Nietzsche and the Nazis Page 3

  11. Idealism, not politics as usual

  It is important to emphasize that the Nazis put their program forward forthrightly and as a noble—even spiritual—ideal to achieve. They promised not merely another political platform, but a whole philosophy of life that, as they and their followers believed, promised renewal. And they called upon Germans to exercise the highest virtues of altruism and self-sacrifice for the good of society to bring about that renewal.

  Program point 10 urges individuals to put the common good of Germany before their self interest. Point 24 repeats it. Hitler and Goebbels repeatedly urge Nazism as a spiritual and ideal vision in contrast to the usual power-grubbing politics of the day.

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler insisted that “All force which does not spring from a firm spiritual foundation will be hesitating and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest on a fanatical view of life.”[22]

  He called upon individuals not to be egoistic but be willing to sacrifice: “the preservation of the existence of a species presupposes a spirit of sacrifice in the individual.”[23]

  In Goebbels’s autobiographical novel, Michael, a book that sold out of seventeen editions, the leading character is explicitly likened to Jesus Christ: Michael is the ‘Christ-socialist’ who sacrifices himself out of love for mankind—and Goebbels urges that noble Germans be willing to do the same.[24] A widely-used Nazi poster featured a religiously spiritual figure with its arm encircling a young Nazi soldier.

  Hitler regularly praised Germans for their spirit of altruism: “this state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture.”[25] Altruism, he believed, is a trait more pronounced in Germans than in any other culture, which is why he claimed to be so optimistic about Germany’s future.

  This message of National Socialism as a moral ideal and a spiritual crusade was appealing to many, many Germans—and especially the young. By 1925 the party membership in the north was mostly young: two-thirds of the members were under thirty years of age, and in a few years the Nazis had attracted a large following among university students.

  Goebbels especially called out to the idealistic young to be the heart of the Nazi future in Germany:

  The old ones don’t even want to understand that we young people even exist. They defend their power to the last. But one day they will be defeated after all. Youth finally must be victorious. We young ones, we shall attack. The attacker is always stronger than the defender. If we free ourselves, we can also liberate the whole working class. And the liberated working class will release the Fatherland from its chains.[26]

  12. Nazi democratic success

  For the Nazis, the clear, firm, and passionate advocacy of their political goals, along with efficient organization and propaganda, brought them increasing democratic success in Germany.

  After years of work, by 1928 the party had only twelve seats in the Reichstag, Germany’s national parliament. But in the election of September 1930, they increased that number to 107 seats. Less than two years later, in the election of July 1932, they increased that number dramatically to 230 seats. A few months later they lost thirty-four seats in a November election and now had 196. But in January of 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, one of the two highest positions in the land, and the Nazis were in a position to consolidate their power. In March of 1933 they called yet another election in order to get a clear mandate from the German people about their plans for Germany. The election had a huge turnout and the Nazis scored huge gains, winning 43.9% of the popular vote and 288 seats in the Reichstag. 288 seats are more seats than their next three competitors combined.

  Table 1. Germany: March 5, 1933 election. Seats in the Reichstag:[27]

  By early 1933, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was in control.

  Part 4. The Nazis in Power

  13. Political controls

  As the Nazis had promised, they moved quickly to transform Germany from a constitutional democracy into an authoritarian dictatorship. An early step they took was to eliminate rival political parties. Some were banned outright; the rest were pressured to dissolve themselves; and in July of 1933, the Nazi government banned the formation of new political parties.

  In 1934, the Nazis further consolidated their power and augmented Hitler’s. Hitler had almost always had a strong grip on the internal politics of the Nazi party, but it had not been absolute. 1934 brought an internal purge and an elimination of Hitler’s rivals. The triggering event was Ernst Röhm’s attempted rebellion. Röhm had been head of the SA, the Sturmabteilung or Storm Division, the paramilitary wing of the party. Röhm had used his position to form a rival power bloc within the party and planned a rebellion. Hitler was warned of the rebellion ahead of time and was able to suppress it. In the purge that followed, forty-three conspirators and rivals were executed. Along with the purge, there were many unofficial assassinations as old scores were settled. The result of the bloodletting was a Nazi party even more strongly united around Adolf Hitler.

  In August of the same year, President Hindenburg died. Paul von Hindenburg had been the grand old man of German politics, holding the office of the presidency, which was along with the chancellorship one of the two highest political offices in the land. Upon Hindenburg’s death, Hitler merged the positions of president and chancellor, thus augmenting his power further. In a nation-wide plebiscite to confirm the merging of the two positions, almost 90% of Germans voted in favor of granting Hitler greater powers.

