One can say “racism” or “anti-Semitism.” One might say that the Nazis were in the grip of a paranoid fantasy. However one characterizes Nazi ideology—the language used to describe it—one has to explain this belief system.
The Nazis’ actions grew out of their ideology. Nazism represented the enactment of ideological propositions. What was this Nazi ideology? What did it mean to those who embraced and promoted it? Why did it evoke such excitement?
Hitler believed—was deeply plugged into—his own ideology. Germans were impressed by his sincerity. Hitler shared his passionate conviction with his people, who responded to what he said. But what exactly was he saying?
It all begins with the idea of the German nation, Hitler’s profound identification with Germany, and his insistence that others identify as deeply as he did. The first element of Nazi ideology is quite conventional: attachment to Germany, or—dare we say—love of country.
Hitler explained: “Our love towards our people will never falter, and our faith in this Germany of ours is imperishable.” He called Deutschland ueber Alles a profession of faith, which today “fills millions with a greater strength, with that faith which is mightier than any earthly might.” Nationalism for Hitler meant willingness to act with a “boundless, all embracing love for the Volk and, if necessary, to die for it.”
According to Hitler, nationalism meant “overcoming bourgeois privatism, unconditionally equating the individual fate and the fate of the nation.” Every single German was obligated to unite with the community, and to share the common fate. The Volk, Hitler explained to the German people, is “but yourselves.”
Hitler’s totalitarianism insisted that individuals identify absolutely with the community. Not a single person was exempt from the obligation to devote one’s life to Germany, and to make enormous sacrifices in her name. There could be no exceptions.
The opposite of devotion to the community was selfish individualism. Hitler’s Official Programme, published in 1927 (Feder, 2012), put forth as its central plank: “The Common Interest before Self Interest,” stating that “The leaders of our public life all worship the same god—Individualism. Personal interest is the sole incentive.” For the Nazis, pursuit of self-interest—selfish individualism—was the primal sin.
Hitler declared:
Our aim is the dictatorship of the whole people, the community. I began to win men to the idea of an eternal national and social ideal—to subordinate one’s own interests to the interest of the whole society. There are, nevertheless, a few incurables who had never understood the happiness of belonging to this great, inspiring community.
The word “incurables” is crucial. The incurables were those diseased individuals who did not or could not embrace Hitler’s dream; who would not or could not assimilate into the National Socialist community.
Hitler theorized that civilization was based on self-sacrifice: the capacity to abandon individualism and pursuit of self-interest in the name of the larger community. The Aryan was the culture bearer par excellence. What was most strongly developed in the Aryan, Hitler said, was the self-sacrificing will to “give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s own life for others.” He “willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community.”
The Jew by contrast, Hitler claimed, represented the “mightiest counterpart to the Aryan.” Whereas the Aryan willingly sacrificed himself for the community, in the Jewish people the will to self-sacrifice did not go beyond the individual’s “naked instinct of self-preservation.” The Jew completely lacked the most essential requirement of a cultured people: the “idealistic attitude.”
The following judgment by the Cologne Labor Court (January 21, 1941) denied the claim of Jewish employees to a vacation (Noakes & Pridham, 2001):
The precondition for the claim to a vacation—membership of the plant community—does not exist. A Jew cannot be a member of the plant community on account of his whole racial tendency, which is geared to forwarding his personal interests and securing economic advantages.
According to this judgment, Jews could not be members of the community on account of their proclivity toward “forwarding personal interests and securing economic advantages.” This proclivity toward selfish individualism was a racially given tendency.
Hitler claimed that Jews were unable to devote themselves to a nation. The Jews were condemned—not for their physical defects—but for their way of being in the world. Jews symbolized the inability—or refusal—to attach and devote oneself to a national community.
Hitler called Jews the “demon of disintegration” of peoples, symbol of the “unceasing destruction” of their life. Jews were a “ferment of decomposition,” meaning that the Jew “destroys and must destroy.” Jews could not help themselves. According to Hitler, Jews were driven to destroy nations.
It was therefore “beside the point,” Hitler said, whether or not any particular Jew was “decent.” It wasn’t a question of this or that Jew—because the Jew “carried within himself those characteristics which nature has given him.” The tendency—or will—to destroy nations was a biologically given characteristic.
Nazi scholarship declared (Aronsfeld, 1985) that the peculiar characteristic of Judaism was its “hostility to human society,” which is why there could be “no solution to the Jewish question.” A true understanding of Jews and Judaism “insists on their total annihilation.”
Jewish hostility toward society was expressed as selfish individualism: the refusal to abandon egoism in order to fuse with a national community. By their very nature, Jews acted to disintegrate nations. In seeking to annihilate Jews, the Nazis sought to annihilate individualism, that is, the will to abandon the nation-state.
