Die UN im Kampf gegen den Terrorismus (German Edition)

Sturmabteilung speakers were used, though their reliance sometimes offended well-educated audiences, but their blunt and folksy manner often had their own appeal. A essay aimed at propagandists "Heart or Reason? What We don't Want from Our Speakers", explicitly complained that speakers should aim for the heart, not the understanding, and many of them failed to try this.

An SS paper declared that IQ varied inversely with male infertility, and medical papers declared that the spread of educational pursuits had brought down the birth rate. This frequently related to the blood and soil doctrines and an organic view of the German people. It also related to antisemitism, as Jews were often accused of being intellectual and having a destructive "critical spirit.

This view affected the creation of propaganda as well.

Goebbels, who never tired of railing against intellectuals, told propagandists to aim their work toward the woodcutter in Bad Aibling. Overall, these themes reflected Nazi Germany's split between myth and modernity. Capitalism was also attacked as morally inferior to German values [3] and as failing to provide for the German people. This was portrayed as Jewish, so as to attack both Communism and plutocracy, describing Jews as being behind both.

The Spanish Civil War began the propaganda of portraying Germany as a protector against " Jewish Bolshevism ," making heavy use of atrocity stories. Before the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact , from , substantial anti-Bolshevist campaigns were conducted. The first declaration of the Pact presented it as a genuine change, but this was unpalatable to the Nazi faithful and the line was soon watered down even before its violation. Initially the Nazis wanted to have alliance with United Kingdom, however after the war started they were denounced as "the Jew among the Aryan peoples" and as plutocrats, fighting for money.

German newspapers and newsreels often pictured photos and footage of British unemployed and slums together with unfavorable commentary about the differences in living standards of the working class of Nazi Germany vs that of the working class living under British "plutocracy".

Simultaneously, propaganda presented them as tools of the Communists.

A German parody stamp, of one depicting King George and Queen Elizabeth, replaced the queen with Stalin and added a hammer and sickle, and stars of David. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, propaganda resumed, quickly linking the attack with British forces, which simplified the task of attacking both Communism and "plutocracy" at once.

This also allowed Goebbels to make use of anti-Communist propaganda to the occupied nations, portraying a Utopia protected by German versus a slave camp under Communism. In , a "Soviet Paradise" exhibit was opened to depict the Soviet Union as having been found a place of filth and poverty. Also in , the Nazi government believed Churchill's fall was possible, which Goebbels chose to spin as England surrendering Europe to Bolshevism. Preparations were made, in anticipation of victory in Russia, to present this as the triumph over Communism.

In , the defeat at Stalingrad led to a serious Anti-Bolshevist campaign in view of the possibility of defeat. These included the Holodomor of , the Great Terror, the persecution of intellectuals during the Great Purge of , the massacre of Ukrainian intellectuals after the annexation of Western Ukraine from Poland in , the introduction and implementation of Collectivisation.

As a result, the population of whole towns, cities and villages, greeted the Germans as liberators which helps explain the unprecedented rapid progress of the German forces in the occupation of Ukraine. Russia became an important role in Hitler's German expansion and foreign policy Lebensraum , in his written and programmatic writing Mein Kampf developed Adolf Hitler, in a special chapter on Facing: East or Eastern policy detail his habitat plans.

We National Socialists consciously draw a line under the direction of our foreign policy war. We begin where we ended six centuries ago. We stop the perpetual Germanic march towards the south and west of Europe, and have the view on the country in the east. We finally put the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-war and go over to the territorial policy of the future. But if we speak today in Europe of new land, we can primarily only to Russia and the border states subjects him think. Because the Russian people were Slavic, not Germanic, the Soviet Union was also attacked on racial grounds for "living space" as Nazi ideology believed that only the Nordic people referred to as the Germanic people represented the Herrenvolk master race which was to expand to the East Drang nach Osten.

Influenced by the guidelines, in a directive sent out to the troops under his command, General Erich Hoepner of the Panzer Group 4 stated:. The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism.

The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.

Martin Heidegger and Nazism - Wikipedia

It is a war of ideologies and struggle races. On one side stands National Socialism: It is worth the world as we want to see: On the other side stands the millionth people, a mixture of races and peoples, whose names are unpronounceable, and whose physical nature is such that the only thing that they can do - is to shoot without pity or mercy. These animals, which are subjected to torture and ill-treatment of each prisoner from our side, which do not have medical care they captured our wounded, as do the decent men, you will see them for yourself.

These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism, with the task of: When you, my friends, are fighting in the East, you keep that same fight against the same subhumans, against the same inferior races that once appeared under the name of Huns, and later - 1, years ago during the time of King Henry and Otto I, - the name of the Hungarians, and later under the name of Tatars, and then they came again under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols.

