# Is Nazism a completely empty political philosophy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 11, 2013, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925 "2013-02-11T00:50:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/1 "2013-02-11T00:50:22Z")
In another thread I said, “Nazis had no coherent political philosophy but loved spectacle, greed, and killing people they didn’t like.” Thinking about it, and doing some research, I think I nailed it (though I usually think that) and have concluded that they had no plans for the future after they had conquered Eurasia and killed all the Jews and Slavs\*. They conquered to gain _Lebensraum,_ but for whom? Urban Germans, like Mao’s urban Chinese, didn’t want to be farmers, and the idle war machine could be quickly switched back to tractors and fertilizer, improving yields faster and cheaper than slave labor provided by Slavic slaves, who’d be dead anyway. And how could they hope to hold the vastness of the USSR? There just weren’t enough Germans to do it, they kept killing the Slavs who might like to help, and getting more Germans by breeding is a long-range plan that doesn’t help for twenty years. The reputation of German manufactured goods was improving pre-war, so it was a shame to waste it on weapons and factories that were destroyed in the war. They were the go-to guys for chemistry and nuclear research. And everybody has had a good laugh at the folly of killing or exporting so many scientists and engineers, and not just Jews. So, where was Nazism going after a German victory? I’ve read some of Hitler’s speeches and they are mostly for boosting morale, bragging, and sneering at lesser peoples. It was all so vague that I wonder if he started WWII because he was running out of ideas. There was no way that mess was surviving another thirty years, much less a thousand without a complete rethink of their goals and the means to achieve them. So, do I have a point or am I just talking out of my ass, like usual? - - Term used in the most inclusive manner possible. And do you know who also used “Slav” like that? Yep, other people who don’t have the time or patience to list every nationality in the Soviet republics. Like Hitler. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/2 "2013-02-11T01:10:52Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > Like Hitler. Shit, I’m glad I changed my email address to one that doesn’t contain my name so my wife doesn’t run a search on my web presence and say, “It said you like Hitler.” The last time she did that she found a comment I’d made on a YouTube video about how Joe and Magda Goebbels murdered their children in the Führerbunker. “As I recall, I was against it.” “Doesn’t matter. Potential employers will associate you with Nazis.” :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/3 "2013-02-11T01:12:56Z")
National Socialism did have a political philosophy; perhaps a paranoid, delusional philosophy, but it had one nonetheless. The starting point for investigating it would be an English translation of Mein Kampf. To grossly oversimplify it, it denied both conventional morality and the Marxist notion of impersonal social forces, instead harking to the Nietzschean idea of the Will as the highest expression of cause. As practiced by the Nazis, it also threw in some pseudo-Darwinism and a lot of Aryan mysticism. ---
**Author:** ![YourAdHere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/65b543/32.png) [@YourAdHere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YourAdHere)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/4 "2013-02-11T01:16:37Z")
Maybe perpetual war was really the goal / only answer. Somehow that seems too easy though. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/5 "2013-02-11T01:25:33Z")
One of the central tenets of Nazism is that there are distinct ethnic groups that have genetically defined moral characteristics. Nazism advocates the “good” ethnic groups should rule over and/or eliminate the “bad” ethnic groups. Being as there’s no basis in this premise of genetic morality, all the conclusions derived from it are wrong. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/6 "2013-02-11T01:42:14Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > National Socialism did have a political philosophy; perhaps a paranoid, delusional philosophy, but it had one nonetheless. I didn’t say they had none, it just seems like it was a very shallow and wooish one with no deep plans for after 1942, after England had accepted terms and the Soviets were all dead or in camps. And the wooiest shit was kept from the public; I think one reason Hitler kept that grasping and conniving loon, Himmler, around was for the laughs. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/7 "2013-02-11T01:59:20Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > I didn’t say they had none, it just seems like it was a very shallow and wooish one with no deep plans for after 1942, after England had accepted terms and the Soviets were all dead or in camps. And the wooiest shit was kept from the public; I think one reason Hitler kept that grasping and conniving loon, Himmler, around was for the laughs. There is a difference between Nazism as a concept and the military plans of Nazi Germany. Nazism holds that the world’s races/nations (races, in Nazi terms, should be nations) are in a state of perpetual conflict, and that the worthiness of a race is determined by its ability to win that conflict. The central philosophy of Nazism really doesn’t need to be viewed in terms of how the Nazis ran their war effort; you could in theory have a Nazi regime in Australia starting tomorrow. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/8 "2013-02-11T02:09:03Z")