I am an American Jew, although, I admit, relatively unobservant. I have been married for fifty-two years now to a German woman, whose father was killed while serving in the Reichswehr in France. What sustains our marriage? Compassion. A search for greater understanding. Love. Respect. Determination to see each other as distinct human beings: each of us worthy of living our lives in harmony with each other, without prejudice or assumptions about our biological heritage or creed or values, unless we have substantial and incontrovertible reasons to judge otherwise and unless we are willing, too, to explore our own prejudices and assumptions about ourselves.
I taught aspects of German history during my long career at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, where I retired with the rank of Distinguished Teaching Professor of History emeritus. My research focus was on German educated elites—school teachers, physicists, mathematicians, lawyers, professors and finally, on physicians. As a senior Fulbright Scholar/Teacher, I was privileged to be a guest professor in Germany and conduct research in twelve major German archives and in Great Britain’s former Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine on “German medical ethics and practices from 1870 to 1945.” One of the fruits of this research is my novel, Shadows Walking, in which I describe, to the best of my ability, the mind and motives of a Nazi physician who “commits crimes against humanity.” It was, obviously, painful to research and write, and is, no doubt, painful to read. Everything in Shadows Walking either actually happened, or could have happened, exactly as I describe it. To my knowledge, it is only one of a few efforts to enter the mind and motives of a Nazi.
I specifically call my protagonist, Dr. Johann Brenner, before he has joined the Nazi Party, a German: he is an idealistic, well-intentioned, even reasonable German. He is born a German and raised in a German—and has strong reasons, I submit, to be proud to be a German, based on the achievements of German civilization. After he has joined the Nazi Party, he is a Nazi. This is a deliberate and conscious decision on my part. I regret more than I ever can say the attitudes that holds Germans responsible for the crimes of those who chose “to do harm” to so many innocents. It is a disservice to the honor of not only the German Jews and those Jews caught in the maw of Hitler’s armies as they invaded the Soviet Union and as they created “Fortress Europa,” but to those heroic Germans in the German Resistance against the Nazis; to the German Protestants and Catholics themselves victims in Hitler’s so-called “Euthanasia Program”; to the courageous German Jehovah’s Witnesses who were sent to the camps; likewise to the German gay and Lesbians; to the youth of Germany, we must admit, who knew no other world than the world of Nazi Germany and who were not educated to question authority; and to the defenseless Sinti and Roma peoples, caught where ever they could be found.
I see too many similarities between their world and ours. That is why we must never forget. Not because we hold “them” responsible. But because we could have been, and might still be, “them.”
This is such powerful insight, and on several levels:
First, it positions what we clinically — protesting faux detachment and “objectivity” — and erroneously call “nationalism” and “ideology” right where it properly needs to be, as the essence of faith, belief, and thus, religion. Hitler created a belief system as powerful as any we have seen. We need to reflect on Nazism, and not simply celebrate it iconically in our special narrative box of Evil.
Second, this wonderful, short message helps us understand the essence of anti-semitism in a way that gets to its essence — as Kant would say — The Thing Itself. Hence anti-semitism is not unique, but perhaps just the most resonant expression of a dynamic embedded in the existential heart of humanity itself. The entire human experience, and the entire compass of belief-reality in our consciousness has been dependent on the active and inescapable vitality and primal existence of The Other. So necessary is the alien, the stranger, to our very capacity to conceive of ourselves — and ourselves belonging together — that its crisp articulation in the Nazi religion should by all rights help us see this in ourselves. This is a great gift of this essay.
Finally, parsing human cultural variation, this distillation of K’s thought should bring us into a more active meditation on ourselves as Americans. How truly different is our need for The Other? Why has America been so bent on pursuing an aggressive ethos of retribution (truthfully, much more than its declarative face of universal redemption)? Such comparisons may be painful, but the joy from subsequent insight is full recompense!
From teaching my students about Marxist-Leninism, Naziism, or Islamic fundamentalism I have found that there is a fine line between being perceived as “explaining” the social movement in question and being perceived (or rather mis-perceived) as “excusing” or rationalizing the movement in question. I understand that when Ernst Nolte sought to explain Nazism phenomenologically, from the “inside out” why an ordinary German, having no previous ant-Semitic prejudice, would come not only to believe in Naziism and also to embrace its program, he was accused of rationalizing or excusing Nazism and its program. Have you, or other contributors to the Library of Social Science, encountered this criticism or line of attack by detractors? How can one respond to such criticism in a constructive but non-apologetic manner?
I do not agree with the point made that it starts with love of country. It starts with a fear of loss of control and power. Then a scapegoat, and love of country is the medium, not the message.