Today they are called Russian under the political banner of Bolshevism. During the war, Himmler published the pamphlet "Der Untermensch" The Subhuman which featured photographs of ideal Aryans contrasted with photographs of the ravages of barbarian races Jews from the days of Attila and Genghis Khan to massacres in the Jewish-dominated Soviet Union. Hitler believed that after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the war in the East was to destroy Bolshevism , as well as aiming to ruin the Great Russian Empire, and a war for German expansion and economic exploitation.

Goebbels, in Das Reich , explained Russian resistance in terms of a stubborn but bestial soul. The troops were told that in World War I, the Russian troops had often feigned death or surrender, or donned German uniforms, in order to kill German soldiers. Until early the following slogan was in use "the Russian is a beast, he must croak" der Russe sei eine Bestie, er muesse verrecken but the need for Russian manpower in the German labor force led to its demise. Events such as the Nemmersdorf massacre and Metgethen massacre were also used by German propaganda to strengthen the fighting spirit on the eastern front towards the end of the war.

Until the end of Czechoslovakia in March , that state was a major target of abuse. Czechoslovakia was represented as an "abomination" created by the Treaty of Versailles , an artificial state that should never had been created. For many years, it was forbidden to discuss the German minority in Poland, and this continued through into early , even while newspapers were asked to press the matter of Danzig. In , when two secretaries at the German War Ministry were caught providing state secrets to their lover, a Polish diplomat, the two women were beheaded for high treason while the diplomat was declared persona non grata.

In inter-war Germany, anti-Polish feelings ran high. Nazi propaganda demanded that Danzig should be returned to Germany. Since the Treaty of Versailles separated Danzig Polish: Hitler used the issue of the status of the city as a pretext for attacking Poland and on May , during a high level meeting of German military officials explained to them: It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our Lebensraum in the east , adding that there will be no repeat of the Czech situation, and Germany will attack Poland at first opportunity, after isolating the country from its Western Allies.

In the spring of , just before the invasion of Poland, a major anti-Polish campaign was launched, asserting such claims as forced labor of ethnic Germans, persecution of them, Polish disorder, Poles provoking border incidents, and aggressive intentions from its government. In attempts to try and justify the Nazis invasion of Poland, Goebbels produced photographs and other evidence for allegations that ethnic Germans had been massacred by Poles. The nazis used the Gleiwitz incident to justify their invasion of Poland, although the incident was set up by Himmler and Heydrich using concentration camp inmates dressed in Polish uniforms' It was alleged that the Poles had attacked a German radio station using the prisoners, who were all murdered at the scene.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1 after having signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in late August. The German attack began in Danzig, with a bombardment of Polish positions at Westerplatte by the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein , and the landing of German infantry on the peninsula. Outnumbered Polish defenders at Westerplatte resisted for seven days before running out of ammunition. Meanwhile, after a fierce day-long fight 1 September , defenders of the Polish Post office were tried and executed then buried on the spot in the Danzig quarter of Zaspa in October In a German court overturned their conviction and sentence.

The death of some Polish cavalry soldiers, caused by tanks, created a myth that they had attacked the tanks, which German propaganda used to promote German superiority. To prevent such anti-Polish stigma, when Polish children were kidnapped for Germanization , official orders forbade making the term "Germanizable Polish children" known to the public.

The position of Nazi propaganda towards the United Kingdom changed over time. Prior to , while Hitler tried to court Britain into an alliance, his propaganda praised the British as proficient Aryan imperialists. Later, as the Nazis realized that they would have to fight the United Kingdom given the British's fervent refusal of all peace offers, German propaganda vilified the British as oppressive, German-hating plutocrats.

During the war, it accused the " perfidious Albion " of war crimes, and sought especially to drive a wedge between Britain and France. Anti-American propaganda dealt heavily with a lack of "ethnic unity" in the United States. Goebbels gave a speech on American negative reactions to anti-Jewish campaigns in , to call for their stopping their criticism. Hitler declared America as a "mongrel nation", grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews and the Americans were a "mongrel people" incapable of higher culture or great creative achievements.

Newspapers were warned, soon after war broke out, to avoid portraying news in a manner that would embarrass American isolationists, and that the United States was considerably more hostile than it had been before World War I. In the Katyn massacre was used to portray American and British governments as subservient to Communism.

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Although there had been irregularities, the magazine acknowledged that the results were "largely honest". It then discussed "the real effectiveness of Nazi demagogy" in obtaining such results:. Its secret is to deal with the people not as individuals but as crowds. The message to the crowd is a series of simple, basic, memorable words — nation , people , blood , family , comrade , friend , home , soil , bread , work , strength , hope , life , fight , victory , birth , death , honor , beauty.

