Were Nazis always SOB's even to each other?

[senoy]

@Miller

I’m not really equipped to debate the specific details of Nietzche’s writings, but the idea of a society taking a particular text and twisting it to justify inhumane social policies isn’t exactly unprecedented.

I think with Nietzsche though, it wasn’t twisting so much as he directly caused those problems. Personally, he would have stopped short and certainly claimed not to be an anti-Semite, but the philosophy that he laid down was what led to Nazism. It wasn’t Nazis appropriating Nietzsche for their own ends so much as Nazis reading Nietzsche and taking it to heart.

Nietzsche’s problem was that he hated Christianity, absolutely despised it in a way that would make New Atheists proud (This is part of the reason that many moderns want to rehabilitate his image. They love this stance of his; they would just rather pretend that the Nazis weren’t part of his lineage.) Into this hatred of Christianity, he brought a hatred of Judaism. He blamed Judaism for what was wrong with Christianity and what was wrong with Europe in general.

@Nietzsche

In the context of the monstrous and inordinately fateful initiatives which the Jews have exhibited in connection with the most fundamental of all another occasion – that it was, in fact, with the Jews that the revolt of the slaves begins in the sphere of morals; that revolt which has behind it a history of two millennia, and which at the present day has only moved out of our sight, because it has achieved victory.

and then later

The ‘masters’ have been done away with; the morality of the vulgar man has triumphed. This triumph may also be called a blood-poisoning (it has mutually fused the races)…Everything is obviously becoming Judaised, or Christianised, or vulgarized…

I mean come on, it’s not exactly a twist to see that Nazis fed off of this. Get rid of the Christianised line (which would have been politically untenable) and this could have been lifted straight out of Mein Kampf. The only real ‘twisting’ that was done was that Nietzsche wanted to see the destruction of thoughts and Hitler decided the best way to do that was to destroy people having those thoughts. Nietzsche could pretend he wasn’t anti-Semitic all he wants, but if a guy were to stand up and say that it is the highest moral good to destroy black ideas and black culture and that black ideas have been the ruination of America, then I think it’s completely fair to start pointing fingers at him when his followers start bombing churches. I guess it’s fair to say that Nietzsche hated Christians just as much as he hated Jews, but I think that the people in Auschwitz might find it a cold comfort that he was an equal opportunity hater.

Nietzsche even goes so far as to define his Ubermensch as a ‘blond beast’ which echoes Aryan racial superiority. Nietzsche at one point said that he was ‘nauseated’ by the concept of a soul because it implied that all men were equal and he saw this concept as created by the slave races to disempower the master races. Nietzsche though was not just about blaming the slave races, he was absolutely actively seeking their destruction and the creation of a new ‘master race.’ Witness this excerpt from ‘The Will to Power’

A doctrine is needed powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world weary. The annihilation of the decaying races. Decay of Europe.-The annihilation of slavish evaluations.-Dominion over the earth as a means of producing a higher type.-The annihilation of the tartuffery called ‘morality.’ The annihilation of suffrage universel; i.e. the system through which the lowest natures prescribe themselves as laws for the higher.-The annihilation of mediocrity and its acceptance (The one sided, individuals – peoples; to strike for fullness of nature through the pairing of opposites: race mixture to this end). The new courage – no a priori truths…

I mean come on… if that’s not a passage that Hitler himself could have written, what is? I totally get that undergrads around the world would be shocked that the standard bearer of ‘God is Dead’ is actually a bugger and his apologists are already talking about how he was talking about individuals and ethoses, but I think it’s more than fair to lay 6 million innocent lives at his feet and maybe ask him what his part was in all of it and it wasn’t small, nor tangential.

[aruvqan]

@Isosleepy

Senoy’s “They weren’t monsters (well, probably some were)” is mind blowing to me. Especially the qualifier “probably”. There is no probably about it. Look at Oscar Dirlewanger. He was a monster. So you can eliminate “probably“ right there. And then I would argue that anyone who joins a party whose stated goal is the elimination of whole groups of people, and actively supports the efforts to that goal, is a monster , no matter how rational their motivation might be from their point of view.

They liked art, except they burned the art they didn’t like. They took care of the poor all right, called them Arbeitsunwillige or Asoziale and sent them to camps ( not vacation camps!). And their focus on health included killing Lebensunwuerdiges Leben - anyone not perfectly healthy, including the blind, epileptics etc.
I don’t think there were more evil people in Germany in 31-45 than in other places, it’s just that most of them joined the NSDAP or found roles in the machine. The psychopaths were put in charge.