There was a mumble floating around that Adolf Hitler was pissed off at Germany (because of the defeat in the big war) and his ultimate goal was revenge – to “bring her to her knees”, or something like that. If there were any truth to that, the NAZI ideology would be a veneer of legitimacy painted over a roil of anger and hatred. ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/9 "2013-02-11T02:12:15Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > National Socialism did have a political philosophy; perhaps a paranoid, delusional philosophy, but it had one nonetheless. The starting point for investigating it would be an English translation of Mein Kampf.. This seems to imply that Naziism would never have existed without Hitler, a much-argued point among historians, who agree broadly that he was critical to its development as a movement but also that the atmosphere into which he introduced his ideas was highly receptive for some militaristic and xenophobic movement to emerge. The degree to which Naziism was an outgrowth of Hitler’s personal philosophy is still unresolved. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 2:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/10 "2013-02-11T02:18:02Z")
> [@For You](#): > > There was a mumble floating around that Adolf Hitler was pissed off at Germany (because of the defeat in the big war) and his ultimate goal was revenge – to “bring her to her knees”, or something like that. If there were any truth to that, the NAZI ideology would be a veneer of legitimacy painted over a roil of anger and hatred. And as book end, regarding World War II. IIRC at the bunker Hitler reported that what was happening to the German people, all the death and destruction of the last days of the Reight was deserved, because the army and the people failed him, therefore they were not so superior after all, so they deserved to die. ---
**Author:** ![Asympotically\_fat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e47c2d/32.png) [@Asympotically\_fat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asympotically_fat)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/11 "2013-02-11T02:26:56Z")
Nazism was a Utopian philosophy like Communism, there was actually a lot of writing about where they were heading and they even released propaganda films showing what the Nazi Utopia would look like once achieved. Basically the Nazis wanted to create a volkisch, Utopian fantasy of 19th century German peasant life where everyone was ‘racially pure’. Their ideas weren’t necessarily fixed and were often self-contradictory, but probably more importantly, like all Utopian philosophies their goals weren’t realistic. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/12 "2013-02-11T02:40:05Z")
Does Nazism necessarily imply a one-party system? Does communism necessarily imply it also? It seems to me that the concept of the Communist Party, with all direction given by the party hierarchy, is inescapable from Leninism. Could “reform Nazism” have come about, maybe roughly in the way that “Eurocommunism” or “neocommunism” were attempts to focus on the good bits (?) and throw away the bad parts? Could a more alert German parliament have quashed the dictatorship, and reduced the Nazis to “just another political party?” (The American Nazi Party doesn’t seem to have accepted these reforms, and, it would seem, would outlaw all other parties at the drop of a Nebelwerfer.) ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/13 "2013-02-11T03:45:20Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Does Nazism necessarily imply a one-party system? Does communism necessarily imply it also? It seems to me that the concept of the Communist Party, with all direction given by the party hierarchy, is inescapable from Leninism. Naziism would, I think, have to be one party, at least a guaranteed majority, or it would probably fall. I could see them, perhaps, for the sake of appearances, cede some seats to other parties, as long as they could be certain of their own majority, and probably then only in peacetime. Soviet communism developed the way it did in large part because of Fanni Kaplan. Had Lenin lived another decade, he might have been able to provide enough support for the Trotsky faction to keep Papa Joe at least in check. We might have actually seen Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat”, at least to some degree. > [@](#): > > Could a more alert German parliament have quashed the dictatorship, and reduced the Nazis to “just another political party?” It is worth noting that the Nazis never really won a majority in Germany, they just used maneuvering and, well, long knives to gain control of the country. Not much the parliament could have done to rein it in. ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/14 "2013-02-11T04:46:22Z")
