Nazi spiritual eugenics (II): Hitler and the Will of Nature

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project.

It feels taboo to read Mein Kampf. It is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’, in Karl Ove Knausgard’s phrase. You download it and think, ‘I must be on some FBI list now’. Nazism still inspires hate-crimes and murders, like the Buffalo shooting. It’s the extreme opposite of modern liberalism — in place of diversity, equality and minority rights, it preaches white supremacy and rule of the strong over the weak.

I’ve written before about how the alt-right overlaps with men’s self-improvement, and Mein Kampf read like a self-help book to me (apparently that’s how it’s often read in India today). It reminded me of Fight Club — a disillusioned drifter finds meaning through street violence, then discovers he has a talent for demagoguery, and leads an extremist movement to stoke national mayhem.

We know what happened next — how this fringe party somehow rose to prominence, how they were handed power by Germany’s rich elite, the rapid collapse of the rule of law, the creation of the racist, eugenic, anti-Semitic dictatorship, and the beginning of a world war in which 60 million people would die.

Some have seen the man at the centre of these awful events as ‘an opportunist entirely without principle’ (in the words of historian Alan Bullock), whose reign was ‘barren of all ideas’ except power[1]. Certainly Hitler was a power-seeking opportunist without conventional morality. But he wasn’t a nihilist. In the words of The Big Lebowski, ‘say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos’. According to another biographer, Ian Kershaw, Hitler possessed ‘an absolutely unaltering and solidly girded ideological vision’, and Mein Kampf was a ‘blueprint’ for it[2].

His worldview, or weltanshauung, is basically this:

1) The Will of Nature / Providence encourages the struggle between strong and weak to create higher forms

2) There are stronger and weaker nations and races. The Aryan race is spiritually superior to all other races and deserves to rule them.

3) The Jews are their demonic enemy, engaged in a global conspiracy to destroy the Aryan race

4) The aim of Nazism is the creation of the Volkstaat, dedicated to the purification and preservation of the Aryan-German race.

5) This involves positive eugenics, or the breeding of a new type of ubermensch

6) And it involves negative eugenics — the sterilization, segregation, expulsion and extermination of untermenschen (or subhumans)

7) The state should also expand its borders to create lebensraum (living room) for the Aryan race

8) The divinely-appointed Fuhrer (ie him) plays a central role in this cosmic apocalyptic race war.

This is a worldview of spiritual eugenics — Hitler sees evolution guided by Providence, favouring the higher race in their spiritual mission and smiling on the extermination of lower races.

1) The Will of Nature / Providence encourages the struggle between strong and weak to create higher forms

It’s no accident that Hitler called his autobiography My Struggle. Struggle was ‘his most basic belief’, in Kershaw’s words. Hitler wrote: ‘It is the struggle for existence that produces the selection of the fittest’…’struggle is always a means for improving a species‘ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development’.[3]

Nature, he declared in a speech of 1942, is ruled by ‘one harsh law, the law that gives the right of life to the stronger and takes the life of the weaker. We humans cannot exempt ourselves from this law…On this earth we observe the unswerving struggle of living organisms with each other. One animal lives, in that it kills the other’. [4]

He then derives an ought from this evolutionary is. We must and should obey the brutal law of nature. His press chief, Otto Dietrich, wrote:

Among Hitler’s own justifications for his actions was his primitive philosophy of nature…He took such principles as the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest and strongest, or the law of nature and considered them a ‘higher imperative’ which should also rule in the community life of men. It followed for him that might was right, that his own violent methods were therefore absolutely in keeping with the laws of nature.[5]

The ‘iron logic of nature’ demanded that ‘the weaker must die, the earth is only for the healthy, and only they have the right to life’.[6] This is brutal, but nature ‘teaches us that what often appears to an individual as brutality… is nonetheless fundamentally necessary, in order to bring about a higher evolution of living organisms’.[7] Individual rights mean nothing, only the long-term good of the species. Hitler declared: ‘If I can accept a divine Commandment, it‘s this one: Thou shalt preserve the species.’[8]

In this brutal ‘might is right’ philosophy of nature we see the clear influence of Friedrich Nietzsche. Hitler claimed to have read Nietzsche while writing Mein Kampf [9], and he visited the Nietzsche Archive when he was chancellor in 1934, where the philosopher’s Nazi-supporting sister, Elizabeth, presented him with Nietzsche’s walking-stick. Hitler often spoke of Nietzsche as one of the ‘greatest of our thinkers’ [10]. Other leading Nazis also worshipped Hitler — Joseph Goebbels quoted him in his speeches, R. Walther Darre called him ‘the herald of a new era for humanity’, while SS officers read out passages from Thus Spake Zarathustra when they were married. [11]

Hitler gazing on a bust of Nietzsche in the Nietzsche Archives, 1934

Modern defenders of Nietzsche insist that the Nazis hijacked and misinterpreted him, that he was not a German nationalist or a typical 19th-century anti-Semite. That’s true. But, as we explored in our chapter on him, Nietzsche attacked Judaism and Christianity as ‘slave moralities’ and argued they should be overthrown in favour of a might-is-right philosophy of strength and power. He also said we should ditch Christian and liberal-democratic ideas of equality, compassion, rights and the sacredness of life, because they harmed the species. Instead, he said, we should forge a new natural morality, in which the weak and sickly are exterminated to make room for the evolution of superior beings, via a ‘higher breeding of humanity’. He also said say that in the service of this, we need ‘hard’ and brutal rulers prepared to kill and enslave millions.

