Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Conflict of groups [Section 35 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 35 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

35. Conflict of groups

A second major point of agreement between Nietzsche and the Nazis is their view of conflict. For both, conflict is the fundamental human reality. Both believe firmly that life is a matter of some individuals and groups gaining at the expense of others.

The Nazis were clear about this in theory and practice. They did not believe it possible for Aryans and Jews to live in harmony. Nor did the Nazis believe that Germany could live in harmony with the liberal capitalist nations of the West.

In the liberal capitalist nations, by contrast, many economists and politicians had come to believe that conflict and war may become a thing of the past. The productive power of the Industrial Revolution was creating great wealth and surpluses, and those surpluses were leading to increased trade between nations that was mutually beneficial. Trade was a powerful harmonizing force, leading nations to want to do business with each other rather than make war.[115]

The Nazis rejected that view and argued that recent economic history was a matter of the Jews and the capitalists advancing their interests at the expense of Germany’s.

Nietzsche shares wholly with the Nazis the general point about zero-sum conflict. In his words, “The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few are opposite viewpoints of value.”[116] But even more strongly, he believes that this conflict is not merely a matter of historical and cultural accident but is built into the requirements of life:

“Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.”[117]

The horse eats the grass; the lion kills the horse; the man rides the horse and kills the lion. Life is an ongoing struggle between strong and weak, predator and prey. Cooperation and trade are possible, but they are superficial interludes between more fundamental animal facts about life. As Nietzsche again puts it: “‘Life always lives at the expense of other life’—he who does not grasp this has not taken even the first step toward honesty with himself.”[118]

On this key point, Nietzsche and the Nazis agree.

Given that conflict is inescapable, the next question is: How will the conflicts be resolved?

References

[115] For example, the great British politician Richard Cobden argued that commerce is “the grand panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world” (Cobden 1903, p. 36). Consider also Norman Angell, speaking to the Institute of Bankers in London on January 17, 1912, on “The Influence of Banking on International Relations”: “commercial interdependence, which is the special mark of banking as it is the mark of no other profession or trade in quite the same degree—the fact that the interest and solvency of one is bound up with the interest and solvency of many; that there must be confidence in the due fulfillment of mutual obligation, or whole sections of the edifice crumble, is surely doing a great deal to demonstrate that morality after all is not founded upon self-sacrifice, but upon enlightened self-interest, a clearer and more complete understanding of all the ties that bind us the one to the other. And such clearer understanding is bound to improve, not merely the relationship of one group to another, but the relationship of all men to all other men, to create a consciousness which must make for more efficient human co-operation, a better human society” (quoted in Keegan 1999, pp. 11-12).

[116] GM, end of First Essay note.

[117] BGE 259.

[118] WP 369.

[Bibliography]

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The Holocaust [Section 19 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 19 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

19. The Holocaust

In 1821, the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.” Heine was evoking the terrible era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in which both people and books were burned regularly. But he was also making a philosophical point about the importance of ideas: books are about ideas, and ideas matter. We humans live what we believe, and if history teaches us anything it is that people can believe an incredible variety of things about themselves and the world they live in. Books store and transmit ideas, but it is in the minds of actual human beings that ideas live and are put into practice. Burning a book has some stopping power for an idea, but the only way to eliminate an idea fully is to eliminate the individuals who believe it. Dictators know this and they have no compunction about eliminating individuals.

The Nazis were not historically unique in this way—where they were unique is in the huge scale upon which they operated and the cold-bloodedly efficient ruthlessness with which they destroyed, killed, and burned human beings.

Eleven to twelve million human beings were exterminated during the Holocaust; approximately six million of them were Jews. We have all heard the numbers and the terrible stories before, and sometimes it is hard for them not to become just abstract statistics in our minds.

But just think of one person you know who lives a real life, has dreams, works hard, loves his or her family, has a quirky sense of humor, wants to travel the world. And then imagine that person taken away in the middle of the night, herded into a cattle car, stripped naked, experimented upon without anesthesia, slowly starved, gassed, shoved into an oven and burned to cinders. That is what the Nazis did to millions of human beings.

All of the theoretical ingredients of the National Socialist program that contributed to the Holocaust were announced publicly twenty years before the Holocaust began:

That human beings are divided into collective groups that shape their identity.

That those collective groups are in a life and death competitive struggle with each other.

That any tactic is legitimate in the war of competing groups.

That human beings are not individuals with their own lives to live but are servants of the state.

That the state should have total power over both the minds and bodies of its citizens and may dispose of them as it wishes.

That citizens should obey a higher authority and be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of their group, as defined by higher authority.

