Nietzsche and the Nazis Read online

  5. Explaining Nazism philosophically

  I want to suggest a better explanation: The primary cause of Nazism lies in philosophy. Not economics, not psychology, and not even politics.

  National Socialism was first a philosophy of life believed and advocated by highly intelligent men and women. Professors, public intellectuals, Nobel Prize-winners—all powerful minds working at the cutting edges of their disciplines. It was they who shaped the intellectual culture of Germany in the 1920s and who convinced millions of Germans that National Socialism was the best hope for Germany’s future.

  That is not to say that there were no other contributing factors. The legacy of World War I, persistent economic troubles, modern communication technologies, and the personal psychologies of the Nazi leadership did play a role. But the most significant factor was the power of a set of abstract, philosophical ideas. National Socialism was a philosophy-intensive movement.

  I will up the ante further.

  I also want to suggest that the Nazi intellectuals and their followers thought of themselves as idealists and as crusaders for a noble cause. This may be even harder to accept. The National Socialists in the 1920s were passionate men and women who thought that the world was in a crisis and that a moral revolution was called for. They believed their ideas to be true, beautiful, noble, and the only hope for the world.[5] Yes, Nazi ideology contained major elements of harshness, even brutality—but what if an important truth about the world is that it is harsh and brutal?

  It may be hard to believe that the Nazis thought of themselves as noble idealists, especially with our after-the-fact knowledge of the horrible destructiveness of Nazism. It may be especially hard for those of us raised in Western liberal democracies to believe it—since from the cradle we’ve been raised to believe that freedom, equality, and peace are almost self-evidently good.

  But what if they are not self-evidently good? Let me play the Devil’s advocate.

  How long have human beings existed? Most anthropologists say Homo sapiens has existed for well over 100,000 years, perhaps as long as 200,000 years. For how much of that time have freedom, equality, and peace been the norm? Democratic experiments were tried in ancient Greece for a few centuries. A little later, republican experiments were tried in ancient Rome—again for a few centuries. But Greece and Rome both failed: the Greeks were conquered by the Romans, and the Romans descended into authoritarian decadence before themselves being conquered. And there have been a few smaller and relatively brief republican city states—Renaissance Venice, Florence, and in the Baltic. That is a few short-lived experiments in over 100,000 years—not very impressive.

  So now we imagine ourselves in Europe in the earliest decades of the twentieth century: democratic republicanism has been resurrected and is being tried again, for example in the United States of America. How successful have the modern experiments been? Come the 1920s, the United States is only about 150 years old. That means that it has survived for less time than the Greek democracies or the Roman Republic. The U.S. lasted only 90 years before it plunged into a brutal Civil War, the reverberations of which are still being felt early in the twentieth century. In the 1920s the U.S. is itself experiencing economic uncertainty and is shortly to plunge into its Great Depression. Even in the United States, many intellectuals are suggesting that capitalism and liberalism are finished and that some form of centralized authority led by a strong man is the future. So in the 1920s, just how strong is the case for liberty, democracy, republicanism, and capitalism?[6]

  What if a culture’s brightest thinkers believe that democracy is a historical blip? What if they come to believe that the lesson of history is that what people need is structure and strong leadership? What if they believe that history shows that some cultures are obviously superior—superior in their arts, their science and technology, and their religion? What if they believe that history teaches that we live in a harsh world of conflict and that in such a world strength and assertiveness against one’s enemies are essential to survive? Or even more strongly than that—that peace makes people soft and that it is conflict and war that brings out the best in people, making them tough, vigorous, and willing to fight for their ideals and if necessary die for them?[7]

  I am suggesting that a set of ideals was primarily responsible for the rise of Nazism.[8] I think those ideals are extraordinarily false and terribly destructive—but that is not how millions of intelligent, educated, even in many cases well-meaning Germans saw them.

  But why do I call them a set of ideals? Why not just say the Nazis had some ideas—of course they had some ideas with which to bewitch the masses—but basically they just wanted power and were effective at using those ideas to get power?

  Well, of course the Nazis wanted power. What politician doesn’t want power? But if you are only out for power, think about how you go about getting it in a democracy. The best way is to identify the established political parties, join one of the powerful ones, and work your way up the ranks to the top.

  Here is an analogy: In the United States, the two major parties are the Democratic and Republican parties. So if you are young and ambitious and you want a realistic chance at becoming a Senator or even President in your lifetime, you join one of those two parties. What you do not do is join a fringe party. What you do not do is start your own party—say, the Midwestern Farmer’s Union Party, out in the middle of nowhere. The only reason you would start the Midwestern Farmer’s Union Party is that you are a true believer in the ideals of Midwestern Farming and think you cannot achieve your ideals by joining the established parties.