  The Nazis now controlled all the major political offices, they had cleaned house internally, and they had eliminated all rival parties. In firm control, they next set about re-shaping all of German society.

  14. Education

  Political tools such as physical force and authoritarian laws are necessary tools for a dictatorship, but long-term control of a people also requires control of their minds. The Nazis recognized this and made re-shaping Germany’s educational system a priority. They already had a good head-start.

  When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, about 2.5 million Germans were members of the Nazi Party. Seven percent of the Party’s members were from the upper class, seven percent were peasants, thirty-five percent were industrial workers, and fifty-one percent were from the professional and middle class. Surprisingly, in the latter group, the professional and middle class, the largest occupational group represented was elementary school teachers. Hitler and the Nazis thus already had a core group of committed followers in a position to help them shape the minds of the next generation.

  The general purpose of education

  The Nazis had a particular kind of youth in mind. As early as 1925, Hitler had written in Mein Kampf: “the folkish state must not adjust its entire educational work primarily to the inoculation of mere knowledge, but to the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies. The training of mental abilities is only secondary.”[28]

  Come 1933 and power, Hitler repeatedly made it even clearer what kind of healthy bodies he wanted the educational system to produce:

  My program for educating youth is hard. Weakness must be hammered away. In my castles of the Teutonic Order a youth will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes ... That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication ... That is how I will create the New Order.

  Intellectual training was less emphasized than physical training, but it was not omitted. Students were trained in Nazi ideology, studied German history from a National Socialist perspective, learned political activism, and trained themselves to develop a selfless, obedient, duty-oriented moral character. The curriculum was revised, textbooks re-written, and teachers trained as servants of the cause. Early in the Nazi reign, teachers were declared to be c
ivil servants and required to join the National Socialist Teachers League, swearing an oath of absolute fidelity to Adolf Hitler.

  The Hitler Youth

  In addition to transforming the formal school system, the Nazis put great emphasis on the Hitler Youth organization. The Nazi Party’s youth organization had been formed in 1922, early in the party’s history, and acquired its Hitler Youth name in 1926. The purpose of the Hitler Youth was to train a cadre of devoted young followers outside the formal school system. Once the Nazis came to power, the formal German school system and the Hitler Youth became complementary training and indoctrination programs.

  Boys could enter the program when they were age six, though official training began at age ten. All members of the Hitler Youth swore this oath: “In the presence of this blood-banner, which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am ready and willing to give up my life for him, so help me God.”[29]

  Full membership and systematic training began at age fourteen and included the ability to take a physical beating without whining. Brutal fighting sessions among the boys were common and encouraged. As Hitler had put it in Mein Kampf, “But above all, the young, healthy body must also learn to suffer blows.”[30] If a boy was unable to withstand the pain or pressure, he was embarrassed in front of his peers. Those who succeeded, though, received accolades, a sense of belonging to a great cause, and useful symbols of their status, such as a special dagger.

  Parallel programs existed for girls. The League of Young Girls was established for girls ten to fourteen years of age. The fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old girls’ group of the Hitler Youth was the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or League of German Girls. From seventeen to twenty-one years of age, young Aryan women were members of Faith and Beauty. Instruction focused on home, family, and the duty to bear children. The girls’ training was similar to the boys’, including wearing military-style uniforms, engaging in soldier-like activities, and learning Nazi ideology and activism.

  Although the youth were encouraged to question their parents and their non-Nazi teachers, within the Hitler Youth absolute obedience was demanded. Despite this, membership in the Hitler Youth was appealing to many young Germans. Summer camps and parades were regular activities for the Hitler Youth. There was also the feeling of camaraderie and the sense of developing a sense of self-discipline, loyalty, and honor. Membership came to be considered to be a badge of honor—and, as the Nazi Party came closer to achieving power, membership even became a status symbol.

  In 1932, the year before the Nazis came to power, the Hitler Youth had 107,956 members—or five percent of the German youth population. Within a year, membership had swollen to well over two million members.

  In 1936, membership in the Hitler Youth became mandatory. All other youth groups had ceased to exist, been absorbed into the Hitler Youth, or abolished. And by 1939, the year that World War II was to begin, membership in the Hitler Youth reached almost eight million members.

  The universities

  The Nazis had also achieved great success with older students, those of university age.

  Well before Hitler came to power, Nazi student groups existed at universities all over Germany. Before 1933, it was common for students to come to classes wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands, and in many cases it was the most intelligent and idealistic university students who were the most activist and outspoken supporters of National Socialism.