A question: Did Hitler at all declare his love and concern for white people? It seems this is what many white pride people ‘admire’ him for. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/15 "2013-02-11T04:51:44Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > National Socialism did have a political philosophy; perhaps a paranoid, delusional philosophy, but it had one nonetheless. The starting point for investigating it would be an English translation of Mein Kampf. > > To grossly oversimplify it, it denied both conventional morality and the Marxist notion of impersonal social forces, instead harking to the Nietzschean idea of the Will as the highest expression of cause. As practiced by the Nazis, it also threw in some pseudo-Darwinism and a lot of Aryan mysticism. See [_Fascism: A History,_](http://www.amazon.com/Fascism-History-Roger-Eatwell/dp/0140257004/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358718309&sr=1-1&keywords=fascism+a+history) by Roger Eatwell. From John J. Reilly’s review of said book. (I can’t link to the whole thing – Reilly’s webpage is gone since [he died](http://obits.nj.com/obituaries/jerseyjournal/obituary.aspx?n=john-j-reilly&pid=157878396#fbLoggedOut). :() > [@](#): > > The ideological component of fascism has often been neglected in favor of psychohistories of fascist leaders and morbid prose poems about national character. This is understandable, since one of the defining features of fascism is ideological syncretism. Usually, this has meant combining “socialism” with some form of nationalism, but even this minimum requires qualification. The study of fascist ideology is made even more difficult by the fact it was most systematically expressed where it had the least influence, in France and Britain. (Eatwell is not an admirer of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, but he does give him credit for producing the best thought-out fascist party-platform. The best platform so far, that is.) In any case, at the local level, fascism often had little theoretical content, beyond the privilege of beating people up with impunity. Nevertheless, fascism does have an intellectual history, and the phenomenon as a whole is not so diffuse as to defy definition. > > Fascism would not have been possible without Friedrich Nietzsche. There has been no lack of anti-theistic philosophers both before and after Nietzsche, but he is almost alone in honestly facing the consequences of living in a world in which everything is permitted. Most thinkers have sought to preserve some fragment of the intellectual structure that depended from the hypothesis of the Christian God, and so they appeal to reason or history or science. Nietzsche would have none of it. If the skies are really empty, then there are no imperatives. There is, however, life, which in the case of human beings expresses itself not just as biology but as the will. Now Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer and unlike many of his own followers, recognized the will is itself a composite entity. It is not a primary physical force, and it is not a god. It does, however, actually exist, and its exercise is all the meaning that life can ever have. > > The proposition that the meaning of life is the exercise of the will leads to two kinds of conclusions. The most obvious, and the most popular, is the cult of cruelty. Naturally, the street-fighters who normally figure in the public activities of successful fascist parties are rarely well-read in the literature of philosophical nihilism. Nevertheless, even the nihilist violence of the German SA and the Italian “squadristi” chimes with high theory. Fascism promotes ruthlessness for the same reason that it promotes conspiracy theories: for a fascist, nothing is going to happen unless some will makes it happen. One suspects this consideration is also a factor in the usual fascist suspicion of free markets. > > The other conclusion to which an ontology of the will leads is the transformation of politics into art. Whole societies become instruments for the expression of the will of elites, or often of a single great individual. In fascist theory, this is all that politics ever was, no matter what purportedly disinterested purposes the ruling elites of the past believed they served. The difference that Nietzsche made was that this reality could become conscious. Hmmmm . . . Come to think of it, the exercise of the will **is** the only meaning life can ever have. But, there is more than one way to exercise the will, and not all ways involve asserting power-over-others. > [@](#): > > Fascism is not quite coincident with the great man theory of history. Since human beings are social animals, the will is to some extent a social phenomenon. Thus, reality is an intersubjective construct, a fable that people make up amongst themselves. The construct is not entirely arbitrary. Most fascists have also posited a strong racial or biological element conditioning the way that leaders and their peoples behave. Still, even in highly racialized forms of fascism, the leader stands to the people as the will stands to the individual. Politics, then, is