  But that describes the Nazis exactly. They did not join the Social Democrats or any of the established political parties. They set up their own fringe party, initially based in the south of Germany and away from the center of power in Berlin. They were true believers in a cause. They did not want power if it meant compromising their ideals by joining with an established party. They wanted power—but power to achieve what they took to be high ideals.

  So what was this obscure political party formed in Munich in 1920, and what did it stand for?

  Part 3. National Socialist Philosophy

  6. The Nazi Party Program

  The Nazi Party grew out of the D.A.P., the German Workers’ Party. Its goal according to one of its founders, Gottfried Feder, “was to reconcile nationalism and socialism.” It was a lecture by Feder in 1919 that attracted Adolf Hitler to the party. Within a year the party changed its name in order to have a name that expressed more accurately its core principles: The new name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. At a rally in Munich in 1920 involving over 2,000 participants, the party announced its platform—a twenty-five point program.[9] The main authors of the program were Feder, Adolf Hitler, and a third man, Anton Drexler. To understand what National Socialism stood for, the main points of the Program are worth looking at more closely.

  7. Collectivism, not individualism

  A major theme of the Program is a stress upon collectivism and a rejection of individualism.

  Point number 10 of the Program, for example, says “It must be the first duty of every citizen to perform mental or physical work. Individual activity must not violate the general interest, but must be exercised within the framework of the community, and for the general good.”

  National Socialism thus consciously rejects Western liberal individualism with its emphasis on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—all of which are individualistic rights. Nazism is collectivistic: it does not hold that individuals have their own lives to live and happiness to pursue. Rather, individuals should work for the community out of a sense of duty; they serve the general good, to which they subordinate their personal lives.

  Point 24 of the Program returns to this theme and emphasizes it strongly: “THE COMMON INTEREST BEFORE SELF-INTEREST.” The bold print and capitalization are in the original, for emphasis.

  8. Economic socialism, not capitalism
/>   The second theme of the Program is a stress upon socialism and a strong rejection of capitalism.

  Numerically, socialism is the most emphasized theme in the Nazi Program, for over half of the Program’s twenty-five points—fourteen out of the twenty-five, to be exact—itemize economically socialist demands.

  Point 11 calls for the abolition of all income gained by loaning money at interest.

  Point 12 demands the confiscation of all profits earned by German businesses during World War I.

  Point 13 demands the nationalization of all corporations.

  Point 14 demands profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.

  Point 15 demands the generous development of state-run old-age insurance.

  Point 16 calls for the immediate socialization of the huge department stores.

  And so on.

  So strong was the Nazi party’s commitment to socialism that in 1921 the party entered into negotiations to merge with another socialist party, the German Socialist Party. The negotiations fell though, but the economic socialism remained a consistent Nazi theme through the 1920s and 30s.

  For example, here is Adolf Hitler in a speech in 1927:

  We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.[10]

  Even more strongly, Josef Goebbels hated capitalism and urged socialism. Dr. Josef Goebbels was perhaps the most brilliant and educated of all the Nazi politicians. Once the Nazis came to power he was to be one of the most powerful of the very top Nazis—perhaps number two or three after Hitler himself. But Goebbels’ commitment to National Socialist principles began much earlier. He received a wide-ranging classical education by attending five universities in Germany, eventually receiving a Ph.D. in literature and philosophy from Heidelberg University in 1921. During his graduate student days he absorbed and agreed with much of the writings of communists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Damning those he called “the money pigs of capitalist democracy,”[11] Goebbels in speeches and pamphlets regularly declaimed that “Money has made slaves of us.”[12] “Money,” he argued, “is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.” And in language that could be right out of the writings of Karl Marx, Goebbels believed fervently: “The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.”[13]

  The Nazi solution, then, is strong socialism.[14] The state should control the economy, organizing its production and distribution in the collective interest.[15]

  9. Nationalism, not internationalism or cosmopolitanism

  This raises a question. So far the Nazi Program emphasizes that collectivism and socialism take priority over the individual—but which collective or social grouping has priority? Here the Nazi Program emphatically defines its collectivism and socialism in nationalistic terms. Individuals belong primarily to their ethnic and racial groups, those ethnic and racial groups giving them their core identities.

  In the 1920 Program, seven of the twenty-five points speak directly to this issue. This issue is moderately complicated, because the Nazis have three enemies in mind against whom they want to distinguish themselves.