  The students also had many allies among their professors.

  When the National Socialists took power, they prohibited all Jews from holding academic positions—this resulted in the firing of hundreds of tenured Jewish professors, including several Nobel Laureates. To their credit, many other professors resigned in protest or emigrated. But such professors were in the small minority.[31]

  A large majority of university professors remained on the job, either silently accepting the new regime or even actively supporting it. In 1933, for example, 960 professors, including prominent figures such as philosopher Martin Heidegger, made a public proclamation of their support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist regime.[32]

  15. Censorship

  What the Nazis established for the schools and universities they attempted to establish for German society at large, by means of sweeping government regulations on media and outright censorship. The world of schools and education was only an important microcosm of the Nazis’ plans for all of German society.

  Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s new propaganda chief, put it this way: Any book or work of art “which acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people” should be destroyed.

  The great symbolic statement of what was to come occurred early in the Nazi regime—the May 10, 1933 book burnings, just a few months after the Nazis assumed power. In the Unter den Linden, an open square across from the University of Berlin, roughly 20,000 books were burned in a huge bonfire. Goebbels spoke at the event to 40,000 cheering spectators. Some of the authors whose books were destroyed were Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Jack London, Helen Keller, H. G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust.

  An important and sometimes overlooked fact about the book burnings is that they were not instigated by the Nazi government. Nor were they instigated by non-intellectual thugs. The book burnings were instigated by university students. The Nazi Party’s student organization conceived and carried out book burnings all across the country—book bonfires burned brightly that night in every German university city. The professors had taught their students well.

  Goebbels’s official title was Minister of the Reich Chamber of Culture. The Reich Chamber of Culture controlled seven cultural spheres: fine arts, music, theater, literature, the press, radio, and films. This gave him power over all the major media in Germany and enabled him to use his formidable talent for propaganda effectively. He quickly established regulations that anyone working in any of those fields had to become a member of the Nazi party and join the respective chamber. The purpose of the regulations was, as Goebbels put it:

  In order to pursue a policy of German culture, it is necessary to gather together the creative artists in all spheres into a unified organization under the leadership of the Reich. The Reich must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but also lead and organize the professions.[33]

  In the realm of art, Hitler and Goebbels attempted to cleanse Germany of modern art and to replace it with “Germanic” art. Classical plays, music, and operas, as well as Hollywood B-movies were still allowed, but galleries exhibiting modern art were shut down.

  Newspapers received close supervision. The Reich Press Law of 1933 prohibited editors of newspapers from marrying Jews, and required that editors meet daily with the Propaganda Ministry to ensure that no misleading stories were published. Essentially, this meant that the government told the newspapers what they could and could not print.

  Likewise, radio was taken over in 1933 by another branch of the Propaganda Ministry, the Chamber of Radio.

  The Chamber of Films took over the content of the film industry, though it left the production of films up to private firms.

  In all areas of arts and culture, uncooperative editors, writers, and performers were ousted, or sent to prison or concentration camps, or sometimes killed. Those editors, writers, and performers who remained knew how they were to behave. German culture thus became an obedient tool of Nazi politics.

  16. Eugenics

  Nazi education and censorship attempted to control people’s minds. The Nazis also controlled the bodies of their citizens as much as possible. Milder controls involved new public-health measures such as an aggressive campaign against smoking: the Nazis banned smoking in certain public places, ran an anti-smoking propaganda campaign, and placed restrictions on how tobacco could be advertised.

  Stronger controls extended to the sex and reproductive li
ves of the citizens, and this takes us into darker territory—the Nazis’ embrace of eugenics.

  Eugenics was not unique to the Nazi regime or to Germany. As early as 1895, eugenics researcher Adolf Jost had published a book called The Right to Death, which called for state control over human reproduction, and many intellectuals in many countries embraced eugenics. In nature, the argument ran, only the strongest males get to mate with the females; the weaker males get to mate less frequently or not at all; this natural selection of the stronger and de-selection of the weaker serves to keep the species healthy and strengthen it.

  The same principle holds for farming. Just as a farmer is concerned to improve the quality of his herd, so the state should be concerned to improved the quality of its citizenry. And just as a farmer will not let any bull mate with any cow, so the state should not let just any male have sex with any female; the farmer will select his strongest and healthiest bulls and have them mate only with his strongest, healthiest cows. Those bulls and cows not up to standard are culled from the herd and not allowed to reproduce at all.