Nietzsche and the Nazis Read online

  Nietzsche and the Nazis

  A Personal View

  Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

  Ockham’s Razor Publishing

  © Stephen Hicks, 2006, 2010

  Nietzsche and the Nazis documentary created by N2 Productions and published by Ockham’s Razor Publishing in 2006. ISBN: 9492262049. ASIN: B000JMJQGS

  Nietzsche and the Nazis book published by Ockham’s Razor Publishing in 2010. ISBN: 978-0-9794270-7-7

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design, book design, and layout by Christopher Vaughan. Cover art

  © Christopher Vaughan, 2010

  10 11 12 13 14 15 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition First Digital Printing

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data pending

  Hicks, Stephen R. C., 1960-

  Nietzsche and the Nazis / Stephen Hicks.

  Includes bibliographic references.

  ISBN: 978-0-9794270-7-7 (cloth)

  ISBN: (paper)

  1. Title. 2. History, German. 3. Socialism—History. 4. National Socialism. 5. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900).

  Table of Contents

  Part 1. Introduction: Philosophy and History

  1. Fascinated by history

  2. What is philosophy of history?

  Part 2. Explaining Nazism Philosophically

  3. How could Nazism happen?

  4. Five weak explanations for National Socialism

  5. Explaining Nazism philosophically

  Part 3. National Socialist Philosophy

  6. The Nazi Party Program

  7. Collectivism, not individualism

  8. Economic socialism, not capitalism

  9. Nationalism, not internationalism or cosmopolitanism

  10. Authoritarianism, not liberal democracy

  11. Idealism, not politics as usual

  12. Nazi democratic success

  Part 4. The Nazis in Power

  13. Political controls

  14. Education

  15. Censorship

  16. Eugenics

  17. Economic controls

  18. Militarization

  19. The Holocaust

  20. The question of Nazism’s philosophical roots

  Part 5. Nietzsche’s Life and Influence

  21. Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?

  22. God is dead

  23. Nihilism’s symptoms

  24. Masters and slaves

  25. The origin of slave morality

  26. The overman

  Part 6. Nietzsche against the Nazis

  27. Five differences

  28. On the “blond beast” and racism

  29. On contemporary Germans: the world’s hope or contemptible?

  30. On anti-Semitism: valid or disgusting?

  31. On the Jews: admirable or despicable?

  32. On Judaism and Christianity: opposite or identical?

  33. Summary of the five differences

  Part 7. Nietzsche as a Proto-Nazi

  34. Anti-individualism and collectivism

  35. Conflict of groups

  36. Instinct, passion, and anti-reason

  37. Conquest and war

  38. Authoritarianism

  39. Summary of the five similarities

  Part 8. Conclusion: Nazi and Anti-Nazi Philosophies

  40. Hindsight and future resolve

  41. Principled anti-Nazism

  Part 9. Appendices

  Appendix 1: NSDAP Party Program

  Appendix 2: Quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism

  Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism

  Appendix 4: Quotations on German militarism

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Part 1. Introduction: Philosophy and History

  1. Fascinated by history

  Think about why we are fascinated by history. All of those outstanding individuals and exotic peoples. The rise and fall of civilizations—and wondering why that happens. How did classical Greece achieve its Golden Age—the age of Socrates and Pericles, Euripides and Hippocrates? What explains the remarkable confluence of so many outstanding individuals in one era?

  Why, almost two thousand years later, did the Italian Renaissance happen? Leonardo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Raphael—again an incredible outpouring of genius in the arts, sciences, and politics.

  Jumping ahead three centuries: What made possible the Industrial Revolution and its awesome outpouring of productivity? The ancient Chinese and the ancient Romans made impressive technological advancements—but nothing on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. Why did the Industrial Revolution first take root initially in England and Scotland? Why not in Burma or Botswana?

  Or what, by contrast, explains major historical declines? Why did the Roman Empire collapse? The most powerful civilization of the ancient world imploded and became defenseless before successive waves of barbarian invasion. And before the Romans, the powerful military empires of the Hittites, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians also collapsed. Is there a common pattern at work here?

  Why did the French Revolution go so horribly wrong, descending in a reign of paranoia, fratricide, and terror? Why, by contrast, did the American Revolution, in many ways fighting the same kind of battle and subject to the same desperate pressures, not go the same self-destructive route? How, a century and a half later, could the most educated nation in Europe become a Nazi dictatorship?

