organisms.”

It is not a question of whether a nation actually “is” an organism, nor a question of whether one can “see” this organism. The point is that Hitler said that Germany was an organism, experienced the nation as an organism, and acted upon his understanding of the nation as an organism.