And they were mean to each other. There is a neat documentary where they lip read Hitler on silent films. At one point he is seen to comment on Goebbels ( arguably his #2) eating pork: “it is true what they say, they really do eat their own kind”. That’s sorta mean, right? Also denouncing each other to the Gestapo, killing a bunch of their comrades in the night of the long knives out of expediency - sorta mean, too.

sigh And my dad, after slogging all the way up the Ruhr [and getting both a Silver and a Bronze Star] was tasked with at one point going out and trading supplies for fresh foods from the local farmers [it was handy he already spoke German] and they were just ordinary schlubs, exactly like the random farmers you might meet wandering around western NY state. In towns, you ran into ordinary people that were nice, and only nazi by default because by that point in time everybody were pretty much enrolled in the party by default.

Don’t judge everybody on the basis of the few, because it doesn’t work. This is not whatever the grey world in Wrinkle in Time is, not everybody is lock stepped [and believe me, as one of the very few female dissenting republicans I am getting tarred with the Kavanaugh is Great/Trump is GOD brush … I neither like nor voted for Trump, and I think Kavanaugh is so heartily unsuitable for the bench it isn’t funny.]

[DPRK]

Now that the OP has been answered (has it?) and we are in Great Debates…

So Nietzsche was critical of organized religion and thought people should think for themselves. I’m sure many people reading this would say the same. From that to laying a direct foundation for Naziism is… a stretch. But ever since at least one Nazi learned how to read and parrot selected quotes from a book his name is mixed up in all this, the same way nobody today can see a swastika and think first and only of Jain ashtamangala.

As Miller reminds us, perverting some widely read text for nefarious purposes isn’t very original.

[DPRK]

@aruvqan

In towns, you ran into ordinary people that were nice, and only nazi by default because by that point in time everybody were pretty much enrolled in the party by default.

No, fuck those “nice” people. Not everybody joined the Nazi party; certainly not more than 10% if you run the numbers, nor did everybody think Nazis were cool or not their problem, and many people paid with their lives for being actual ordinary decent people. Even people like Oskar Schindler had to live with the fact they chose to sign up.

‘Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown / “Ha, Nazi schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.’

[senoy]

@DPRK

Now that the OP has been answered (has it?) and we are in Great Debates…

So Nietzsche was critical of organized religion and thought people should think for themselves. I’m sure many people reading this would say the same. From that to laying a direct foundation for Naziism is… a stretch. But ever since at least one Nazi learned how to read and parrot selected quotes from a book his name is mixed up in all this, the same way nobody today can see a swastika and think first and only of Jain ashtamangala.

As Miller reminds us, perverting some widely read text for nefarious purposes isn’t very original.

Heh, I am simply going to assume that you are someone that admires Nietzsche for his strident atheism, but has failed to actually read him. This is not a case of a quote or two being taken out of context. I have linked to an English translation of Genealogy of Morality below. It is a hate-filled work that reads exactly like a Nazi propaganda tract. Essay 1 is especially egregious, I invite you to read Part 5 as something that is especially Nazi-like. You are certainly welcome to judge for yourself. I’m sorry if you have Nietzsche on a pedestal, but it’s not a place he belongs, even if he does hate the same people that you do.

http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/nietzsche/genealogytofc.html

[DPRK]

I am no extraordinary “admirer” (?) of Nietzsche, though he does come up with some vivid allegories and turns of phrase, nor of strident atheism, but I do think (even if you regard him as a demented syphilitic who couldn’t write proper German) that it is absurd to blame him for some Nazi interpretation of what he wrote, though I am not blind to what you are saying. If anything, Nazi leaders and stooges exemplify the “slave mentality” he described, although of course they didn’t think so.

[DPRK]

Note that (to vastly simplify things; forget about Nietzsche for the moment) if I write that “you should always think for yourself”, you cannot take that as condoning a rape, murder, and pillaging spree.

[senoy]

@DPRK

Note that (to vastly simplify things; forget about Nietzsche for the moment) if I write that “you should always think for yourself”, you cannot take that as condoning a rape, murder, and pillaging spree.

