Nazism and German Intellectuals

The Rise of Nazism and the Role of German Intellectuals

By Dilip Barad

Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction

One of the most disturbing chapters in the history of modern thought is not simply the rise of Adolf Hitler — a demagogue who exploited mass hysteria — but the active role played by Germany's intellectual class in enabling, legitimising, and sometimes enthusiastically embracing National Socialism. Professors, philosophers, jurists, and writers — among the best-educated minds of their generation — did not merely fail to resist; many became willing architects of a murderous ideology. This essay traces the conditions that made Nazism possible, the intellectuals who gave it respectability, and those who resisted or fled.

The Soil in Which Nazism Grew

The Nazi movement did not emerge in a vacuum. Several structural conditions converged to create fertile ground for its rise.

Post-WWI Trauma and the Stab-in-the-Back Myth

The *Dolchstoßlegende* — the "stab-in-the-back" myth — convinced large sections of German society that the war had been lost not on the battlefield but through betrayal by Jews, Marxists, and liberals on the home front (Evans, 2003; Kershaw, 1998). The humiliating Treaty of Versailles (1919), which stripped Germany of territory, imposed crippling reparations, and forced a formal admission of war guilt, fuelled an intense, widespread nationalist resentment that political extremists skillfully exploited (Shirer, 1960).

The Fragility of the Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic was born in defeat and was never fully accepted by powerful sections of German society — the military, the judiciary, the civil service, and the universities (Evans, 2003). It was associated in the popular imagination with national shame, hyperinflation (1923), social disorder, and — after 1929 — catastrophic unemployment triggered by the Great Depression. For many Germans, the Republic was not a legitimate democratic order but a foreign imposition masquerading as government.

The Fear of Bolshevism

The Communist Revolution in Russia (1917) and the brief, violent Soviet Republic in Bavaria (1919) terrified Germany's middle classes, industrialists, and conservatives. An authoritarian, fiercely anti-communist movement like Nazism appeared to many as a necessary — even heroic — bulwark against the perceived Marxist threat (Kershaw, 1998).

## The Intellectual Climate: A Long Ideological Preparation

German intellectuals had been preparing the conceptual ground for fascism for decades before Hitler appeared.

Romantic Nationalism

The philosophical tradition of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte had long insisted that the German *Volk* constituted a unique, organic spiritual community whose authentic culture (*Kultur*) was inherently superior to the shallow, mechanical individualism of Western liberal civilisation (*Zivilisation*). This romantic nationalism provided the intellectual vocabulary through which Nazi propaganda would later speak (Mosse, 1964; Stern, 1961).

Social Darwinism and Eugenics

By the late nineteenth century, Social Darwinist ideas had given pseudo-scientific respectability to the notion of racial hierarchy, placing Germanic peoples at the summit of an imagined biological ladder. Eugenics — the idea that the "health" of the racial community must be scientifically managed — entered mainstream academic and medical discourse long before the Nazis institutionalised it in policy (Mosse, 1964).

The "Ideas of 1914" and Academic Nationalism

When World War I broke out, German academics responded with an outburst of nationalist enthusiasm. The *Manifesto of the 93* (1914) — signed by 93 leading German intellectuals including physicist Max Planck — publicly endorsed German militarism and rejected international criticism. Scholars framed the war as a sacred struggle of authentic German spirit against decadent Western rationalism (Verhey, 2000). This moment revealed how thoroughly nationalism had colonised the German university. When the war was lost, this same intellectual class turned its humiliation into resentment — and resentment into ideology.

The "Conservative Revolution"

A loose cluster of writers and thinkers in the 1920s — often grouped under the label of the *Konservative Revolution* — articulated a vision of Germany radically hostile to liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and Enlightenment universalism (Stern, 1961; Wolin, 2004). Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (*Das Dritte Reich*, 1923) coined the very phrase "the Third Reich." These thinkers provided the crucial intellectual bridge between nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and twentieth-century fascism.