The Party is set up as having a monopoly on giving the people these virtues and good things. To a people whose immediate past has been hard, muddled and apparently irremediable, simple emotional words have an immense, reverberating authority. But most of all the little man who is lost and friendless in a complex, lonely modern society is treated as important, if only in the mass.

As a counterpoint to their anti-intellectualism , the Nazis heavily favored action. Manuals for school teachers, under "Literature", instructed that since only the vigorous were educationally valuable, anything that discouraged manliness was to be avoided. Leni Riefenstahl 's Der Sieg des Glaubens glorified the mass adulation of Adolf Hitler at the Nuremberg rally of , although the propaganda film was later deleted and banned following the murder of Roehm in the Night of the Long Knives.

She also produced Triumph of the will , her film of the rally, which gave greater prominence to the SS. Women, too, were expected to be strong, healthy, and vital, despite being primarily mothers; a photograph subtitled "Future Mothers" showed teenaged girls dressed for sport and bearing javelins. Heroic death was often portrayed in Nazi propaganda as glorious. Propaganda about the Volk depicted it as a greater entity to which the individual belonged, and one worth dying for. Several dead stormtroopers were singled out for glorification by Goebbels, [] especially Horst Wessel.

His posthumous fame stemmed from his "martyr's death" and Goebbel's selection of him to glorify among the many Storm-Troppers who died. This continued in the war. In , the Winter Relief booklets recounted the stories of 20 decorated war heroes. The dead of the Battle of Stalingrad were portrayed as heroes of Valhalla , not as having failed but as having held back Russian regiments. Goebbels attempted to contrast German heroism with Douglas MacArthur's flight, accusing him of cowardice—somewhat ineffectually, as the Germans knew he had been ordered to leave.

The creation of the Volkssturm had propagandists make full use of themes of death, transcendence, and commemoration to encourage the fight. While men were the ones depicted as dying for Germany, women were also presented as needing to sacrifice. Women, and other civilians, were also called on by Goebbels to reduce their standard of living to that of soldiers and civilians living in bombed areas, so as to sacrifice that material for total mobilization.

Teachers' guidelines instructed that since people with hereditary weaknesses were personally innocent, their voluntary submission to sterilization was a great sacrifice for the good of the people, and they should not be treated with contempt. At the time of the Beer Hall Putsch, he used his trial to present himself, claiming it had been his sole responsibility and inspiring the title Fuhrer. Carl Schmitt , drawn to the Nazi party by his admiration for a decisive leader, [] praised him in his pamphlet State, Volk and Movement because only the ruthless will of such a leader could save Germany and its people from the "asphalt culture" of modernity, to bring about unity and authenticity.

The Volksgemeinschaft or people's community received a great deal of propaganda support, a principle that the Nazis continually reiterated. After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler, on the trial, omitted his usual pre-putsch antisemitism and centered his defense on his selfless devotion to the good of the Volk and the need for bold action to save them. The Volksgemeinschaft was also used for war support. Film on the home-front during World War II, depicted the war uniting all levels of society, as in the two most popular films of the Nazi era, Die grosse Liebe and Wunschkonzert.

Closely related to the community was the notion of blood and soil, a mystical bond between the German people and Germanic lands. Neues Volk displayed demographic charts to deplore the destruction of the generous Aryan families' farmland and how the Jews were eradicating traditional German peasantry. Carl Schmitt argued that a people would develop laws appropriate to its "blood and soil" because authenticity required loyalty to the Volk over abstract universals. The charge laid against degenerate art was that it had been cut off from blood and soil. Blut und Boden films likewise stressed the commonality of Germaness and the countryside.

The Rhineland Bastards , children of German mothers and black fathers from French occupying troops, received so much propaganda attention as diluting German blood prior to the Nazi seizure of power that a census finding only seemed an embarrassment. The Nazis went to great extents on teaching the German youth to be proud of their race through biology teaching, the National Socialist Teachers League NSLB in particular taught in schools that they should be proud of their race and not to race mix.

The Nazis often described the Germans as being the Ubermenschen superhumans Aryan master race. This also created their idea of the Untermenschen subhumans , in particular this was aimed at Jews and Roma Gypsies. The Nazis encouraged the Germans not to race mix and that only racially pure Aryans should be allowed to breed. They were taught to have nothing to do with them and view them as subhumans. On trial after the Beer Hall Putsch, foregoing his usual antisemitic speeches, Hitler presented his involvement as a springing from a deep love of the Volk.