not an arbitrary art, but an art whereby the leader makes the unconscious will of the people explicit. > > In addition to Nietzsche, the other seminal influence on fascism whom Eatwell discusses at length is Georges Sorel. Now Sorel is remembered as the chief theorist of socialist syndicalism, and like Nietzsche his thought has influenced people who are not fascist by any definition. Nevertheless, he seems to have been a primary source of the nuts-and-bolts of practical fascism, which was chiefly concerned with integrating restive populations of industrial workers into fragile national communities. (The widespread use of the word “community” to refer to classes of people who could not possibly know each other is mostly Max Weber’s fault, though to me it has long carried fascist undertones. Well, that is another story.) > > Sorel’s socialism was of the sort that combined plans for the betterment of the masses with considerable contempt for their intelligence, indeed contempt for almost everything about them as they actually existed. Sorel believed that the masses could be integrated into a social force only through slogans and myths. Sorel’s favorite myth was that of the “general strike.” Actual general strikes, in which the whole of a country’s organized labor force walked off the job at the same time, have been tried a few times, with mixed success. The myth of the general strike, however, is like the vision of Judgment Day. It is the goal in whose name organizers organize, it is the reason to pay union dues. It is an ultimate threat, like the strategic doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, that creates a world by defining its limits. It is not entirely dishonest; the leaders may believe it in a heuristic sense. Such subtleties, however, are not for the people they lead. > > Perhaps the most striking thing about the political systems of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was precisely their use of myth and symbol. (As Salvador Dali once remarked, Nazism was essentially surrealism come to power.) The widely-bought if sparsely-read “Myth of the Twentieth Century,” by the Nazi Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, seems to have used “myth” in a Sorelian sense, the myth in this case being the origin of the Aryan race in Atlantis and its leading role in later history. More generally, both the Nazi and the Italian Fascist regimes seemed to be exercises in government by grand opera. (Götterdämmerung and Don Giovanni, no doubt.) > > The myths used to organize the elites were not necessarily those provided for the masses. The Nazi leadership in particular cultivated a sort of occultism (though if figures like Julius Evola are any indication, this enthusiasm was not absent from Italy, either). The people, however, were pushed with more conventional forms of nationalist xenophobia and pulled with quite prosaic promises of economic improvement and social welfare (promises on which both regimes could in large measure deliver). This difference of integrative principles was consistent with the fascist notion of society as an organic entity. Organism implies differentiation, so it was only proper that elites and masses be organized through different means. > > \ > > A sentiment that seems to find increasing currency is what might be called “Euro-fascism.” While fascist parties between the wars built their followings on nationalistic platforms, still from the very beginning fascism has always had a universalizing streak. Nietzsche pronounced himself a “good European.” In these days when political theorists speak in terms of the clash of civilizations, New Right theory seems to be moving in the direction, not of renewed hypernationalism, but of an integrating theory for the European Union. Eatwell notes that the EU as it stands is a disedifying entity, run by bland bureaucrats who are most concerned with setting standards for bottled jam. Current plans for future integration will go no further toward turning Europe into a true political community (that word again). Eatwell asks whether anyone is ever going to be willing to die for the Bundesbank. Maybe what Europe needs is a Sorelian myth to hold it together. Work is in progress. > > So, are we really just back where we started at the beginning of the 20th century, waiting for some crisis that will delegitimize the existing establishments and start the ball rolling again? One way to look at the 20th century is as one long recoil from the process of globalization. It was only in the 1990s, for instance, that international capital flows again reached the levels relative to the economies of the major countries that they had reached before the First World War. Similarly, it is only recently that international trade in general became as important as it was around 1900. What happened thereafter was that the governments of the leading nations sought to gain unprecedented control of their countries’ destinies. Partly this was accomplished by war, partly it was accomplished through the creation of command economies. Stalinism was simply Lloyd George’s “War Socialism” made permanent, something that happened in greater or lesser degree throughout the West. In every case, the goal was to