  All these questions raise issues of dramatic historical change, for better or worse. But we can also ask questions about long periods during which no dramatic changes took place. Consider the San people of the Kalahari area in Southern Africa, sometimes called Bushmen. Experts estimate that for 10,000 years the San have lived the same way for generation after generation. Let us put that in perspective. If a generation is twenty-five years or so, then 10,000 years means 400 generations of sameness. By contrast, it has been only about twenty generations since Columbus crossed the Atlantic—and consider how much has changed in Europe and the Americas since then.

  Yet even the 10,000 years of the San people is dwarfed by the estimated 35,000 years that the Aborigines of Australia have existed in essentially the same way generation after generation. 35,000 years ago is approximately when Neanderthal Man was becoming extinct. Why did the cultures of the San and the Aborigines not change for such unimaginably long stretches of time?

  2. What is philosophy of history?

  These are fascinating questions. As historians we study interesting individuals and cultures to understand how they lived, why they lived the way they did, and what impact they had on the course of human events. As philosophers we think more broadly and abstractly. We learn our lessons from the historians and ask: Are there broader explanations we can find in the dramatic rises and falls of cultures, or in the static nature of others?

  History, from this perspective, is a huge laboratory of experiments in human living. Some of those experiments have been wildly successful, some have achieved middling results, leading their cultures to eke out an existence across the generations—and some have been outright disasters, causing misery and death on a large scale. Can we identify the fundamental causes at work? Can we learn why some cultures flourish while others stagnate, collapse, or descend into horror? Is there a moral to the story of history?

  Let us turn to one major experiment, one that turned out to be one of the darkest eras in human history.

  Part 2. Explaining Nazism Philosophically

  3. How could Nazism happen?

  How could Nazism happen? This is an important question: professors and teachers the world over use the Nazis as a prime example of evil and rightly so. The Nazis were enormously destructive, killin
g 20 million people during their twelve-year reign. They were not the most destructive regime of the twentieth century: Josef Stalin and the other Communist dictators of the Soviet Union killed sixty-two million people. Mao Zedong and the Communists in China killed thirty-five million. The Nazis killed over twenty million and no doubt would have killed millions more had they not been defeated.[1]

  So it is important to learn the lesson and to get it right.

  After coming to power by democratic and constitutional means in 1933, the Nazis quickly turned Germany into a dictatorship. For six years they devoted their energies to preparing for war, which began in 1939. During the war in which every human and economic resource was needed for military purposes, the Nazis devoted huge amounts of resources in an attempt to exterminate Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and others.

  Domestic dictatorship, international war, the Holocaust. All are terrible. But what exactly is the lesson of history here? How could a civilized European nation plunge itself and the world into such a horror?

  4. Five weak explanations for National Socialism

  a) A common explanation is that the Germans lost World War I. They were bitter over the loss and the harsh punitive measures the victors imposed in the Versailles Treaty. There is a grain of truth here, but this is a very weak explanation. One reason why it is weak is that many countries lose bitter wars, but they do not respond by electing Adolf Hitlers to power. Another reason is that Germany’s losing the war does not explain Italy. In the 1920s Italy turned to Benito Mussolini and his fascist version of National Socialism. But Italy was on the winning side of World War I. So if one of the winners of World War I became fascist, and one of the losers also became fascist, then whether one lost or won the war is not the significant factor here.

  b) Another explanation holds that Germany’s economic troubles of the 1920s were the cause of National Socialism. Here again there is a grain of truth, but again this is a weak explanation. Many countries suffer economic malaise, but they do not turn to National Socialism for the solution. There is also the phenomenon of Nazi and neo-Nazi movements throughout the twentieth century in relatively prosperous countries. Very few countries suffering economic difficulties go Nazi, and there are plenty of Nazi-sympathizers in prosperous nations.

  c) Another weak explanation suggests that there is something innately wrong with Germans, that history shows that they are inherently militaristic, bloodthirsty, and genocidal—and the Nazis merely tapped into and exaggerated innate German tendencies. This kind of explanation is an insult of course to the many Germans who were appalled by National Socialism, who opposed it and fought it vigorously. And it does not explain how National Socialism has appealed to people of many races and ethnicities. In 2005, Mein Kampf was a bestseller in the country of Turkey.[2] Do we want to suggest that the Turks are inherently bloodthirsty and genocidal? I do not think so.