Intellectuals Who Enabled or Embraced Nazism

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Perhaps the most consequential and philosophically troubling case is that of Martin Heidegger — widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and was installed as Rector of Freiburg University. His *Rectoral Address* — "The Self-Assertion of the German University" — framed the Nazi revolution in the language of existential authenticity, spiritual destiny, and the essence of the German people (Ott, 1993; Wolin, 1990). In this role, he used his office to denounce Jewish and politically suspect colleagues to party authorities. His posthumously published *Schwarze Hefte* (Black Notebooks) have revealed a more deeply personal and theological anti-Semitism than previously acknowledged by defenders of his philosophical legacy (Trawny, 2015). Heidegger never publicly apologised for his Nazi years, and the relationship between his philosophy and his politics remains one of the most fiercely debated questions in twentieth-century intellectual history (Safranski, 1998).

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985)

Carl Schmitt earned the chilling title of the "Crown Jurist of the Third Reich." A leading political and legal theorist, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and immediately placed his formidable intellect at the regime's service. His concept of the *Ausnahmezustand* — the "state of exception," in which the sovereign is defined as whoever decides when normal law is suspended — provided theoretical cover for Hitler's dictatorship (Schmitt, 1985). He drafted legal justifications for the purging of Jewish lawyers from the German bar and worked to legitimate the regime's most authoritarian acts. Schmitt represents a particularly stark example of how legal and political theory can be weaponised by power (Balakrishnan, 2000).

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946)

Alfred Rosenberg served as the Nazi Party's chief ideologue. His *Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts* (*The Myth of the Twentieth Century*, 1930) attempted to give Nazism a quasi-philosophical foundation in racial mysticism, Norse mythology, hostility to Christianity, and a cult of blood and soil (Rosenberg, 1930). While many Nazis found the book unreadable, it sold over a million copies and gave the movement an air of intellectual seriousness. Rosenberg was convicted of crimes against humanity and crimes against peace at the Nuremberg Trials and executed in 1946.

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)

Spengler's *Der Untergang des Abendlandes* (*The Decline of the West*, 1918) argued that Western liberal civilisation was in terminal historical decay and that a new era of blood, will, and Caesarism was inevitable (Spengler, 1991). While Spengler later expressed contempt for Hitler personally — finding him vulgar and plebeian — his work had already provided a powerful ideological framework for dismissing liberal democracy as historically obsolete (Hughes, 1952). The Nazis appropriated his pessimistic diagnosis of modernity even as he distanced himself from their crude racialism.

Ernst Jünger (1895–1998)

Ernst Jünger's celebrated World War I memoir *In Stahlgewittern* (*Storm of Steel*, 1920) glorified combat, violence, and the aesthetics of war as a sublime human experience (Jünger, 2003). His writings were enormously influential in creating a cult of hardness, heroism, and contempt for civilian, bourgeois values that the Nazis enthusiastically appropriated. Though Jünger maintained an ambivalent relationship with the Nazi regime and later distanced himself from it, his earlier work had contributed materially to the cultural climate in which fascism flourished (Neaman, 1999).

German Universities: Institutional Collaboration

Germany's universities — among the most prestigious in the world — were deeply and systematically implicated in the Nazi project.

Gleichschaltung (Coordination)

In 1933, the Nazis enforced *Gleichschaltung* — the "coordination" of all German institutions under party control. The *Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums* (Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 1933) provided the legal mechanism for expelling Jews, political opponents, and anyone deemed ideologically unreliable from university positions (Grüttner & Kinas, 2007). Over 1,200 academics — including some of the world's finest scientists, mathematicians, lawyers, and humanists — were dismissed or forced to resign. In many departments, between one-third and one-half of all faculty were removed.

The Nazification of Academic Disciplines

Many remaining academics enthusiastically adapted their disciplines to serve the regime. *Deutsche Physik* ("German Physics"), championed by Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, rejected Einstein's theory of relativity as "Jewish physics" and sought to purge the discipline of "un-German" abstractions (Beyerchen, 1977). Legal scholars rewrote constitutional theory to serve dictatorship. Historians produced nationalist mythology dressed as scholarship. Medical researchers provided pseudo-scientific justifications for racial hygiene and eventually for the extermination programmes.

The Book Burnings of 1933

On 10 May 1933, student organisations staged coordinated book-burning events at universities across Germany. Works by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, and hundreds of other authors were publicly incinerated. The burnings were not a spontaneous act of mob violence but an organised, university-sponsored ritual of intellectual purification — a symbol of what German academic life had become.

Intellectuals Who Resisted or Fled

Against the collaborators and opportunists must be set a remarkable generation of exiles whose departure represented one of the greatest intellectual migrations — and one of Nazi Germany's most devastating self-inflicted wounds.

