The Nazi state distributed the sovereign power to kill across all citizens

Evidence

Hitler frequently commented on the relationship between state and party, and always emphasized that not the state, but the race, or the “united folk community,” was of primary importance (cf. the afore-quoted speech, reprinted as annex to the Tischgespräche). In his speech at the Nuremberg Parteitag of 1935, he gave this theory its most succinct expression: “It is not the state that commands us, but we who command the state.” It is self-evident that, in practice, such powers of command are possible only if the institutions of the party remain independent from those of the state. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2780 (#expands, via linked claim)

One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control. But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer? Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? War, after all, is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 7 (#expands, via linked claim)

I suggest in the conclusion that the Holocaust was an outcome of a unique encounter between factors by themselves quite ordinary and common; and that the possibility of such an encounter could be blamed to a very large extent on the emancipation of the political state, with its monopoly of means of violence and its audacious engineering ambitions, from social control – following the step-by-step dismantling of all non-political power resources and institutions of social self-management. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 29 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Nazi law claimed retroactive global jurisdiction over all peoples — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 932; Deliberately vague Nazi orders relied on subordinates inferring violent intent beyond their literal words.; The Nazi race concept was deliberately kept supranational to license internal extermination (+6 more)

Related

• Nazi ideology subordinated the state to the racial folk community (similarity 0.84)
• Nazism exploited a breakdown of state worship, not excessive state-worship. (similarity 0.82)
• The Nazi race concept was deliberately kept supranational to license internal extermination (similarity 0.81)
• Pan-German ideology replaced universal humanity with tribal solidarity (similarity 0.80)
• Nazi law claimed retroactive global jurisdiction over all peoples (similarity 0.79)
• Nazism inverted the Prussian ideal by prioritizing party membership over state office (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Nazi ideology subordinated the state to the racial folk community #expands (0.82) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2780
• War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill. #expands (0.78) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 7
• The Holocaust resulted from an unchained state wielding violence and engineering ambitions #contradicts (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 29
• Totalitarian rule replaces external coercion with domination from within each person #expands (0.72)