replace the power of capital with the power of the will, whether the will was that of an electorate or of a would-be Nietzschean superman. When, starting in the 1980s, the military and economic systems of command began to be relaxed, the world economic system began to look again something like the way it had looked before these measures were implemented. The process of globalization began again. So did the attempts to stop it. > > It would be wrong to say that all attempts to stop globalization of economics and communications and culture are fascist. Most resistance to universalism comes from a positive desire to preserve local identities and traditions. Such things may or may not be worth preserving. The balance between the local and the universal is not something that can be dictated categorically. Fascist nationalism, in contrast, was perhaps just an improvisation, made necessary by the fact that nation states were the largest units that fascist elites could hope to control. At a deeper level of fascism is the ideal of the universal empire, of the whole world subject to a single will. The goal is repeatedly deferred only because it is obviously so much harder to achieve. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/16 "2013-02-11T05:12:39Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Could “reform Nazism” have come about, maybe roughly in the way that “Eurocommunism” or “neocommunism” were attempts to focus on the good bits (?) and throw away the bad parts? A reformed Nazism actually might not be too different from China right now-a nationalist technocracy with extensive state involvement in the economy although not socialist. > [@the\_diego](#): > > A question: Did Hitler at all declare his love and concern for white people? It seems this is what many white pride people ‘admire’ him for. Not really, its quite obvious he liked certain non-white peoples such as the Japanese better than fellow Indo-European speaking whites such as the Slavs. Which is ironic since a lot of neo-Nazis are concentrated in Russia nowadays. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/17 "2013-02-11T07:23:10Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > So, where was Nazism going after a German victory? Hitler hoped to create a [Greater Germanic Reich](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Germanic_Reich) ecompassing the former territory of Poland and European Russia and much besides. For AH-literary speculation as to that, see: [_Fatherland,_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland_(novel)) Robert Harris. [_In the Presence of Mine Enemies,_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Presence_of_Mine_Enemies) Harry Turtledove. > [@dropzone](#): > > I’ve read some of Hitler’s speeches and they are mostly for boosting morale, bragging, and sneering at lesser peoples. It was all so vague that I wonder if he started WWII because he was running out of ideas. There was no way that mess was surviving another thirty years, much less a thousand without a complete rethink of their goals and the means to achieve them. Hitler did not think so, and he **always** wanted WWII. He believed in the Germans as _Herrenvolk_ and he believed in the power of the “will” over impersonal forces like the laws of economics. He never would have considered the possibility that the Reich eventually might self-destruct like the USSR. Victory in war would solve all problems. A good source here is [_Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties,_](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-Revised-Twenties-Perennial/dp/0060935502/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196390812&sr=8-3) by Paul Johnson. Chapter 10, “The End of Old Europe”: > [@](#): > > [The] ruling caste hated the West with a passionate loathing, both for its liberal ideas and for the gross materialism and lack of spirituality which (in their view) those ideas embodied. They wanted to keep Germany “pure” of the West, and this was one motive for their plans to resume the medieval conquest and settlement of the East, carving out a continental empire for Germany which would make her independent of the Anglo-Saxon world system. These Easterners drew a fundamental distinction between “civilization,” which they defined as rootless, cosmopolitan, immoral, un-German, Western, materialistic and racially defiled; and “culture,” which was pure, national, German, spiritual and authentic. Civilization pulled Germany to the West, culture to the East. The real Germany was not part of an international civilization but a national race-culture of its own. When Germany responded to the pull of the West, it met disaster; when it pursued its destiny in the East, it fulfilled itself. > > \ > > Hitler’s aims can be reconstructed not merely from Mein Kampf itself, with its stress on the ‘East Policy,’ but from his early speeches and so-called ‘Second’ or Secret Book of 1928. This material makes it clear that the ‘cleansing’ process – the elimination of the Jews – was essential to the whole long-term strategy. Being a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist, Hitler believed the dynamic of history was race. The dynamic was interrupted when race-poisoning took place. The