Intellectuals Who Resisted or Fled

Against the collaborators must be set a remarkable generation of exiles:

Intellectual	Field	Significance
Albert Einstein	Physics	Fled to USA; stripped of citizenship
Sigmund Freud	Psychoanalysis	Fled to London; his books burned
Thomas Mann	Literature	Initially nationalist, became Nazism's most eloquent literary opponent
Hannah Arendt	Political philosophy	Fled; later wrote Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer	Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)	Fled; wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment analysing fascism's roots in Enlightenment itself
Walter Benjamin	Philosophy/Criticism	Fled; died at the Spanish border, 1940
Bertolt Brecht	Theatre	Fled; wrote anti-fascist plays in exile
Ernst Cassirer	Philosophy	Fled; directly debated Heidegger's irrationalism

This "brain drain" — estimated at the loss of nearly one-third of Germany's physics community alone — permanently damaged German science and scholarship (Fermi, 1968). American, British, and other Western universities were, paradoxically, enormously enriched by what Nazi Germany expelled.

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Why Did So Many Intellectuals Collaborate?

The Frankfurt School's Response

Members of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin — developed what became known as Critical Theory as a sustained intellectual response to fascism. In their landmark *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (1944/2002), Adorno and Horkheimer made the provocative argument that fascism was not a rejection of Enlightenment rationality but its logical culmination — that the same dominating, instrumental reason that drove modern science and capitalism could produce the machinery of the Holocaust (Jay, 1973).

Hannah Arendt and the "Banality of Evil"

Hannah Arendt's *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (1951) remains the most comprehensive philosophical analysis of how Nazism and Stalinism emerged from the ruins of liberal Europe. Her later concept of the "banality of evil" — developed through her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem — challenged the assumption that evil on such a scale required monsters (Arendt, 1963). Eichmann was not a fanatic but a bureaucrat: a man who had simply stopped thinking. The horror, for Arendt, lay precisely in the ordinariness of those who administered mass murder.

Why Did So Many Intellectuals Collaborate?

Historians and philosophers have wrestled deeply with this question. Several interlocking factors help explain — though never excuse — the pattern of collaboration:

1. **Opportunism** — Many academics saw the Nazi seizure of power as an opportunity for career advancement, particularly once Jewish and leftist competitors had been removed.

2. **Genuine ideological conviction** — Anti-Semitism, ethnic nationalism, and hostility to liberal democracy were already widespread in German academic culture long before Hitler's rise (Wolin, 2004).

3. **Fear** — Non-compliance risked loss of position, public denunciation, imprisonment, or worse.

4. **Self-deception** — Many told themselves they could "guide" or "moderate" the regime from within. Heidegger's case is paradigmatic: he believed, briefly, that he could be the philosopher-king who gave intellectual direction to the Nazi revolution (Ott, 1993).

5. **The crisis of liberalism** — After the trauma of WWI, the instability of Weimar, and the catastrophe of the Great Depression, many intellectuals genuinely believed that liberal democracy had failed historically and that a radical alternative was both necessary and legitimate.

6. **Romantic irrationalism** — A deep tradition of privileging *Geist* (spirit), *Volk* (people), and intuition over reason and universal rights made many German thinkers structurally susceptible to Nazi mysticism (Stern, 1961; Mosse, 1964).

The Lasting Question

The complicity of German intellectuals with National Socialism raised — and continues to raise — one of the central questions of modern thought: **Can philosophy, science, and culture claim moral neutrality?** Can the life of the mind be hermetically sealed from the world of power?

The answer that emerged from the catastrophe was an unequivocal no. The German case demonstrated that universities can become engines of persecution; that philosophy can provide the language of genocide; that science can serve extermination; and that the most educated society in Europe can choose barbarism.

The lesson endures. As Arendt (1951) warned, totalitarianism is not a relic of a barbaric past but a permanent possibility in modern societies — wherever loneliness, ideological certainty, and the abdication of critical thought converge. The German intellectuals who failed their moment did not do so because they were uneducated. Many failed precisely because they were educated — and chose, nonetheless, to stop thinking.

References

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Posted under: History of Ideas | European History | Philosophy | Political Thought

This blog post was generated by Claude AI Sonnet 4.6, based on a prompt crafted by Dilip Barad.