Nietzsche and the Nazis Read online

  Nipperdey, Thomas. 1996. Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800-1866. Translated by Daniel Nolan. Princeton University Press.

  Orlow, Dietrich. 1969. The History of the Nazi Party, 1919-1933. University of Pittsburgh Press.

  Peikoff, Leonard. 1982. The Ominous Parallels. Stein and Day.

  Pipes, Richard. 1999. Property and Freedom. A. A. Knopf.

  Reuth, Ralf Georg. 1990. Goebbels (trans. Krishna Winston). New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.

  Richardson, John, and Leiter, Brian, editors. 2001. Nietzsche. Oxford Readings in Philosophy. Oxford University Press.

  Rohkrämer, Thomas. 2005. “Martin Heidegger, National Socialism, and Environmentalism.” In Brüggemeier et al. 2005, 171-203.

  Rosen, Stanley. 1995. The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press.

  Rummel, R. J. 1997. Death by Government. Transaction Publishers.

  Shirer, William L. 1962. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Greenwich CT: Crest.

  Shorris, Earl. 2007. The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

  Solomon, Robert. 2003. Living with Nietzsche. Oxford University Press.

  Stern, Fritz. 1972. The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany. A. A. Knopf.

  Taylor, A. J. P. 1945. The Course of German History, A Survey of the Development of Germany Since 1815. Hamish Hamilton.

  Taylor, A. J. P. 1995. From Napoleon to the Second International. Penguin.

  Toland, John. 1976. Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. Anchor.

  Weinreich, Max. 1999. Hitler’s Professors. Yale University Press.

  Weiss, John. 1996. Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. Ivan Dee Publishers.

  Winds of Change. 2005. “Mein Kampf a Bestseller in Turkey.” http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006690.php. Post published April 20, 2005. Viewed June 30, 2006 and August 24, 2009.

  Acknowledgments

  Rockford College provided a research grant that enabled the writing of the first draft of the script. Virginia Murr researched the Nazi eugenics movement and proofread the manuscript. Quee Nelson shared several new-to-me quotations from key figures in the National Socialist movement. Anja Hartleb-Parson provided valuable editing and reference checking. Kira Newman proofread the index. And Christopher Vaughan designed the e-book edition.

  * * *

  [1]1 See Courtois 1999, pp. x, 4: contributors to that volume variously estimate the Communist death toll to be from 85 million to 100 million. See also Rummel 1997, Section II. Rummel at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ has updated numbers. For example, new data on deliberately caused famines in the People’s Republic of China under Mao led Rummel to revise the death toll for communist China upwards to 76,702,000.

  [2] “Mein Kampf a Bestseller in Turkey,” April 20, 2005. http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006690.php. Viewed August 24, 2009.

  [3] Weinreich 1999 (pp. 13-16) gives a wide-ranging list of professors and intellectuals who supported Hitler prior to 1933. See also Rohkrämer 2005 for a clear discussion of the role of Heidegger and the many other philosophers who gave enthusiastic support to the Nazis. Earl Shorris (2007) describes Germany of the time as “a society richer in the knowledge of the humanities than perhaps any other in modern times. Among those people who rose to the top of the Nazi government were students of humanities, former scholars. Joseph Goebbels had studied history and literature at the University of Heidelberg. Reinhard (Hangman) Heydrich was the child of a pianist and an opera singer who founded a conservatory. Ernst Kaltenbrunner studied law at the University of Prague. More than a third of the members of the Vienna Philharmonic belonged to the Nazi Party. Albert Speer, who ran the business side of the Nazi war machine, was an architect.” Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), the great logician and philosopher of mathematics, can be added to this list. Frege was an anti-Semite and later in life named Adolf Hitler as one of his heroes; see Reuben Hersh, What Is Mathematics, Really? (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 241.

  [4] Albert Speer described “the event that led me to [Hitler],” which was a speech Hitler gave to the College of Engineering in Berlin. Speer expected the talk to be “a bombastic harangue” but it turned out to be a “reasoned lecture” (quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 199).

  [5] As did many foreign observers, e.g., the Anglican clergymen who expressed “boundless admiration for the moral and ethical side of the National Social programme, its clear-cut stand for religion and Christianity, and its ethical principles, such as its fight against cruelty to animals, vivisections, sexual offenses, etc.” (quoted in Manchester 1989, p. 82).

  [6] “Few of the supporters of Weimar understood that for many Germans the fundamental political issue in 1930 was the pluralistic system of politics itself, not substantive issues within the system” (Orlow 1969, p. 186).

  [7] E.g., Immanuel Kant: “a prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation” (1951 [1790], p. 28). See Appendix 4 for quotations on German militarism.

