National Socialism

Dr. Franz Hamburger and the National Socialist collectivizing of reproduction

4 Comments / History, Religion /

“National-Socialism and Medicine” is Hamburger‘s address to the German medical profession. The University of Vienna professor outlines the philosophical basis for the Nazis’ collectivizing medicine, sex, and family life. Three passages caught my attention. 1. The importance of religion to National Socialist medicine: “we scientists and doctors simply and soberly affirm the principle of strength […]

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Heidegger and World War One — Altman’s good book

12 Comments / History, Philosophy, Politics /

The “Heidegger Wars” are an academic battle about the significance of Martin Heidegger’s commitment to Natonal Socialism as an ideology and to the Nazi Party in particular. William H. F. Altman’s important book, Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration, opens with this question: “Was Martin Heidegger an apolitical

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“Only a God Can Save Us” documentary

12 Comments / History, Philosophy, Politics /

The line is from Martin Heidegger’s resigned and despairing Der Speigel interview, shortly before his death in 1976. At Rockford University we hosted a showing of Jeffrey Van Davis’s film on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and his disturbing relationship with National Socialism. After the showing, we had a panel discussion featuring director Van Davis, professors David

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Why did Bertrand Russell blame German fascism on German philosophy?

8 Comments / History of Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics /

Reprising this from Thomas Akehurst’s Philosophy Now essay on why Bertrand Russell blamed German fascism on German philosophy: “What is less well known is that in the 1930s and 1940s Russell’s attention turned to the idea that the origins of Nazism were primarily philosophical.” Russelll, according to Akehurst, mentioned several German philosophers by name, among

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Zeev Sternhell on the Nazis’ pillaging of Nietzsche

Leave a Comment / History, Philosophy, Politics /

Refreshing this quotation from Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010), a scholarly study of the most disturbing intellectual trend of the modern world — the ongoing lineage of intellectuals opposed to the Enlightenment tradition of reason, naturalism, individualism, and freedom. Along the way Sternhell asks, of Nietzsche’s place in the trend, an

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“The Nazis were Socialist” — really?

Leave a Comment / History /

From 2006, an eight-minute documentary clip with my answer. Topics covered: (1) National Socialist philosophy, (2) the Nazi Party’s original 25-point platform — collectivism, economic socialism, nationalism, authoritarianism — (3) negotiations to merge with the German Socialist Party, (4) Hitler and Goebbels speeches on socialism, and (5) the symbolism of the swastika. From 2006, an

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Viktor Frankl: On the original preparation for the gas chambers

Leave a Comment / History of Philosophy /

Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School: I became acquainted with the last stages of corruption in my second concentration camp in Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity

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