According to Hitler, civilization grows out of the willingness of individuals to sacrifice for the community. Hitler believed that, in the words of Carolyn Marvin, “blood sacrifice maintains the nation.” The self-sacrificing will to “give one’s own life for others,” he said, was “most strongly developed in the Aryan,” who willingly subordinated his life to the life of the community and, “if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.”

The Jew, on the other hand, represented the “mightiest counterpart to the Aryan.” Jews, Hitler believed, lacked “idealism”—the most “essential requirement for a cultured people.” The fundamental characteristic of the Jew was his unwillingness to abandon “personal interest”—to sacrifice for Germany, or any nation.

Realistically, Jews posed no threat to Germany. Their “threat” lay entirely on the symbolic plane. Jews were conceived as unable or unwilling to sacrifice for nations. In the absence of a willingness to sacrifice, the German nation (and every other nation) might cease to exist.

Germany surrendered and World War I ended on November 11, 1918. Hitler insisted (on June 26, 1944) that “Another 1918 will never come.” Anyone “merely thinking such a thought will be destroyed.” Jews were imagined to be thinking such thoughts. It was the idea of surrender, that is, the cessation of sacrificial death—that Hitler sought to destroy.

Jews were conceived as proponents of the pacifist impulse not to sacrifice; people who did not believe in the “goodness” of countries—and who did not believe they were worth dying for. Hitler sought to kill off or destroy this pacifist impulse.

As long as blood sacrifice continued, Germany would continue to exist. Rudolf Hess crystallized the Nazi fantasy of the preservation of the nation through blood sacrifice: “The stream of blood which flows for Germany is eternal—the sacrifice of German men for their Volk is eternal—therefore Germany will also be eternal.”