I would characterize it more than merely thinking for yourself. Any existentialist would agree with that statement. What made Nietzsche unique wasn’t that he advocated thinking for yourself (which he didn’t necessarily), but that he saw culture as corrupt and degraded. Something that needed to be destroyed and reborn in another image. His claim wasn’t “Well, you just need to figure stuff out for yourself.” Rather it was “What you believe now is the result of a slave mentality. Throw off the shackles of slave morality and pursue power as our forebears intended before being scammed by the Jews and Christians. Become the ‘Lord of the Earth’ by excising the thoughts of the weak and claim what is yours. God is dead, so make yourself into a new God.” It’s a different statement than a Kierkegaardian, “We don’t know what’s real or not, so look within and make a leap of faith toward what you believe.” Nietzsche’s philosophy is one about destruction, not self-introspection. He and Kierkegaard both preached freedom, but Nietzsche saw it as a freedom to ignore morality while Kierkegaard saw it as a freedom to become truly moral. It’s very easy to see why Nazi’s made Nietzsche required reading and not Kierkegaard.

[Isosleepy]

@aruvqan

sigh And my dad, after slogging all the way up the Ruhr [and getting both a Silver and a Bronze Star] was tasked with at one point going out and trading supplies for fresh foods from the local farmers [it was handy he already spoke German] and they were just ordinary schlubs, exactly like the random farmers you might meet wandering around western NY state. In towns, you ran into ordinary people that were nice, and only nazi by default because by that point in time everybody were pretty much enrolled in the party by default

“Sigh”, really? First off, if you can, thank your dad for his service from me. I owe him and many just like him my very existence.

Those nice German farmers he met, they met a guy with a gun who belonged to the people who were going to be in charge for quite a while. Not surprising they were very nice, and surely no Nazis oh no sir! And probably most weren’t, because your statement that pretty much everyone was enrolled by default is nonsense.
And this thread is about actual Nazis. Not the regular Germans.

That said, many of the regular Germans were stunningly complicit in the atrocities the Nazis organized. This is not some inherent German quality, it has happened since in other places. But they still were. At least a number of those schlubby farmers had forced labor helping them farm, and that was an often cruel existence.

And, to Godwinize-by-proxy, just for fun: You know when had a farm? Mengele!

[aruvqan]

Quote:
Originally Posted by aruvqan https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/images/buttons/viewpost.gif
sigh And my dad, after slogging all the way up the Ruhr [and getting both a Silver and a Bronze Star] was tasked with at one point going out and trading supplies for fresh foods from the local farmers [it was handy he already spoke German] and they were just ordinary schlubs, exactly like the random farmers you might meet wandering around western NY state. In towns, you ran into ordinary people that were nice, and only nazi by default because by that point in time everybody were pretty much enrolled in the party by default

“Sigh”, really? First off, if you can, thank your dad for his service from me. I owe him and many just like him my very existence.

  He died 9 years ago, next time I end up sucked into a seance, I will pass it on =)

Those nice German farmers he met, they met a guy with a gun who belonged to the people who were going to be in charge for quite a while. Not surprising they were very nice, and surely no Nazis oh no sir! And probably most weren’t, because your statement that pretty much everyone was enrolled by default is nonsense.
And this thread is about actual Nazis. Not the regular Germans.

Well, there is a big difference between hauling out the hams and sausages that were stashed in the back of the barn and just swapping fresh veggies. Not sure about you, but something other than canned rats, or the 'fresh truck' [some guy came up with the idea of fitting deuces with ovens and getting the guys a hot meal a day of anything that could be made with flour, powdered eggs, powdered milk, sugar, salt, pepper - til he died my dad refused to eat cream chipped beef, scrambled eggs, and biscuits and gravy, he said he ate more than his fill of them and never wanted them again. Pity, I happen to like a properly made batch of chipped beef on toast or sausage gravy and biscuits] And you become a party member when not doing so gets you refused services and even can land you in trouble. Not all farmers used prisoner labor, when the farm is 2 acres you don't need many people to deal with an acre of mixed veggies [potatoes, onions, cabbage and herbs with a few pigs, chickens and a goat for milk he said was pretty common.] And by default, if one is in the party even under duress, they are still a member of the political party. 

That said, many of the regular Germans were stunningly complicit in the atrocities the Nazis organized. This is not some inherent German quality, it has happened since in other places. But they still were. At least a number of those schlubby farmers had forced labor helping them farm, and that was an often cruel existence.