poison came, above all, from the Jews. He admired the Jews as ‘negative supermen’. In his Table-Talk he said that if 5,000 Jews emigrated to Sweden, in no time at all they would occupy all the key positions: this was because ‘blood purity’, as he put it in Mein Kampf, ‘is a thing the Jew preserves better than any other people on earth’. The Germans, on the other hand, were poisoned. That was why they lost the First World War. Even he was poisoned: that was why he sometimes made mistakes – ‘all of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood’. Race-poisoning was a comparatively common obsession in the time of Hitler’s youth, rather as ecological poisoning became an obsession of many in the 1970s and 1980s. The notion of ubiquitous poisoning appealed strongly to the same type of person who accepted conspiracy theories as the machinery of public events. As with the later ecologists, they thought the race-poison was spreading fast, that total disaster was iminent, and that it would take a long time to reverse even if the right policies were adopted promptly. Hitler calculated it would take a hundred years for his regime to eliminate racial poisoning in Germany: on the other hand, if Germany became the first nation-race to do so successfully, it would inevitably become ‘lord of the Earth’. (Mein Kampf.) > > What distinguished Hitlerian race-theory was, first, this rooted belief that ‘cleansing’ could make Germany the first true superpower, and ultimately the first paramount power in the world; and, secondly, his absolute conviction that the ‘Jewish race-poison’ and Bolshevism were one and the same phenomenon. In 1928, when he wrote his Second Book, he did not appreciate that old-style ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism had ceased to exist and that Stalin’s Russia was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been. On the contrary, he believed the Soviet Union was a Jewish cultural phenomenon. Hence the object of his policy was to combat ‘an inundation of diseased bacilli which at the moment have their breeding-ground in Russia’. Thus the ‘cleansing’ fit in perfectly with the resumption of traditional German East policy, but on a far more ambitious scale. > > Hitler’s full programme, therefore, was as follows. First, gain control of Germany itself, and begin the cleansing process at home. Second, destroy the Versailles settlement and establish Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe. All this could be accomplished without war. Third, on this power basis, destroy the Soviet Union (by war) to rid the ‘breeding-ground’ of the ‘bacillus’ and, by colonization, create a solid economic and strategic power base from which to establish a continental empire, in which France and Italy would be mere satellites. In the fourth stage Germany would acquire a large colonial empire in Africa, plus a big ocean navy, to make her one of the four superpowers, in addition to Britain, Japan and the United States. Finally, in the generation after his death, Hitler envisaged a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States for world domination. > > No one since Napoleon had thought in such audacious terms. In its gigantic scope the concept was Alexandrine. Yet until he was engulfed by the war he made, Hitler was always pragmatic. Like Lenin he was a superb opportunist, always ready to seize openings and modify his theory accordingly. This has led some historians to conclude he had no master-programme. In fact, while always adjusting the tactics to suit the moment, he pursued his long-term strategy with a brutal determination that has seldom been equalled in the history of human ambition. Unlike most tyrants, he was never tempted to relax by a surfeit of autocratic power. Quite the contrary. He was always raising the stakes on the table and seeking to hasten the pace of history. He feared his revolution would lose its dynamism. He thought himself indispensable, and at least four of his phases must be accomplished while he was not only still alive but at the height of his powers. It was this impatience which made him so dangerous in the short term and so ineffectual in the long term (the very reverse of the Soviet strategists). In a secret speech to German newspaper editors in November 1938, after his great Munich triumph, he deplored the fact that his need to talk about peace had led the German nation to relax too much. He argued that for Germany to accept peace, and thus stability, as a permanent fact of international life was to accept the very spirit of defeatism. Violence was a necessity, and the public must be prepared for it. Chapter 11, “The Watershed Years”: > [@](#): > > Hitler’s ultimate aim was to create a German Volk of 250 million. He said that he proposed settling 100 million Germans on the great plains to the west of the Urals. In 1941 he envisaged that over the next decade the first 20 million would move east. Though he saw the colonization process clearly, he was vague on where the settlers were to come from. Those eligible and willing to settle, the Volksdeutsche from south-east Europe, numbered only 5 million, perhaps 8 milllion at most. His colleage Alfred Rosenberg considered the idea of ‘drafting’ Scandinavian, Dutch, and