This past week I have listened to Robert Solomon’s lectures from his course The Will to Power: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The author shows how Nietzsche influenced existentialism and postmodernism. But how much much more he prepared the way for Nazism. I would like to list seven ideas of Nietzsche that helped Nazism to flourish in Germany. First, Nietzsche was an outspoken atheist. He announced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that God is dead. He replaced God with fate and taught a love of fate. Hitler likewise was an atheist and also a naturalist. He believed in no supernatural beings-either good or bad. Hitler also believed in fate which he called providence (Vorsehung). As the war was winding down and defeat for the Germans seemed inevitable, Hitler told his comrades that one must accept one’s fate. Second, Nietzsche believed in the hegemony of the masters over the slaves. He taught that the masters are beyond good and evil and that the resentful slaves have invented morality in order to drag the masters down. The Nazis believed in the Aryans as the Master Race and in the dictum that might makes right. Hitler said more than once in Table Talk that if the Germans were victorious it would not matter who was right and who was wrong. Third, Nietzsche did not believe in objective truth. He wrote a number of statements that undermined truth and the reality of the objective world. He wrote that the only truth is that there is no truth. He wrote that there are no facts–only interpretations. He wrote that the truth is whatever belief that enables the individual to survive. Hitler was not enough of a philosopher to comment on truth. But Nazi Alfred Rosenberg wrote a book The Myth of the Twentieth Century that promulgated the notion that the Aryan racial soul was responsible for the creation of civilization. Heinrich Himmler made several efforts to establish a pagan religion for the German people. Nietzsche’s depreciation of truth made this Nazi mythmaking possible. Fourth, Nietzsche promoted the healthy and denigrated the sick. The Nazis acted on this belief by practicing eugenics and putting to death the mentally retarded and mentally ill. Fifth, Nietzsche lifted up the Ubermensch as the superior human being of the future. Similarly, the Thule Society in Germany saw in Adolf Hitler the “man from above”. Sixth, Nietzsche made the will to power the key concept in his understanding of the motivation of man. The Nazis in general and Hitler in particular placed great emphasis on will power as the prerequiste for victory in war. Yes, it is hard to imagine the rapid emergence of Nazism in Germany without the ideas of Nietzsche that were known to the common man. And indeed the Nazis acknowleged their debt to Nietzsche. Nietzsche was the father of existentialism, postmodernism and Nazism. But the child that resembled him the most closely was Nazism. Perhaps that is why Hitler remarked in Table Talk that the Jews would suppress Nietzsche if they were in power even though it was known that Nietzsche was not a classical anti-semite.
Nietzsche laid the groundwork for Nazism.
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