And, to Godwinize-by-proxy, just for fun: You know when had a farm? Mengele!
Isosleepy

Friend of Cecil
Join Date: Jul 1999
Location: Pittsburgh
Posts: 1,191

[Isosleepy]

Not sure if this is some new stylistic choice, or just trouble with the “quote” function, but I’m having trouble following what’s going on, and I wrote half of it.

[Urbanredneck]

Someone mentioned how they also killed the elderly.

Can anyone elaborate on that? I cant see people going along with killing grandpa and grandma even if they are infirmed or bedridden.

[Brayne_Ded]

@justins7

Contrary to Senoy’s post, it was not a rational system that was “not noticeably cruel to one another”. This is an absurd statement.

If by ethical do you mean euthanising hundreds of thousands of sick, elderly or the economically unproductive?
This T4 Program (euthanizing the masses) went beyond their standard definitions of “desirable,” and people were killed based on the whims of a personal grudge or a covetous neighbor. It was actually deeply unpopular, however, and the Nazis were forced to hide it — which gives some indication that there were internal contradictions in their standards of ethics. This is but one small example.

The euthanasia program was aimed at those considered undesirable. As was said before, life was fine as long as you were not on the wrong side of Nazi ideology, but you had no choice in the matter if you were Jewish, for example.
Some joined the Nazi party out of opportunism. There was widespread support even at the intellectual level for much of the Nazi ideology, mainly the bits concerning a mythical but wonderful Germania and the advantages of the German race, while anti-Semitism has been prevalent in all parts of Europe, and got moral support even from Luther. To the average schmoo, Nazism was really just a sort of Tolkienesqe hippy-dippy trip with some Boy Scout / military ideals thrown, if you but ignored the street brawlers of the SA and the cartoonish (literally) anti-Semitism of Julius Streicher.

However, it is worth noting that the T4 euthanasia attracted so much popular opposition that it had to be scaled back and done very quietly indeed.

[Brayne_Ded]

@Urbanredneck

Someone mentioned how they also killed the elderly.

Can anyone elaborate on that? I cant see people going along with killing grandpa and grandma even if they are infirmed or bedridden.

Never heard of that. But a good many older people died on the treks from east, due to the conditions.

[senoy]

@Brayne_Ded

Never heard of that. But a good many older people died on the treks from east, due to the conditions.

T4 killed all of those who were incurably ill. So if you got cancer and they couldn’t cure it, it was curtains for you. T4 was really a euthanasia program more than a genocidal one. Nazi’s looked at it maybe in similar terms to the way that you look at putting your dog to sleep. You don’t ask your dog, you just do it. Ultimately, you think of it as doing your dog a favor. I think it’s helpful when thinking of Nazi’s to remember that they were strong Darwinists and people to them were just another species of animal with nothing inherently unique about them. Just livestock. It also explains their love of animals and nature. A dog and a person are ultimately the same thing. If your dog gets sick, you put it down. If gramma gets sick, you put it down. If your cow gets a disease, you cull it for the good of the herd. You get rid of breeds that are defective and will hurt the herd, you breed the best cows with the best bulls. etc. Someone has Down’s Syndrome? We can’t fix it, probably better for them if they were dead, so sorry. You’re schizophrenic? Welp, nothing to be done. Time to put you to sleep. Gramma has cancer? It’s gonna get her sooner or later, might as well be sooner.

[DPRK]

@senoy

It’s very easy to see why Nazi’s made Nietzsche required reading and not Kierkegaard.

I suppose we agree on some level there, though I suspect that Nazis ultimately cared more about style over substance. To a Nazi, all that reading about ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ and ‘Wille zur Macht’ is practically masturbation fuel. They were no philosophers, and they certainly didn’t encourage it in others.

Another book on their index librorum cremandorum was The Call of the Wild.

@senoy

I would characterize it more than merely thinking for yourself. Any existentialist would agree with that statement. What made Nietzsche unique wasn’t that he advocated thinking for yourself (which he didn’t necessarily), but that he saw culture as corrupt and degraded. Something that needed to be destroyed and reborn in another image. His claim wasn’t “Well, you just need to figure stuff out for yourself.” Rather it was “What you believe now is the result of a slave mentality. Throw off the shackles of slave morality and pursue power as our forebears intended before being scammed by the Jews and Christians. Become the ‘Lord of the Earth’ by excising the thoughts of the weak and claim what is yours. God is dead, so make yourself into a new God.” It’s a different statement than a Kierkegaardian, “We don’t know what’s real or not, so look within and make a leap of faith toward what you believe.” Nietzsche’s philosophy is one about destruction, not self-introspection. He and Kierkegaard both preached freedom, but Nietzsche saw it as a freedom to ignore morality while Kierkegaard saw it as a freedom to become truly moral.

