Hitler thrilled to these demonstrations. At the mass rallies at Nuremberg, Germany would cease being an “imagined community.” Germans would become “one:” massed together to create a single body controlled by Hitler’s will.

Hitler spoke to the German people in an impassioned tone, typically as follows:

One day you all come into this city, leaving your small villages, your market-towns, your cities, leaving your mines, your factories, and your ploughs. You come from the small world that surrounds your daily fight for existence that you may, once in a while, gain the feeling that now we are together; we are with him and he with us, and we are now German!

If a people is rent asunder, split up in classes, then it is essential that they should draw the right conclusions—that they should come to stand together, men of all ranks, all occupations, all classes, all walks of life, and form one column on the march. Then drum will join drum, flag join flag, then group will come to group, and then at last the united nation will follow the mighty column. The people which once was torn asunder, it will then in these columns see its leadership, then it will render to this leadership its obedience.

At these rallies, the forces working toward disunity or disintegration were overcome. One might say that the mass-rallies operated as a centripetal force, almost in a physical sense (Isaac Newton’s definition of centripetal being a “force by which bodies are drawn or impelled towards a point as to a centre.”).

Hitler was the center of Nazi Germany and used the mass-rallies to draw everyone around and into him. At the mass-rallies Hitler brought together the bodies of many German individuals—to create the one German body that he longed to see and experience.

These rallies would relieve the distress in Germany, Hitler said, by restoring the “consciousness of belonging together.” Germans would be “welded to one another” in order to form “single, closely united body.”

Writing in Hitler’s State Architecture (1990), Alex Scobie states that Hitler’s “vast stadia and assembly halls” were part of his plan to establish his domination over masses of people who could be molded into a single unified body” when enclosed in one all-embracing building.

The mass-rallies constituted Hitler’s methodology for creating and experiencing the body politic he longed for. Each human being massed closely next to another human being—was like a cell in a gigantic body. Each of these human beings or cells responded precisely to Hitler’s every utterance.

Liah Greenfeld poses the question: Was Hitler a “super-brain”? Indeed, many Germans responded as if Hitler was their brain—and they were his body (this is the meaning of “obedience unto death”).

Hitler’s central aspiration—perhaps the defining fantasy of National Socialism—was to unite the German people: to bring them together so that they constituted a single body, responsive to Hitler’s brain, or will.

Hitler declared that he was “sweeping together” all the forces of his people. From 68 million individual Germans there would arise a “single concentrated will, one conviction and one resolution.” Given that Germany was a single body united under a single will, Hitler imagined that she would become indestructible.