Additionally, during the 1930s the Nazis had experimented with most of the practical techniques that would be used in the Holocaust. In the 1930s, basic human rights to liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness were denied to millions as a matter of official policy. Many of those deemed undesirable had been forced to leave their homes and country. Those who stayed were subject to officially tolerated vandalism, beatings, and occasional murders. Some of those deemed unfit to reproduce had been sterilized. Some of those deemed unfit to live had been euthanized. As early as 1933, concentration camps had been established north of Berlin at Oranienburg and at Dachau in the south of Germany. More camps were added as the decade progressed.

And of course the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their sympathizers among millions of Germans had been common knowledge and common practice. It is appropriate that the classically-educated Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Culture, would express it most bluntly and clearly: “Certainly the Jew is also a Man, but the Flea is also an Animal.”[42]

So I return to our early question: How could Nazism happen?

References

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

[Bibliography.]

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Militarization [Section 18 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 18 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

18. Militarization

The most important part of the new Germany was the military. On a historically unprecedented scale, the German economy became a war economy.

Conscription had been reintroduced in 1935, and in 1936 Hermann Göring took over as Germany’s economic minister. Under Göring’s direction, Germany began to develop a total war economy in earnest. Up until this time, the re-militarization of Germany had been kept semi-secret and had been largely paid for by funds confiscated from enemies of the state and blocked foreign bank accounts.

Under Göring’s leadership, the re-militarization came out into the open. Göring started a Four Year Plan to make Germany self-sufficient so that it would be able to survive blockades during a war: he reduced imports to a minimum, put price and wage controls in place, built factories to produce rubber, textiles, fuel, and steel—all commodities essential to a war machine—and taxes were increased greatly upon private businesses to fund the war.

Also as promised as long ago as 1920 in the Nazi Party’s founding political program, the Nazis initiated a strategy of geographical expansion. In 1936, Germany re-occupied the Rhineland. Also in 1936, Hitler concluded an alliance with Mussolini and Italy and sent troops to Spain to support General Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime. There was no military response from France, England, or the other Allied powers.

In 1938, the Germans took over Austria; no shooting or violence was necessary. After the takeover, a plebiscite was held in which one could vote yes or no for Hitler: In Austria, 99.75% voted for Hitler; in Germany, 99.08% voted for Hitler. Hitler was angry that he received a slightly lower level of support from the Germans than he did from the Austrians. Again there was no military response from the Allies. Instead they believed Hitler was satisfied. They still believed him when he signed the Munich Agreement promising no more expansion beyond the Sudetenland, then a key part of Czechoslovakia. As a result of that agreement, Hitler was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1938.

Early in 1939, the Germans took over all of Czechoslovakia. Again there was no military response from the Allies.

But on September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland, and this time the western Allies responded.

World War II had officially begun, and the twentieth century began its second great collision of incompatible philosophies of life—with the broadly liberal, individualistic, democratic, and capitalist Allies of the west at war with the authoritarian, collectivistic, and socialistic Axis powers of the east. And at the end of the war, tens of millions more people would be dead.

The Germans were steeled for war and well prepared physically and psychologically. They believed in Lebensraum—in the rightness of Germany’s expanding as much as necessary to acquire land and resources to survive. They believed in the rightness of Germany’s expanding to re-incorporate ethnic Germans now living in foreign lands. They believed that Germany had a moral mission—even a divine mission—to show the world the way to a brighter, idealistic future and to destroy the tottering and depraved capitalist nations of the West. As Hitler put it at the beginning of the war: “What will be destroyed in this war is a capitalist clique that was and remains willing to annihilate millions of men for the sake of their despicable personal interests.”[41]

And of course, the Germans had plans for the Jews.

References

[41] Quoted in Lukacs 1991, p. 121.

[Bibliography.]

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Political controls [Section 13 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 13 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

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.

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Authoritarianism, not liberal democracy [Section 10 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 10 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

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.

References

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

[20] Hitler 1925, p. 449.

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

[Bibliography.]

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Idealism, not politics as usual [Section 11 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 11 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

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]

References

[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.

[Bibliography.]

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Nazi democratic success [Section 12 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 12 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

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]:

NSDAP (National Socialist) 288

SPD (Socialist) 120

KPD (Communist) 81

Zentrum (Center, Catholic) 73

Kampfront SWR (Nationalist) 52

Bayerische Volkspartei 19

Deutsche Staatspartei 5

Christlich-Sozialer Volksdienst 4

Deutsche Volkspartei (Nationalist) 2

Deutsche Bauernpartei 2

Württembergerische Landbund 1

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

References

[27] Craig 1978, p. 576.

[Bibliography.]

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Explaining Nazism philosophically [Section 5 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 5 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

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?

References

[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.

[Bibliography.]

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