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This paper is an idiosyncratic psychoanalytic interpretation of the main motives of the Nazis for their actions. The author suggests that the Nazis' preoccupation with soil, earth, and nature was a way to seek a "union with mother." Jews and non-Aryans had to be eradicated because they were obstacles to such a direct union. She holds that Nazi ideology contained very little symbolic mediation between man and the universe. Racism was a "body" fantasy which promoted the actualization of murder. She quotes extensively from Hitler's Mein Kampf. The German soul, detached from Judeo-Christian morality, found fulfillment in German paganism, i.e., a conflict-free fusion with mother earth. On an archaic oedipal level, the Jew was the father, the moralist, who interfered with this union. He therefore had to be eliminated. A regression to the anal stage of morality took place. Jews were gassed in pseudowashrooms with Zyklon B gas, an insecticide. The author's main point is that Hitler's thinking was wholly concretistic, barely a step away from the corporeal.
Chasseguet-Smirgel describes Lanzmann's film, Shoah, as a "blind spot" into which