In Hitler's Ideology (1975/2007), I examine metaphors and images used by Hitler to describe the Jew, viewed as the source of disease, bacteria, virus or cancer; as a "parasite within the body of the people;" and as a force working toward the "disintegration" or "decomposition" of the nation. For Hitler, the Jew was an element within the body politic whose continued presence would lead to Germany’s demise.

From the beginning, the Jew was central in Nazi ideology. Hitler's Official Programme (first published in 1927) stated that anti-Semitism was the “emotional foundation” of the Nazi movement. The anti-Semite was one who recognized the “carrier of the national plague-germ and demands the expulsion of the Jew from our state.”

Hitler’s believed that his task as political leader was to alert the German people to the Jewish danger, and to remove this source of their suffering. In Mein Kampf (1923), Hitler observed that “every distress has some root or other.” It matters not, therefore, he said, “how many emergency regulations the Government issues—that I doctor around on the circumference of the distress and try from time to time to lance the cancerous ulcer.” Rather, Hitler declared, in order to be effective as a leader, it was necessary to “penetrate to the seat of the inflammation--to the cause.” Unless the irritating cause is discovered or removed, he said, “no cure is possible.”

Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) draws attention to the profound link between the behavior of the Nazis and their ideology, a connection that had been noted by Lucy Dawidowicz in The War against the Jews (1976/2010):

The mass murder of the Jews was the consummation of Hitler's fundamental beliefs and ideological conviction. The nexus between ideas and act has seldom been as evident in human history with such manifest consistency. Hitler's ideas about the Jews were at the center of his mental world. They shaped his worldview and his political ambitions, forming the matrix of his ideology and the core of National Socialist doctrine. Few ideas in world history achieved such a fatal potency. 

The Final Solution was undertaken as fulfillment of Hitler’s desire to destroy the Jewish race. Raoul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961-2003) remains one of the best sources providing a sense of what the process of extermination meant to those who carried it out. Hilberg describes the killing of the Jews as an “undertaking for its own sake;” an event “lived and lived through by its participants.”

As the destructive process unfolded, its requirements became more complex and its fulfillment involved an ever-larger number of agencies, party offices, business enterprises, and military commands. The destruction of the Jews was a total process, comparable in its diversity to a modern war, a mobilization, or a national reconstruction.

The killing of the Jews was an undertaking for its own sake; an event lived and lived through by its participants. The German bureaucracy could sense the enormity of the operation and displayed a fundamental comprehension of the task even when there were no explicit communications. The destruction process was described as "cleansing of Jews actions."

The destruction of the Jews was not a gainful operation. It imposed a strain upon the administrative machine and its facilities. In a wider sense, it became a burden that rested upon Germany as a whole. In the totality of the administrative process, the destruction of the Jews presented itself as an additional task to a bureaucratic machine that was already straining to fulfill the requirements of the battlefronts.

One need think only of the railroads, which served as the principal means for transporting troops, munitions, supplies and raw materials.  Every day, available rolling stock had to be allocated, and congested routes assigned for trains urgently requested by military and industrial users. Notwithstanding these priorities, no Jew was left alive for lack of transport to a killing center.

The killing centers or death camps were a massive institution created, organized and managed by human beings. Their fundamental purpose was to kill people. Steven Katz (1993) asks:

Has there ever been a comparable example of so much disciplined planning and modern technological know-how, so much specialization and concern with efficiency, being harnessed and used solely to murder a noncombatant civilian population, where a technology came into being and had its sole raison d’être the murder of a segment of one's own and then one's subject population?

An entire, sophisticated industry, and much of the energy of the German nation and its allies, were devoted solely to the production of corpses. Everything, from the making of trains to carry the victims, to the making of gas chambers to gas the victims, to ovens to burn the victims, to the communications that controlled the entire process, was the end product of a technologically advanced civilization which decided to turn its economy, as well as its inmost soul, over to manufacturing death.

Viewed through the lens of rationality, the Final Solution makes no sense. Jews represented no threat to Germany. Yet the Nazis spent vast amounts of resources in their effort to kill Jews. What a tremendous burden this project was for the people who carried it out—and how purposeless it seems to the outsider.

Hannah Arendt (1944/1994) observed that

Only people who are no longer ruled by the common motives of self-interest and common sense could indulge in convictions that for all immediate practical purposes (winning the war or exploitation of labor) were quite obviously self-defeating. Social scientists will have great difficulty understanding that behavior patterns and motives usually identified with human psychology are abolished or play a secondary role, that objective necessities conceived as the ingredients of reality itself could be neglected.

Observed from the outside, victim and persecutor look as though they were both insane and the interior life of the camps reminds the onlooker of nothing so much as an insane asylum. Our common sense, trained in utilitarian thinking, is offended by nothing so much as by the complete senselessness of a world where punishment persecutes the innocent more than the criminal, where labor does not result and is not intended to result in products, where crimes do not benefit and are not even calculated to benefit their authors.

Similarly, Ronald Aronson (1984):

The functionalist bias of most systematic thought assumes that there is a reason for every societal act, a more or less rational intention behind political action. It offends the intellect to suggest that there is no reason behind a major policy--or that indeed its reason is profoundly and systematically irrational.

How is one to understand this social institution—created by the Nazis—that seemed to have no rational purpose?