Books such as Hitler’s Ideology (Koenigsberg, 1975), The Nazi Doctors (Lifton, 1986), Racial Hygiene (Proctor, 1988) and The Racial State (Burleigh, 1991) established that the Final Solution was rooted in a biological fantasy: Jews were conceived as a “disease within the body of the people” that had to be removed or destroyed if Germany was to survive.

Mineau’s SS Thinking and the Holocaust extends our understanding of the impact of this biological fantasy, demonstrating that war against the Soviet Union – like the Holocaust – was undertaken to destroy the source of a disease that Hitler and other Nazis imagined was acting to bring about the demise of Western civilization. Mineau suggests that the Holocaust and the war against Russia – Operation Barbarossa – were two sides of the same coin.

The Nazis embraced and embarked upon their “Final Solution” with a sense of righteousness. Heinrich Himmler famously declared at a meeting of SS Major-Generals on October 4, 1943, that the Nazi leadership had “the moral right, the duty, to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us.”

Why did the Nazis believe that it was necessary to destroy the Jews? What was the logic of mass-murder? Mineau says that everything began with the idea of the German Volk, the immortal German community: the “blood flow that comes from eternity and leads to eternity.”

Hitler explained to his people, “you are nothing, your nation is everything.” The Volk, Mineau says, was the focus of “ontological value,” as compared to the individual. The Volk transcended empirical existence. One SS author expounded: “Fight for the future of your blood! You are immortal in your Volk.”

What was the Jew? The Jew represented that which acted to destroy the Volk. The Volk could be eternal – provided it cared for its existence. What threatened the being of the Volk – worked toward its destruction – was the Jew. SS thinking conceived the very existence of Jewry, Mineau points out, as a “lethal bacteria threatening the Volk’s body with decay and ruin.”

How are we to understand Hitler’s “foreign policy”? Why did he attack the Soviet Union in the midst of the Battle of Britain? From a strategic perspective, it would have made sense for Germany to have completed the war in the West – conquered Great Britain – and then turn to Russia.

Andreas Hillgruber shows (1981) that – from the beginning of his career – Hitler was intent upon destroying the source of “Jewish Bolshevism” in the Soviet Union. Hitler feared the “inundation by disease bacilli which at the moment have their breeding ground in Russia” (in Hitler’s Second Book, 1928/2006). The conquest of Russia, Hillgruber says, was for Hitler inextricably linked with the extermination of these “bacilli.”

Indeed, Hillgruber says, the racist component of Hitler’s thought was so closely interwoven with the central political element of his program, the conquest of European Russia, that “Russia’s defeat and the extermination of the Jews were – in theory and later in practice – inseparable for him.”

The focus of SS Thinking and the Holocaust is to establish the important point that Germany’s war against the Soviet Union originated and was carried out in the name of a biological ideology. And that the objective of this war was identical to that of the Holocaust: to exterminate “Jewish Bolshevik bacteria.”

The intended war against the Soviet Union was officially discussed by Hitler on March 30, 1941, during a speech to top Wehrmacht commanders. Hitler made it clear that his intent was to eliminate ideological enemies. General Franz Halder noted the essentials:

Clash of two ideologies. Crushing denunciation of Bolshevism, identified with asocial criminality … A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of extermination … War against Russia: Extermination of the Bolshevist commissars and the Communist intelligentsia … We must fight against the poison of disintegration. Commissars and GPU men are criminals and must be dealt with as such … This war will be very different from the war in the West. … Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.

War against the Soviet Union, Mineau suggests, was absolute or total because what was at stake was not a “particular pool of resources,” but “Truth” and “The Good” – about which no compromise was possible. The ultimate good consisted of “preserving the body politic or Volk against threats understood in terms of disease.” Politics sought to achieve “social hygiene.”

Operation Barbarossa, Mineau says, was the ultimate fulfillment of the Nazi ideology of health, a “large-scale and multifaceted sanitary operation in the sick and evil world of Untermenschen.” Barbarossa was the Nazi’s attempt at “eliminating threats and sources of disease, the most lethal one being Jewry.” Confronted with the pervasiveness of biological evil, Nazism was the “politics of hypochondria.”

Mineau concludes that Barbarossa would be no ordinary military operation because it was to be “grounded on ideology as makeshift biology.” The Holocaust “would be and was intended to be an essential dimension in the upcoming war.” The war against Russia was a dimension of the Holocaust, and the Holocaust was a form of war. Each (or both) may be understood as a “single gigantic sanitary operation,” an “anti-biotic operation” whose purpose was to “control the spread of an infectious disease, which lay in the existence of the Jewish people.”

Of course, Jews were not bacteria, and the threat they posed to civilization was located in the mind of Hitler and the Nazis. The war against the Soviet Union was based upon a fantasy, one that was acted upon – and caused the death of tens of millions of people.

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, Library of Social Science
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

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