  d) Another weak explanation holds that Nazism is explained by the personal neuroses and psychoses of the Nazi leadership. The argument here is that Hitler was bitterly disappointed by being rejected for art school—or that he was a repressed homosexual—or that his right-hand man, Josef Goebbels was compensating for his below-average height and having a club foot. Again, this is a poor explanation. How many art-school rejects become Nazis? How many repressed homosexuals or handicapped men become Nazis? This explanation also ignores the large number of powerful Nazis who were neither homosexual nor short nor particularly interested in art.

  e) Any of the above explanations can works together with a suggestion that the Nazis were a product of modern communications technologies—that as masters of rhetoric and propaganda the Nazis succeeded in fooling millions of Germans about their agenda and manipulated their way into power.

  I have some sympathy for this way of thinking, for it is the kind of explanation that comes naturally to those of us raised in liberal democracies. When I first started learning about the Nazis, I thought they must have been insane. It is hard to imagine that such horror could be anything but the products of deranged minds manipulating the masses. But here I want to suggest two reasons why I think it is not a good idea to dismiss the Nazis merely as manipulators.

  The first is that the Nazis achieved power though democratic and constitutional methods. When the party was formed in 1920, it was a small, fringe party. But it spoke to the beliefs and aspirations of millions of Germans. And in the 1920s, the Germans were, arguably, the most educated nation in the world with the highest levels of literacy, numbers of years of schooling, newspaper readership, political awareness, and so on. It was in an educated nation that the Nazis achieved increasing success in elections through the 1920s, spreading their message far and wide, until they made their major breakthroughs in the early 1930s. Millions of voters in a democracy may be wrong, but it is unlikely that they were all deluded. A better explanation is that they knew what they were voting for and thought it the best course of action. And that is what I will be arguing.

  But millions of people do not decide spontaneously to vote for this party or that. A mass political movement requires that much cultural groundwork be done over the course of many years. And this is where intellectuals do their work. A culture’s intellectuals develop and articulate a culture’s ideals, its goals, its aspirations. In books, speeches, sermons, and radio broadcasts, intellectuals are a culture’s opinion-shapers. It is intellectuals who write the opinion pieces in the mass newspapers, who are the professors at the universities, the universities where teachers and preachers are trained, where politicians and lawyers and scientists and physicians get their education.

  This leads us to the other reason why it is a weak explanation to say the Nazis were simply deranged and lucked or manipulated their way into political power. Consider the following list of intellectuals who supported the Nazis long before they came to power. These intellectuals represent a “Who’s Who” list of powerful minds and cultural leaders:

  Philipp Lenard won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905.

  Gerhart Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. Hauptmann once met Hitler and described their brief handshake as “the greatest moment of my life.”

  Johannes Stark won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1919.

  That is three Nobel Prize winners.

  Then there is Dr. Oswald Spengler, author of the historical bestseller The Decline of the West (1918). Spengler’s books sold in the millions, and he was perhaps the most famous intellectual in Germany in the 1920s.

  Then there is Moeller van den Bruck, another famous public intellectual of the 1920s. His book The Third Reich (1923) provided a theoretical rationale for National Socialism and was, like Spengler’s books, a consistent best-seller throughout the 1920s.

  Then there is Dr. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), probably the sharpest legal and political mind of his generation. Schmitt’s books are still widely read and discussed by political theoreticians of all stripes and are recognized as twentieth century classics.

  And to round out this initial list, there is philosopher Martin Heidegger. Already in the 1920s Heidegger was being hailed as the brightest philosopher of his generation, which is especially significant in a philosophical nation such as Germany. That assessment has held over the course of the twentieth century. Ask professional philosophers of today to name the five most significant philosophers of the twentieth century and, whether they love him or loathe him, most will include Heidegger on the list.

  These seven men are among the most intelligent and powerful minds in Germany in the decade before the Nazis came to power. They are leading figures in German intellectual culture, spanning the arts, science, history, law, politics, and philosophy.[3] All of them, to one degree or another, supported National Socialism. Was Hitler smart enough to fool all of these highly intelligent men? Or is it more likely that they knew what they believed and supported National Socialism because they thought it was true?[4]