This continued after the seizure of power.

Die NATO und der Anti-Terror-Kampf

One popular Munich speaker, declaring biological research boring, called instead on racial emotions; their "healthy ethnic instincts" would reveal the quality of the Aryan type. The overturning of the rule of law was justified on the grounds that law stemmed from the "right to life of the people. Walter Gross , as head of the National Socialist Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare, oversaw a massive propaganda effort to increase ethnic consciousness; [] this was termed "enlightenment" rather than "propaganda" by Nazi authorities, because it was not a call for immediate action but a long-term change in attitude.

Bernhard Rust informed teachers that their task was to educate ethnically aware Germans. Many Nazi speakers muted antisemitic themes for general audiences, to instead dwell on the ethnic excellence of the Germans. The immensely popular "Red Indian" stories by Karl May were permitted despite the heroic treatment of the hero Winnetou and "colored" races; instead, the argument was made that the stories demonstrated the fall of the Red Indians was caused by a lack of racial consciousness, to encourage it in the Germans. In , Hitler's January 30 speech, which threatened to destroy Jews as the authors of any coming war, opened with praise for the flowering of the German people, and declare that whatever was detrimental to the people could not be ethical.

Goebbels's Christmas speech was devoted to the greatness of Germans and their certain victory rather than the war. Nazi propaganda emphasized that the Aryan race could only continue through the children for the future generations. A pamphlet "You and Your People", given to children at fourteen, when they left school, urged on them their unity with the Volk , their ancestry, and the vital importance of their marrying within their own race and having many children.

As the theory called only for parents of good blood, propaganda attempts were made to destigmatize illegitimate births, although the Lebensborn homes were presented to the public as places for married women. This, of course, applied only to those who selected proper partners as the parents of their children. In the movie Friesennot , depicting ethnic Germans persecuted in the Soviet Union, a half-Friesan woman is murdered for her association with a Russian man, as her German blood outweighs her Russian blood.

In wartime, the NS-Frauen-Warte urged women to nevertheless have children to maintain their race. During the era of the Nazi Party in Germany, policies and propaganda encouraged German women to contribute to the Third Reich through motherhood. To build the Third Reich, the Nazis believed that a strong German people, who acted as a foundation, was essential to the success of Nazi Germany. Within this propaganda there were three main arguments that were used. The first argument that was used in Nazi motherhood propaganda was that German mothers were expected to produce as many children as possible.

The mother of Nazi Germany was glorified in visual propaganda. Another use of Nazi propaganda was that they wanted women to have as many Aryan children that they could bear to make a future for the next generations master race. The second argument within German propaganda is that racially desirable German women were supported in their effort to have children; however undesirable mothers, such as Jews and gypsies, were discouraged from having more children.

If women did not produce desirable children, they were subject to shaven heads, pillorying, public humiliation and execution. The third argument used in Nazi motherhood propaganda created an ideal Nazi woman, which implicitly encouraged women to always be mothers in one way or another. The first way that this ideal was created was through the construction of spiritual motherhood in Nazi propaganda.

German women who were not able to have children were encouraged, through propaganda, to participate in spiritual, rather than physical, maternity by doing womanly work. Their contributions to the war came in the form of mothering German society. The next way that motherhood towards Germany was created through Nazi propaganda was through the ideal German woman. These propaganda appeals effectively persuaded German women because it contained the right mixture of traditional ideas, myths of the past, and the acceptance of the needs of a modern economy and lifestyle.

Propaganda was also directed to Germans outside the Third Reich, to return as regions, or as individuals from other regions. Hitler hoped to make full use of the "German Diaspora. Prior to Anchluss , a powerful transmittor in Munich bombarded Austria with propaganda of what Hitler had done for Germany, and what he could do for Austria. In the Baltic States, after an agreement with Stalin, who suspected they would be loyal to Nazis, [] the Nazis set out to encourage the departure of "ethnic Germans" by the use of propaganda.

This included using scare tactics about the Soviet Union, and led to tens of thousands leaving. As part of an effort to lure ethnic Germans back to Germany, [] folksy Heimatbriefe or "letters from the homeland" were sent to German immigrants to the United States. Radio propaganda to Russia included the threat that if the Volga Germans were persecuted, the Jews would have to pay for it, many times over. Newspapers in the occupied Ukraine printed articles about antecedents of German rule over the Ukraine, such as Catherine the Great and the Goths.

Nazi Germany conducted propaganda against smoking [] and had arguably the most powerful anti-tobacco movement in the world. Anti-tobacco research received a strong backing from the government, and German scientists proved that cigarette smoke could cause cancer. German pioneering research on experimental epidemiology led to the paper by Franz H. The government urged German doctors to counsel patients against tobacco use.