English settlers, being racially approximate to Germans, when the war was won. Some aspects of this great population transfer, to be the most formidable and decisive in history, were determined in meticulous detail. There was to be polygamy and a free choice of women for servicemen with decorations. The Crimea, after being ‘cleansed’ of Slavs and Jews, was to be turned into a gigantic German spa under its old Greek name of Tauria, populated by a mass transfer of peasants from the South Tyrol. Over vast areas of the Ukraine and south European Russia, a new Volk civilization was planned. As Hitler described it: > > > [@](#): > > > > The area must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe. It must be Europeanized! . . . The ‘Reich peasant’ is to live in outstandingly beautiful settlements. The German agencies and authorities are to have wonderful buildings, the governors palaces. Around each city, a ring of lovely villages will be placed to within 30 or 40 kilometers . . . . That is why we are now building the large traffic arteries on the southern tip of the Crimea, out to the Caucasus mountains. Around these traffic strands, the German cities will be placed, like pearls on a string, and around the cities the German settlements will lie. For we will not open up Lebensraum for ourselves by entering the old, godforsaken Russian holes! The German settlements must be on an altogether higher level! > > As Hitler’s vision expanded, in the heady days of 1941, it came to embrace all Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the whole of France north of the Somme were to be incorporated in a Greater Germany, the names of the cities being changed – Nancy would become Nanzig, Besancon Bisanz. Trondheim would become a major German city and naval base of 250,000 inhabitants. The Alps would be the boundary between ‘the German Empire of the North,’ with a new ‘Germania’ as its capital, and ‘the Roman Empire of the South’. The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St. Peter’s Square. Strasbourg Cathedral would be turned into a giant ‘Monument to the Unknown Soldier’. New crops, such a perennial rye, would be invented. He would forbid smoking, make vegetarianism compulsory, ‘revive the Cimbrian art of knitting’, appoint a ‘Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs’ and an ‘Assistant Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects’.’ ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/18 "2013-02-11T15:20:54Z")
Fascism was a much more coherent philosoply then Naziism. The Nazis fetishized action and will and so there ideology was less systemized than Italian fascism. What the Nazis added to fascism was the notion of race purity as others have already said. What drove Hitler to start WW2 was malthusianism and Germany’s experience in WW1. Prior to WW1 Germany was eclipsing Great Britain as the most powerful nation on earth. Germany was the center of science and education and was becoming the great industrial power of Europe. In WW1 Germany had a superior Army and never lost any German ground to the allies, but lost for the most part because the Army and civilian population had been ground down by the length of the war and the British blockade. This lack of resources and especially food meant to Hitler that Germany needed to be self sufficient if it was to survive and thrive. Otherwise other countries would dominate the natural resources and could starve Germany whenever they wanted. All societies were in a fight for limited resources and those with the power to take the resources would expand and thus without the power would see their resources taken by the strong and would starve. Thus Germany had to take over Slavic lands and use them to grow food for the expanding German people. They also had to take over Russia for its resources and to keep the Communists from attacking them. Once Germany had all those resources it would be in the catbird seat for the final conflicts and would inevitably win them and rule the world. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/19 "2013-02-11T16:27:02Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > Once Germany had all those resources it would be in the catbird seat for the final conflicts and would inevitably win them and rule the world. I agree with the post except for the last bit. I don’t think they fancied themselves as rulers of the world. Rather as having their rightful place at the table of leading countries. They saw themselves as equals (or even better) but never felt part of the club. Rather _accepted into the club_. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2013, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-nazism-a-completely-empty-political-philosophy/649925/20 "2013-02-11T17:19:26Z")
At its heart, Naziism was a pretty weird cult-some of the top Nazis wanted to revive the worship of Wotan. There were also some weird variety of sun worship going on. After the final victory over Russia, the German people wold be totally de-Christianized (Hitler saw Christianity as another variety of Judaism). Reproduction wold be controlled by the state, and anybody judged (unworthy of life-mental patients, people with birth defects, etc.), would be euthanized.