The way I would put it is that the ‘master’ (Herr) does not need to be told what is moral.

[senoy]

@DPRK

The way I would put it is that the ‘master’ (Herr) does not need to be told what is moral.

Sort of, but in Beyond Good and Evil, he explicitly said that there was no morality, only the interpretation of morality. He clearly favored taking the ‘noble’ or ‘master’ view of morality that valued power and inventing your own morality

@Genealogy

The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, “what is harmful to me is harmful in itself”; it knows itself to be that which first accords honour to things; it is value-creating."

Nietzsche certainly sees the ‘bad’ as that which harms the powerful and the ‘good’ as that which helps them.

Let’s not pretend that Nietzsche is advocating for some New Age self-actualization. He wants a return to what he sees as pre-Christian values where kindness and sympathy are weaknesses to be exploited and not virtues to be lauded. He calls democracy ‘the collective degeneration of man’ because it treats people as equal. He saw Christianity and democracy allied together to vindictively oppress the strong for the sake of the weak. He wasn’t just talking about a single person wrestling in their mind and deciding not to be slave. He was advocating an overthrow of the system to one that favored the powerful and oppressed the weak. The internal self-actualization that he talked about was about how strong men would rise up from the masses and create this new order that advanced the ‘good’ values from the pre-Christian and pre-Jewish era and put the ideas of Jews and Christians to the sword. Nazi’s weren’t an unfortunate side effect of Nietzschean writings, they were what he was calling for. He just didn’t want the blood that came with them. I think he saw the world as flocking to these strong men and just willingly changing their ideas. When that didn’t happen, the Nazis decided to change their ideas by eliminating the people holding those ideas.

[DesertDog]

@Lamoral

I think there were probably two kinds of Nazis, the “bureaucratic” kind and the “sadistic” kind. The bureaucratic kind were seriously just doing their job…that doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t absolve them of responsibility at all, and they deserved to be tried as war criminals for it, but that’s really all it was to them, a job, no different from cleaning up an office. Maybe it’s sociopathic, but not exactly psychopathic.

I can’t remember what movie it was, but the young protagonist is applying for a job with the SA before the Nazi Party really got rolling. He is having an interview and is asked, “Why have you applied to us?”

He replied, “To be honest, I need the work.”

The interviewer looked at him a long moment, beamed, and said, “I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to hear an honest answer after listening to patriotic bullshit day after day. You’re hired!”

[Fuji]

@DPRK

No, fuck those “nice” people. Not everybody joined the Nazi party; certainly not more than 10% if you run the numbers, nor did everybody think Nazis were cool or not their problem, and many people paid with their lives for being actual ordinary decent people. Even people like Oskar Schindler had to live with the fact they chose to sign up.

‘Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown / “Ha, Nazi schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.’

This calls to mind the opening passage from Ian Kershaw’s excellent *The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944-45*:

Originally Posted by the Wiki article cited above

The book begins with an example of the German refusal to surrender, and how this refusal by the Nazis to accept defeat would eventually lead to the deaths of millions. With American troops on the outskirts of Ansbach, the local commandant, Dr Ernst Meyer, an ardent Nazi, insisted on fighting to the end. A student, Robert Limpert, having seen the destruction wrought on Würzburg, took action in an attempt to prevent the same happening to his own town. He was seen in an act of sabotage by two members of the Hitler Youth who reported him to the police.[9] He was arrested, and after a trial lasting a few minutes the commandant sentenced the young man to death by hanging. As the noose was placed around Limpert’s neck he broke free but was recaptured quickly. No one in the crowd watching tried to help and some kicked and punched him. On the second attempt the rope broke, and on the third he was finally hanged. The commandant ordered the body to remain where it was “until it stinks” and shortly after he fled the town. American troops cut the body down four hours later when they entered the town.[10]

[DPRK]

An interesting legend about Nietzsche is that he could not bear the sight of a horse being whipped by its owner, and tried to intervene.