Tobacco and pollutants in the workplace were viewed as a threat to the German race, so for partly ideological reasons the Nazi government chose to conduct propaganda against them, as one of many preventative steps. Although the child was "the most important treasure of the people", this did not apply to all children, even German ones, only those with no hereditary weaknesses. Propaganda for the Nazi eugenics program began with propaganda for eugenic sterilization. Articles in Neues Volk described the pathetic appearance of the mentally ill and the importance of preventing such births.

Biology textbooks were among the most propagandistic in the Third Reich, owing to their content of eugenic principles and racial theories, including explanations of the Nuremberg Laws , which were claimed to allow the German and Jewish peoples to co-exist without the danger of mixing. During the euthanasia program, the film Ich klage an was created to depict a woman being mercifully killed by her husband to escape her fatal illness, and his trial afterwards to stage pro-euthanasia arguments. This situation presented the matter in the most favorable light, far from the solitary, involuntary deaths of those killed by the program under a very broad definition of "incurably ill.

The Stab-in-the-back myth , asserting that Germany had not really been defeated in World War I but instead betrayed, was integral to affirming the excellence of Germany. The humiliation of Germany at Versailles was of good use to Hitler, both inside Germany and outside, where many onlookers were sympathetic. A common wartime motif was that the Allies intended to destroy this country for its excellence.

Goebbels presented it as the stakes of the war. By the end of the war, total war propaganda argued that death would be better than the destruction the Allies intended to inflict, which would nevertheless end in death. The propaganda claim was made from that Germany was under threat and attack and in need of defense. This line of propaganda presented obvious difficulties in occupied nations. Propaganda directed at these countries asserted, with blatant falsity, of wanting to protect European rather than German culture, particularly from the threat of Communism.

When propaganda had to be visible to both native and foreign populations, a balance had to be struck. Pamphlets urging German women to protect the purity of their blood from foreign slave workers also asserted that this was not a manifestation of contempt for other nations. German Institutes in occupied countries, particularly France, attempted to demonstrate Germanic cultural superiority through cultural programs, which also softened the effects of occupation, and distracted from Nazi plans. Early success led many in Germany to believe that the war could be won with ease.

Setbacks caused Goebbels to call for propaganda to toughen up the German people and not make victory look easy. This means allowing oneself to be beset by the unknown and then becoming master of it in comprehending knowing; it means becoming secure in one's sense of what is essential.

It is from such teaching that true research emerges, interlocked with the whole through its rootedness in the people and its bond to the state. The student is forced out into the uncertainty of all things, in which the necessity of engagement is grounded. University study must again become a risk , not a refuge for the cowardly. Whoever does not survive the battle, lies where he falls. The new courage must accustom itself to steadfastness, for the battle for the institutions where our leaders are educated will continue for a long time.

It will be fought out of the strengths of the new Reich that Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. A hard race with no thought of self must fight this battle, a race that lives from constant testing and that remains directed toward the goal to which it has committed itself. It is a battle to determine who shall be the teachers and leaders at the university.

According to Farias and Ott, Heidegger also denounced or demoted three colleagues for being insufficiently committed to the Nazi cause. But this has been disputed by Eduard Langwald, who considers "Heidegger was never a Nazi-minded informer". According to Hugo Ott, Heidegger leaked information on September 29, to the local minister of education that the chemist Hermann Staudinger had been a pacifist during World War I. Heidegger knew this could cost Staudinger his job. The Gestapo investigated the matter and confirmed Heidegger's tip.

Asked for his recommendation as rector of the university, Heidegger secretly urged the ministry to fire Staudinger without a pension. As Langwald alleges Heidegger was himself a pacifist since World War I, he doubts that Heidegger could so suddenly become a "pacifist hunter" acting "furiously macho", [29] and asserts Ott did not interpret the facts properly. After Hitler's "Peace Speech" of May 17, , Heidegger more likely wanted to test Staudinger, because as a chemist his researches could become dangerous. Safranski, although he charges Heidegger, recognizes: He felt he was a part of the revolutionary movement, and it was his intention to keep opportunists away from the revolutionary awakening.

They were not to be allowed to sneak into the movement and use it to their advantage. He intervened as Baumgarten applied for membership in the SA brownshirts and in the National Socialist Dozentenschaft. In the letter, Heidegger called Baumgarten "anything but a National-Socialist" and underlined his links to "the Heidelberg circle of liberal-democratic intellectuals around Max Weber. Heidegger also fired a Nazi student leader because he was this time too favorably disposed toward the regime see Picht's testimony.

