Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War Publisher: Library of Social Science Author: Richard A. Koenigsberg Paperback ISBN: 978-0915042234 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0915042241 For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discount rate, click here. “Koenigsberg’s ideas cut through conventional notions about culture, the nation, and war, enabling us to see human institutions in utterly new ways.” —Ruth Stein, author of  For Love of the Father “If a case can be made that nationalism is a religion, few books rival Koenigsberg’s  Nations Have the Right to Kill. The author confronts the taken-for-granted world of nationalism and political realism, and makes them seem utterly bizarre. The force of Koenigsberg’s contention leaves little doubt that in analyzing nationalism and warfare, we are treading on a sacred ground.” —Matthew Eddy,  Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

Hitler’s Official Programme (Feder, 1927/2013) inveighed against leaders of public life who worshipped “individualism” and whose sole incentive was “personal interest.” Goebbels contrasted the idealistic philosophy of National Socialism with the Jewish philosophy of “materialism and individualism.”

Hitler stated in Mein Kampf (1924) that what was unique about the Aryan was his willingness to abandon self-interest and transcend egoism in the name of surrendering to the community. What was most developed in the Aryan, Hitler said, was the self-sacrificing will to “give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s life for others.

The Jew by contrast, Hitler said, represented the “mightiest counterpart to the Aryan.” Whereas Aryans willingly sacrifice for a community, in the Jewish people the will to sacrifice did not go beyond the “naked instinct of self-preservation.”

The Jew lacked completely, according to Hitler, the most essential requirement for a cultured people: the “idealistic attitude.” The Jew’s “absolute absence of all sense of all sense of sacrifice” manifest itself as “cowardice.”

This was the central template out of which the Final Solution evolved: Aryan or good German = willingness to sacrifice for a national community. Jew = unwillingness or inability to sacrifice for a national community.

The penultimate form of sacrifice, according to Hitler, was willingness to die for a national community. Hitler defined nationalism as the willingness to act with a “boundless, all embracing love for the people” and if necessary to “die for it.”

The Aryan, Hitler said, willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community, and if the hour demands “even sacrifices himself.”