Hitler identified Germany with his own body: his body became a body politic. Nationalism represents an expansion of the self: one’s body is equated with an entire body of territory.

Hitler conceived the Jew as a disease within the body politic. Germany’s disease was Hitler’s disease. He experienced the Jew as a body within his own body.

What was this disease within Hitler’s body? Nothing more or less than the German nation. The Jew was the negative experience of this gigantic body bound to—within—Hitler’s body. What an enormous burden to have an entire nation contained within oneself!

Hitler insisted that each and every German bind their body to the German body politic—to create an enormously powerful national organism. If Germans fused together like a single block of steel—this would create an indestructible body that no one could tear asunder.

Nazism was devotion to the health of Germany. The life of the body politic was more significant than the bodies of individuals. Nazism was nationalism carried to the nth power. Reductio ad absurdum.

Hitler revealed the dream of nationalism for what it is: A shared fantasy about a gigantic body. An entire body of territory is equated with one’s own body.

Hitler—like most fanatic nationalists—believed his nation to be in a process of deterioration—had fallen into decline. Hitler’s mission was to restore Germany’s health—make her great again.

Even as Hitler believed in the greatness of Germany, he imagined she was weak—disintegrating. Nazi ideology was a rescue fantasy seeking to restore Germany to her rightful place as a powerful nation—by removing from within the sources of her decline.

Radical nationalism is always a moral crusade: violence in the name of virtue. Destruction is conceived as goodness: eliminate the causes of weakness in order to restore the nation’s health. To rescue a nation is to rescue oneself.