On November 3, , Heidegger issued a decree applying the Nazi racial policies to the students of Freiburg university. These laws meant that Jews were now indirectly and directly dissuaded or banned from privileged and superior positions reserved for "Aryan Germans. After , Heidegger declined to direct the doctoral dissertations of Jewish students: And in his letter denouncing Baumgarten, cited above, Heidegger wrote that "after failing with me" [not as a student but as a friend! Heidegger intervened as rector to help several other Jewish colleagues.

There are nevertheless troubling passages from Heidegger's lecture and seminar courses from the period of the Nazi Gleichschaltung. The enemy is one who poses an essential threat to the existence of the people and its members. The enemy is not necessarily the outside enemy, and the outside enemy is not necessarily the most dangerous.

It may even appear that there is no enemy at all. The root requirement is then to find the enemy, bring him to light or even to create him, so that there may be that standing up to the enemy, and so that existence does not become apathetic. In his advanced contemporary seminars "On the Essence and Concept of Nature, State and History," Heidegger expostulated in essentialising terms concerning "semitic nomads" and their lack of possible relation to the German homeland, "drifting" in the "unessence of history":.

History teaches us that nomads did not become what they are because of the bleakness of the desert and the steppes, but that they have even left numerous wastelands behind them that had been fertile and cultivated land when they arrived, and that men rooted in the soil have been able to create for themselves a native land, even in the wilderness…the nature of our German space would surely be apparent to a Slavic people in a different manner than to us; to a Semitic nomad, it may never be apparent. Beginning in , the philosopher Edmund Husserl championed Heidegger's work, and helped him secure the retiring Husserl's chair in Philosophy at the University of Freiburg.

On April 6, , the Reichskommissar of Baden Province, Robert Wagner, suspended all Jewish government employees, including present and retired faculty at the University of Freiburg. Husserl, who was born Jewish and was an adult convert to Lutheran Christianity, was affected by this law. Heidegger did not become Rector until April 22, so it was Heidegger's predecessor as Rector who formally notified Husserl of his "enforced leave of absence" on April 14, Then, the week after Heidegger's election, the national Reich law of April 28, came into effect, overriding Wagner's decree, and requiring that all Jewish professors from German universities, including those who had converted to Christianity, be fired.

The termination of Husserl's academic privileges thus did not involve any specific action on Heidegger's part. Heidegger had by then broken off contact with Husserl, other than through intermediaries. Heidegger later claimed that his relationship with Husserl had become strained after Husserl publicly "settled accounts" with him and Max Scheler in the early s.

Prior to that there was his self-initiated break in relations with me - in fact, soon after his appointment at Freiburg - and, over the last few years, his anti-Semitism, which he came to express with increasing vigor - even against the coterie of his most enthusiastic students, as well as around the department.

Heidegger did not attend his former mentor's cremation in He spoke of a "human failure" and begged pardon in a letter to his wife. There is no truth to the oft-repeated story that during Heidegger's time as Rector, the University denied Husserl access to the university library. However, in , under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, Heidegger did agree to remove the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time , but it could still be found in a footnote on page 38, thanking Husserl for his guidance and generosity.

Husserl, of course, had died several years earlier. The dedication was restored in post-war editions. For example, in one speech Heidegger stated:. Let not propositions and 'ideas' be the rules of your being Sein. Learn to know ever more deeply: In another speech a few days later, Heidegger endorsed the German election of November , in which the electorate was presented with a single Nazi-approved list of candidates:. There is only one will to the full existence Dasein of the State. In this address, he argued for a revolution in knowledge, a revolution that would displace the traditional idea that the university should be independent of the state:.

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We have witnessed a revolution. The state has transformed itself. This revolution was not the advent of a power pre-existing in the bosom of the state or of a political party. The national-socialist revolution means rather the radical transformation of German existence. In that interview, he stated: Such things as that I stopped saying by But as to Heidegger's being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: Jonas' reading can be supported by citations from Heidegger's lectures during and immediately following the time he was rector.

In "On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History and State", for instance, Heidegger appears to give a direct ontological sanction to Hitler's absolute rule:. The origin of all political action is not in knowledge, but in being. In his class on Holderlin, Heidegger is able to comment that "The true and only Fuhrer makes a sign in his being towards the domain [ bereich , empire] of the demigods.

In his postwar justification, Heidegger claimed he resigned the rectorship in April because the ministry in Karlsruhe had demanded the dismissal of the deans Erik Wolf and Wilhelm von Mollendorf on political grounds. By the beginning of , there were reports in Berlin that Heidegger had established himself as 'the philosopher of National Socialism'. But to other Nazi thinkers, Heidegger's philosophy appeared too abstract, too difficult, to be of much use [ It is not surprising that his enemies were able to enlist the support of Alfred Rosenberg , whose own ambition it was to be the philosopher of Nazism himself.

