Following up on an earlier post about Only a God Can Save Us, here in four parts is my 40-minute interview with van Davis about his documentary on philosopher Martin Heidegger and his involvement with National Socialism:
van Davis’s documentary is available at Amazon.
The interview is also posted at CEE’s site.
Related:
Nietzsche and the Nazis page.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
[This is Section 3 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
Part 2. Explaining Nazism Philosophically
3. How could Nazism happen?
How could Nazism happen? This is an important question: professors and teachers the world over use the Nazis as a prime example of evil and rightly so. The Nazis were enormously destructive, killing 20 million people during their twelve-year reign. 
They were not the most destructive regime of the twentieth century: Josef Stalin and the other Communist dictators of the Soviet Union killed sixty-two million people. Mao Zedong and the Communists in China killed thirty-five million. The Nazis killed over twenty million and no doubt would have killed millions more had they not been defeated.[1]
So it is important to learn the lesson and to get it right.
After coming to power by democratic and constitutional means in 1933, the Nazis quickly turned Germany into a dictatorship. For six years they devoted their energies to preparing for war, which began in 1939. During the war in which every human and economic resource was needed for military purposes, the Nazis devoted huge amounts of resources in an attempt to exterminate Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and others.
Domestic dictatorship, international war, the Holocaust. All are terrible. But what exactly is the lesson of history here? How could a civilized European nation plunge itself and the world into such a horror?
References
[1] See Courtois 1999, pp. x, 4: contributors to that volume variously estimate the Communist death toll to be from 85 million to 100 million. See also Rummel 1997, Section II. Rummel’s site has updated numbers. For example, new data on deliberately caused famines in the People’s Republic of China under Mao led Rummel to revise the death toll for communist China upwards to 76,702,000.
[Bibliography.]
[Return to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
I am reading How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich
One of the essays is Thomas Rohkrämer’s “Martin Heidegger, National Socialism, and Environmentalism,” which takes up the long-running (and occasionally vicious) arguments about Heidegger’s Nazism: To what extent was he a Nazi? To what extent did his National Socialist politics follow from or otherwise cohere with the rest of his philosophy?
Rohkrämer has this to say early on:
‘“Martin Heidegger? A Nazi, of course a Nazi!” On a purely factual level, this exclamation by Jürgen Habermas is fully correct. Contrary to what Heidegger and Heideggerians have long maintained, historical research has demonstrated beyond doubt Heidegger’s early enthusiasm for National Socialism. Heidegger sympathized with the Nazis before 1933, he actively maneuvered to become rector, he publicly joined the Nazi Party on May Day, and the ceremony around his Rectoral Address included Nazi flags and the singing of the “Horst Wessel Song.” While Jews and political opponents were removed from the university (like his teacher Edmund Husserl) or even forced to flee the country (like his intimate friend Hannah Arendt), Heidegger showed his enthusiastic support for the destruction of the Weimar Republic and for the new regime. He praised the Führer principle for the university sector, while striving to attain such a position for himself. In speeches and newspaper articles he identified himself with Hitler’s rule, going so far as to state in autumn 1933 that “the Führer himself and alone is and will be Germany’s only reality and its law.” He not only approved in principle of the Nazi cleansing, but also tried to use the new regime to destroy the academic careers of colleagues, for example by initiating a Gestapo investigation.’ (pp. 172-173)
Rohkrämer then has a nicely nuanced discussion of Heidegger’s later moving away from Nazism in several particulars — though never in principle. He also points out that Heidegger was very much not alone among philosophers in embracing the Nazis:
“Association with National Socialism was also widespread among philosophers. While twenty philosophy professors were forced out of their positions, about thirty joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and almost half became party members by 1940. Moreover, it was not only, as many have assumed, ‘life philosophers’ or radical Nietzscheans who supported the Nazis; the rival schools of neo-Kantians or ‘value philosophers’ also had adherents who made the same political decision for very different reasons.” (p. 171)
Given Heidegger’s towering presence in the landscape of 20th-century philosophy and “deep ecology” environmentalism, How Green Were the Nazis? is an important book.
[Go to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
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