  [8] Contra, e.g., Helmut Kuhn (1963, p. 310), who asserts that the Nazis perverted German philosophy.

  [9] See Appendix 1 for the twenty-five point Program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

  [10] May 1, 1927; quoted in Toland 1976, p. 306.

  [11] Quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 87.

  [12] Goebbels 1929, in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 107.

  [13] Goebbels 1932, “Those Damned Nazis” pamphlet.

  [14] See Appendix 2 for more quotations from Nazi leaders on the socialism of National Socialism.

  [15] This explains why the Nazi SA “staged joint rallies with the Communists and planned campaigns to win over the KDP members well into 1929 and 1930” (Orlow 1969, p. 210).

  [16] As Goebbels put it in his 1929 Michael, which sold well and went through seventeen editions: “Race is the matrix of all creative forces. Humanity—that is a mere supposition. Reality is only the Volk. Humanity is nothing but a multitude of peoples. A people is an organic entity” (Goebbels 1929, in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 106).

  [17] Michael Mack’s German Idealism and the Jew (University of Chicago Press, 2003) is a study of the role German philosophers, historians, and other intellectuals, including Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others, played in developing and promoting anti-Semitism. See Appendix 3 for further quotations.

  [18] Hitler 1925, pp. 623, 305, 327, 193, 453, and 327.

  [19] Goebbels 1929, in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 105.

  [20] Hitler 1925, p. 449.

  [21] Goebbels 1927, quoted in Irving 1999, p. 117.

  [22] Hitler 1925, p. 222.

  [23] Hitler 1925, p. 151.

  [24] Goebbels 1929, in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 108.

  [25] Hitler 1925, 298. Hitler distinguishes altruism from “egoism and selfishness” and also labels it “Idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community” (1925, p. 28). Egoism and the pursuit of happiness he sees as the great threat: “As soon as egoism becomes the ruler of a people, the bonds of order are loosened and in the chase after their own happiness men fall from heaven into a real hell” (1925, p. 300).

  [26] Goebbels 1929, p. 111.

  [27] Craig 1978, p. 576.

  [28] Hitler 1925, p. 408.

  [29] Quoted in Shirer 1962, p. 253.

  [30] Hitler 1925, p. 410.

  [31] “But in numbers the émigrés were not to be compared with the leading figures in every field of intellectual endeavour who hailed the advent of National Socialism and pledged support to its Führer with every evidence of enthusiasm” (Craig 1978, p. 639).

  [32] Shirer 1962, p. 251. Rohkrämer notes the following: “Association with National Socialism was also widespread among philosophers. While twenty philosophy professors were forced out of their positions, about thirty joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and almo
st half became party members by 1940” (Rohkrämer 2005, p. 171). On Heidegger in particular, given his high profile in the landscape of 20th-century philosophy, “‘Martin Heidegger? A Nazi, of course a Nazi!’ On a purely factual level, this exclamation by Jürgen Habermas is fully correct. Contrary to what Heidegger and Heideggerians have long maintained, historical research has demonstrated beyond doubt Heidegger’s early enthusiasm for National Socialism. Heidegger sympathized with the Nazis before 1933, he actively maneuvered to become rector, he publicly joined the Nazi Party on May Day, and the ceremony around his Rectoral Address included Nazi flags and the singing of the ‘Horst Wessel Song.’ While Jews and political opponents were removed from the university (like his teacher Edmund Husserl) or even forced to flee the country (like his intimate friend Hannah Arendt), Heidegger showed his enthusiastic support for the destruction of the Weimar Republic and for the new regime. He praised the Führer principle for the university sector, while striving to attain such a position for himself. In speeches and newspaper articles he identified himself with Hitler’s rule, going so far as to state in autumn 1933 that ‘the Führer himself and alone is and will be Germany’s only reality and its law.’ He not only approved in principle of the Nazi cleansing, but also tried to use the new regime to destroy the academic careers of colleagues, for example by initiating a Gestapo investigation” (Rohkrämer 2005, p. 172-173).

  [33] Quoted in Shirer 1962, p. 241.

  [34] Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942, had a crucial role intellectually and administratively in determining Nazi policy: “Just as in the animal world, this committed Social Darwinist proposed a system of racial selection in order to ‘breed’ a new rural nobility and to achieve the ‘breeding goal of the German people.’ Darré suggested marriage restrictions for Jews and ‘less valuable’ non-Jews, strict state control of all marriages and fertility, and sterilization of those members of the community who were considered to be a threat to the ‘racial purity’ of the German people. The Nazis used all of these measures in the subsequent years …” (Gerhard 2005, p. 131-132).