After he resigned from the rectorship, Heidegger withdrew from most political activity but he never withdrew his membership in the Nazi party. What today is systematically touted as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has nothing in the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement namely the encounter of a globally determined technology with the man of the new age , darts about with fish-like movements in the murky waters of these 'values' and 'totalities'.

The whole lecture shows that I was at that time an adversary of the regime. The understanding ears knew therefore how to interpret the sentence. One had to throw them a crumb here and there in order to keep freedom of teaching and speaking.

This lecture was published in under the title An Introduction to Metaphysics. In the published version, Heidegger left the sentence, but added a parenthetical qualification: However, Heidegger did not mention that this qualification was added at the time of publication, and was not part of the original lecture. This raised concerns in post-Nazi Germany that Heidegger was distinguishing a "good Nazism" from a "bad Nazism", a contention supported by his philosophical opponents, including Bauemler [ citation needed ].

The controversial page of the manuscript is missing from the Heidegger Archives in Marbach. Heidegger defended himself during the denazification period by claiming that he had opposed the philosophical bases of Nazism, especially biologism and the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche's The Will to Power.

However, in a lecture, Heidegger still sounded rather ambiguous as to whether Nietzsche's thought was compatible with Nazism, or at least with that hypothetical "good Nazism": According to personal notes made in not published until , Heidegger took strong exception to Hitler's statement, "There is no attitude, which could not be ultimately justified by the ensuing usefulness for the totality. Who makes up this totality? Eighty million-strong extant human mass? Does its extantness assign to this human mass the right to the claim on a continued existence?

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How is this totality determined? What is its goal? Is it itself the goal of all goals? Wherein lies the justification for this goal-setting? On what is this principle grounded? Does comprehensibility justify legitimacy? However, in a lecture, published posthumously, Heidegger was once again ambiguous on the subject of Nazism. During a discussion of then recent German classics scholarship, he said that: This overenthusiasm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this anyhow.

In the same lecture, he commented on America's entry into World War II, in a way that seems to identify his philosophy with the Nazi cause:. The entry of America into this planetary war is not an entry into history. No, it is already the last American act of America's history-lessness and self-destruction. This act is the renunciation of the Origin. It is a decision for lack-of-Origin. Walter Biemel, Heidegger's student in , testified in Heidegger was the only professor not to give any Nazi salutations prior to beginning his courses, even though it was administratory obligatory.

Some conversations in those times could cost you your head. I had many such conversations with Heidegger. There is absolutely no doubt he was a declared adversary of the regime. Heidegger's lectures were attended not only by students but also by people with long-standing professions and even by retired people, and every time I had the occasion to talk with these people, what came back incessantly was their admiration for the courage with which Heidegger, from the height of his philosophical position and in the rigor of his starting point, attacked National Socialism.

Equally, Hermine Rohner, a student from to , bears testimony to the fact Heidegger "wasn't afraid, as for him, even in front of students from all faculties so not only "his" students , to attack National Socialism so openly that I hunched up my shoulders. Due to what he calls Heidegger's "spiritual resistance", Czech resistance fighter and former Heidegger student Jan Patocka included him among his "heroes of our times".

He was another of Heidegger's students, aided by Heidegger in in obtaining a fellowship to study in Rome, where he lived between and He left no doubt about his faith in Hitler; only two things that he had underestimated: Now, as before, he was convinced that National Socialism was the prescribed path for Germany. Heidegger told me unreservedly that I was right and developed his idea by saying that his idea of historicity [ Geschichtlichkeit ] was the foundation for his political involvement.

In response to my remark that I could understand many things about his attitude, with one exception, which was that he would permit himself to be seated at the same table with a figure such as Julius Streicher at the German Academy of Law , he was silent at first. At last he uttered this well-known rationalisation which Karl Barth saw so clearly , which amounted to saying that "it all would have been much worse if some men of knowledge had not been involved. He didn't understand it. During the hearings of the Denazification Committee, Hannah Arendt , Heidegger's former student and lover, who was Jewish, spoke on his behalf.

Arendt very cautiously resumed her friendship with Heidegger after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt for Heidegger and his political sympathies, and despite his being forbidden to teach for many years. In September , the Denazification Committee published its report on Heidegger. He was charged on four counts: In , he wrote to his friend Heinrich Petzet: Thomas Sheehan has noted "Heidegger's stunning silence concerning the Holocaust ," in contrast to his criticism of the alienation wrought by modern technologies: In a lecture entitled "Das Ge-stell" "Enframing" , he stated:.

Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry — in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations [the Berlin blockade was then active], the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. Commentators differ on whether these statements are evidence of a profound disregard for the fate of the Jews or rather, a recontextualization of their suffering in terms of the mechanization of life and death. Heidegger explained during his lecture: The same is no more only the indistinctive coincidence of the identical.

The same is rather the relation of the different. Moreover, many of those who align themselves with Heidegger philosophically have pointed out that in his work on "being-towards-death" we can recognize a much more salient criticism of what was wrong with the mass-produced murder of a people. Thinkers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler have made this point sympathetically.

Hundreds of thousands die en masse. They are done in. They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of manufacturing corpses. They are liquidated inconspicuously in extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished people are perishing from hunger in China. But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes our own essence possible. In other words, according to Heidegger, the victims of death camps were deprived not only of their life, but of the dignity of an authentic death, since they were "liquidated" as if they were inventory or problematic accounting, rather than killed in combat as one would kill an enemy.

Another citation levied against Heidegger by his critics, is his answer to a question by his former student Herbert Marcuse , concerning his silence about the Nazi racial policies. In a letter to Marcuse, he wrote:. I can add only that instead of the word "Jews" [in your letter] there should be the word " East Germans ", and then exactly the same [terror] holds true of one of the Allies , with the difference that everything that has happened since is public knowledge world-wide, whereas the bloody terror of the Nazis was in fact kept a secret from the German people.

The reference to East Germans concerns the expulsion of Germans after World War II from territories across eastern Europe, which displaced about 15 million and killed another 0. On September 23, , Heidegger was interviewed by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff for Der Spiegel magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously it was published on May 31, In the interview, Heidegger defends his involvement with the Nazi party on two points: Second, he saw in the historic moment the possibility for an "awakening" Aufbruch which might help to find a "new national and social approach" to the problem of Germany's future, a kind of middle ground between capitalism and communism.

For example, when Heidegger talked about a "national and social approach" to political problems, he linked this to Friedrich Naumann. According to Thomas Sheehan, Naumann had the "vision of a strong nationalism and a militantly anticommunist socialism, combined under a charismatic leader who would fashion a middle-European empire that "preserved the spirit and tradition of pre-industrial Germany even as it appropriated, in moderation, the gains of modern technology.

After , Heidegger claims in the interview, he was more critical of the Nazi government, largely prompted by the violence of the Night of the Long Knives. When the interviewers asked him about the lecture in which he had referred to the "inner truth and greatness of [the National Socialist] movement" i.

Rather, he meant it as he expressed it in the parenthetical clarification added in , namely, as "the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity. According to Lowith, Heidegger did not make any decisive break with National Socialism in , and Heidegger was willing to entertain more profound relations between his philosophy and political involvement than he would subsequently admit. The Der Spiegel interviewers were not in possession of most of the evidence for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies now known, and thus their questions did not press too strongly on those points.

In particular, the Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's quotation comparing the industrialization of agriculture to the extermination camps. In , Heidegger met with the poet Paul Celan , a Jew who had survived concentration camps operated by the Nazis' Romanian allies.

Heidegger there presented Celan with a copy of What is Called Thinking? On July 25 Celan visited Heidegger at his retreat, signing the guestbook and spending some time walking and talking with Heidegger. The details of their conversation are not known, but the meeting was the subject of a subsequent poem by Celan, entitled "Todtnauberg" dated August 1, The enigmatic poem and the encounter have been discussed by numerous writers on Heidegger and Celan, notably Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

A common interpretation of the poem is that it concerns, in part, Celan's wish for Heidegger to apologize for his behavior during the Nazi era. Although Heidegger's involvement with Nazism was known and had already divided philosophers, the publication, in , of Victor Farias ' book Heidegger and Nazism provoked on the topic an open controversy. The book, which tries to show that Heidegger supported Hitler and his racial policies and also denounced or demoted colleagues, was highly acclaimed but also starkly criticised.

The American philosopher Richard Rorty declared that "Farias' book includes more concrete information relevant to Heidegger's relations with the Nazis than anything else available", [72] while French philosopher Roger-Pol Droit commented: Farias was accused, however, of poor scholarship and sensationalism.

In Germany, Hans-Georg Gadamer , a former student of Heidegger, denounced Farias' "grotesque superficiality" [74] and historian Hugo Ott remarked that Farias' methodology was unacceptable in historical research. In , the controversy was renewed after Emmanuel Faye published a book with the provocative title Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy [41] Faye claims that Heidegger's philosophy was close to Nazism and that fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of his thought that it does not deserve to be called philosophy.