  First they reject Marxist socialism or any socialism that puts economic groupings first. As much as the Nazis hate capitalism, they do not see the world as a battle between economic groups. The Marxists, as they see it, are obsessed with and too narrowly focused on money. To the Nazis money is only part of the battle—the major battle is between different racial and cultural groups with different biological histories, languages, values, laws, and religions. The battle is between Germans—with their particular biological inheritance and cultural history—against all other racial cultures.

  Second, the Nazis reject cosmopolitanism, an ideal of Western liberals who believe that all humans are essentially the same wherever one travels in the world, and who believe that one should strive to be a citizen of the world, someone who can be at home anywhere.

  The Nazis are nationalists, by contrast, and they reject any form of internationalism or cosmopolitanism.[16]

  These themes explain the design of the Nazis’ swastika flag, as a symbolic integration of the socialism and the nationalism. Red is symbolic of socialism, white is symbolic of nationalism, and the swastika is, according to Hitler, representative of the Aryan struggle for racial and cultural supremacy against those who are trying to destroy the Germans.

  Consequently, in the Nazi Program of 1920 we find many points about German national identity and asserting German needs and goals.

  Point 1 demands the unification of all ethnic Germans into a greater Germany.

  Point 8 demands that immigration by non-Germans be halted and that all those who have immigrated recently be expelled from the country.

  Public offices can be open only to citizens, and Point 3 defines citizenship in terms of the possession of German blood.

  And the possession of German blood is defined carefully to reject a third target of the Nazis, those whom they hate even more than the Marxists or the liberal capitalists—and that is the Jews.[17]

  Point 3 of the Program denies that Jews can be racial comrades of Germans, and this in combination with the other points in the Program effectively shuts the Jews out of German life.

  A widely-used Nazi propaganda poster displayed a dragon with three heads wearing hats representing the communist, the international capitalist, and the Jew—the enemies the pure German warrior must defeat.

  From the beginning of the Party in 1920 then, the pro-German nationalism and the strong anti-Semitic themes are, like the collectivism and the socialism, core Nazi themes.

  While the 1920 Program only mentions the Jews twice and seems to advocate only that the Jews be forced to leave Germany, within a few years the Nazi leadership had clearly begun to consider harsher measures. In 1925, for example, Hitler published Mein Kampf, a book that sold increasingly well as the Nazis rose to power. Hitler variously describes the Jews as an “octopus,” as “a parasite on the body of other nations,” as a “vampire,” as a “spider” that was “suck[ing] the blood out of the people’s pores,” and as having taken over the German state. To free the German Volk, consequently, Hitler calls for the “elimination of the existing Jewish one” and “the end of this parasite upon the nations.”[18]

  10. Authoritarianism, not liberal democracy

  So far we have three major themes in the Nazi Program: collectivism, socialism, and nationalism. The next question is: How do the Nazis believe this is to be achieved?

  As early as 1920 the Nazis are clear that they are no friends of democracy, liberalism, or republicanism. They favor strong authoritarianism and centralized power.

  Point 23 calls for censorship and government control of all newspapers.

  Point 24 suggests limitations on religions that do not fit the Nazis’ goals.

  Point 25 calls for centralization and unconditional power: “we demand the creation of a strong central power in Germany. A central political parliament should possess unconditional authority over the entire Reich, and its organization in general.”

  These points in combination with the economically socialist points earlier are to give the government total control over all aspects of society.

  Throughout the 1920s the Nazis are unapologetic about wanting to eliminate liberalism, democracy, and republicanism. Goebbels for example put it bluntly and publicly: “Never do the people rule themselves. This madness has been invented by liberalism. Behind its concept of the sovereignty of the people hide the most corrupt rogues, who do not want to be recognized.”[
19]

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler agreed entirely: “There must be no majority decisions.” Instead, “the decisions will be made by one man.”[20] So, Goebbels continued, “We shall create a power-group with which we can conquer this state. And then ruthlessly and brutally, using the State’s prerogatives, we shall enforce our will and our programme.” Again from Goebbels:

  History has seen repeatedly how a young, determined minority has overthrown the rule of a corrupt and rotten majority, and then used for a time the State and its means of power in order to bring about by dictatorship … and force the conditions necessary to complete the conquest and to impose new ideas.[21]

  The Nazis were very clear from the outset what they were in favor of, what they opposed, and how they planned to exercise power once they achieved it: socialism, nationalism, racial identity and purification—and a strong, centralized power to make it happen.