  [35] Using “positive” and “negative” here descriptively, not normatively.

  [36] “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz!” (quoted in Meinecke 1950, p. 51); cf. the 1920 Nazi Program.

  [37] Quoted in Pipes 1999, p. 221.

  [38] Hitler’s pragmatism in foreign policy: “In political life there is no such thing as principles of foreign policy. The programmatic principles of my party are its doctrine on the racial problem and its fight against pacifism and internationalism. But foreign policy is merely a means to an end. In questions of foreign policy I shall never admit that I am tied by anything” (quoted in Heiden, p. xx).

  [39] “Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much, and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending ‘special contributions’ to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing Germany at the outbreak of the war, he recognized that the ‘Nazi regime has ruined German industry.’ And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, ‘What a fool [Dummkopf] I was!’” (Shirer 1962, p. 261).

  [40] Shirer 1962, p. 258-259.

  [41] Quoted in Lukacs 1991, p. 121.

  [42] “Sicher ist der Jude auch ein Mann, aber der Floh ist auch ein Tier.”

  [43] Recall Albert Speer on “the event that led me to [Hitler]”—a speech Hitler gave to the College of Engineering in Berlin: Speer expected it to be “a bombastic harangue” but it turned out to be a “reasoned lecture” (quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 199).

  [44] Rohkrämer 2005, p. 181.

  [45] During WWI, the German government printed 150,000 copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and gave them to soldiers along with a copy of the Bible.

  [46] EH “Why I Am So Wise” 2 and GS 283.

  [47] Z I.

  [48] BGE 287.

  [49] GS 108, 125.

  [50] GS 117.

  [51] Z 1:11; TI Skirmishes 34; also 37: “Socialists are decadents.” See also HAH 473: “Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be.”

  [52] GM, 1:11.

  [53] TI “Skirmishes” 33, 35.

  [54] BGE 264.

  [55] GM 1:6.

  [56] BGE 199.

  [57] GM 1:13.

  [58] BGE 6.

  [59] WP 258. See also D 542 and BGE 221.

  [60] GM 1:4.

  [61] GM Preface 6.

  [62] GM Preface 6.

  [63] GM Preface: 3 and 6.

  [64] GM 1:7.

  [65] GM 1:14.

  [66] GM 2:10.

  [67] GM 1:16. Also: “but to think revenge without possessing the force and courage to carry it out, means to carry about a chronic suffering, a poisoning of body and soul” (HH 1.60).

  [68] GM 1:7.

  [69] A 5.

  [70] BGE 219; GM 1:7, 1:10, 1:15.

  [71] GM 1:15n. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. III, Supplementum, Q.94, A.1 and 3: “Whether the blessed in heaven will see the sufferings of the damned?” and “Whether the blessed rejoice in the punishment of the wicked?” In Article 3, Aquinas qualifies the rejoicing by stating that it is in reaction to the justice of God’s punishment of the wicked.

  [72] Nietzsche: “For the Romans were the strong and the noble, and nobody stronger and nobler has yet existed on earth or even been dreamed of” (GM 1.16).

  [73] GM 1:9.

  [74] GM 2:7.

  [75] Noting here that toward the end of The Will to Power, Nietzsche argues that the new masters will thus combine the physical vitality of the aristocratic masters with the spiritual ruthlessness of the slave-priests of Christianity: the new masters will be “Caesars with the soul of Christ” (WP 983).

  [76] Preface to Ecce Homo.

  [77] WP 983.

  [78] GS 290.

  [79] WP 933.

  [80] BGE 259.

  [81] BGE 44.

  [82] BGE 2.

  [83] GM 3:14.

  [84] BGE 257.

  [85] GM 2:12.

  [86] GM 2:24.

  [87] GM 2:17.

  [88] GM 1:11.

  [89] GM 1:11.

  [90] GM 1:11.

  [91] WP 142; 145.

  [92] BGE 251.

  [93] GM 2:11.

  [94] A 55.

  [95] Connecting here to the fascinating “What-if” history question: What if the Nazis had put the Holocaust on hold and devoted the vast resources used there instead to military purposes where needed in WWII?

  [96] BGE 251.

  [97] A 24.

  [98] BGE 251.

  [99] GS 348.

  [100] A 43.

  [101] Z 2: “On Priests.”

  [102] A 62.

  [103] A 44.

  [104] Hitler 1925, 307.

  [105] Hitler, quoted in Langer, http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/documents/osssection1.htm (viewed July 25, 2006). Hitler also claimed: “By warding off the Jews, I struggle for the work of the Lord” (quoted in Lilla 1997, p. 38).