Just words, of course. But words matter, and Nietzsche’s railing against humanitarianism, liberal democracy and equality was a huge inspiration to far-right and fascist thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, like Benito Mussolini, who wrote in 1908: ‘in order for the overman to ascend, a higher level of cruelty is required.’ [Complete Works, 1958, Vol 1. p. 183] He still inspires the far-right today.[12]

Hitler, who sent Mussolini a complete works of Nietzsche, likewise saw his weltanschauung as a rejection of Christianity and a return to healthy nature. He declared: ‘Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.’[13]

He also railed against humanitarianism, declaring it a ‘burden’ that leads to degeneration.[14] Like Nietzsche, he preached that only the strong and healthy deserved to live: ‘He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard; but, after all, that’s how it is.’ [15]

This sort of Nietzschean philosophy could be seen as anti-transcendent — there are no true values, no ideals, we’re just animals on a rock, struggling for survival. Hitler sometimes speaks in such terms, particularly when dismissing humanitarianism. But more often he speaks of a Providence, Will of Nature, or creative evolution, seeking higher and better forms. In Mein Kampf, for example, he suggests that inter-racial breeding is ‘a sin against the Will of Eternal Providence’.[16]

His spirituality is a sort of pantheistic nature-worship — but the Nature he worships is red-in-tooth-and-claw:

Man has discovered in nature the wonderful notion of that all-mighty being whose law he worships…in everyone there is the feeling for this all-mighty, which we call God (that is to say, the dominion of natural laws throughout the whole universe)[17]… The essential thing, really, is that man should know that salvation consists in the effort that each person makes to understand Providence and accept the laws of nature.[18]

The gullible masses still need Christianity but the special minority can ‘satisfy the needs of the inner life by an intimate communion with nature’.[19] When in power, the Nazis tried to promote this sort of pagan Nature-worship in propaganda films like The Enchanted Forest (shown below).

2) There are stronger and weaker nations and races. The Aryan race is spiritually superior to all other races and deserve to rule them.

As we’ve seen, there are many varieties of evolutionary ethics and evolutionary spirituality. Hitler’s, like Theodore Roosevelt’s, was explicitly nationalist and racist. He ‘saw racial struggle and survival of the fittest as the key determinants in human history’, in Kershaw’s words.[20] He was influenced by American racists like Madison Grant, whose Passing of the Great Race he praised as his ‘bible’; and by Volkisch racists like Houston Chamberlain and Richard Wagner. Like them, he insisted on the natural inequality of the races. He writes in Mein Kampf:

we cannot admit that one race is equal to another. By recognizing that they are different, the völkisch concept separates mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this recognition, it feels bound in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior and weaker.[21]

He believed history was a zero-sum struggle between various races, and the strongest had the right to conquer and exterminate the weaker races. Historian Percy Ernst Schramm, who saw the Nazi regime up close, wrote:

One night late in January 1942, Hitler formulated this thought as follows: ‘According to the eternal law of nature, the land belongs to whoever wins it, because the old boundaries do not leave enough room for the expansion of the population’. For this reason alone the stronger must be more prolific. This creates hardship and forces them to move in order to avoid the danger of racial death. That one devours the other is frightful, but that is the way things are.[22]

Hitler believed the Aryan race (which included the Germans) was the finest race:

[The Aryan] is the Prometheus of mankind from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth…[23]

Aryans are not just the smartest race (he believed), they are the most cultural, the most beautiful, the most spiritual because most capable of sacrifice. Take them away and ‘all that remains is ape dances’.[24] The key to their superiority is found not in their IQ but in ‘the blood’ — a mystical-racial concept at the heart of Nazism. In a 1931 interview with a German newspaper, he spoke of:

the basic principle of the blood. We do not judge by merely artistic or military standards or even by purely scientific ones. We judge by the spiritual energy which a people is capable of putting forth, which will enable it in ten years to recapture what it has lost in a thousand years of warfare. I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual — I would almost say divine-creation [25]

3) Jews are a demonic enemy engaged in a global conspiracy to destroy Aryan race

The demonic enemy of the divine Aryan is the Jew, who offers ‘the most striking contrast to the Aryan’ [26]. Where the Aryan is mystical and altruistic, the Jew is ‘devoid of all metaphysics and has no foundation but the most repulsive materialism’ and ‘lacks any interest in things of the spirit’.[27]

The first political statement Hitler ever wrote, and the last, were both about the need to fight Jews. It was the most consistent idea in his ideology. In the early chapters of Mein Kampf, he writes of living in Vienna as a failing artist, and suddenly having a ‘revelation’, where he realizes that the entire corrupt world is run by Jews. Everywhere, ‘global Jewry’ pulls the strings behind the scenes. Why did Germany lose World War One? The Jews! Why did the global economy collapse in 1929? The Jews! Who caused the Bolshevik revolution? The Jews! When he discovered this ‘key’ to the ‘inner workings’ of history, ‘the scales fell from my eyes’. [28]

Hitler was a conspiracy-theorist. He saw occult groups pulling the strings behind global events. He thought the Freemasons were behind the coup against Mussolini and the attempted coup against him[29], and he also thought that, just as the Protocols of Zion said, a secret cabal of Jews controlled the world, including controlling the UK government and making it fight their Aryan brothers in Germany. This Jewish cabal was dedicated to destroying the Aryan race by spreading lies, above all, the lie of racial equality:

The assumption that all races are alike leads to the assumption that nations and individuals are equal to one another. And international Marxism is nothing but the application — effected by the Jew, Karl Marx — of a general conception of life to a definite profession of political faith

Jews don’t really believe in equality, this is a lie spread ‘to destroy nations by vitiating their racial integrity’ [30]. Aryans need to wake up to the conspiracy against them, awaken their racial consciousness, and come together to conquer their cosmic enemy. At times he uses the language of demons to describe Jews, at others, the language of biology and public health. The Jews are a virus in the German body politic:

The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged to-day is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch…We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.[31]

They must be dealt with brutally: ‘Where the Jews are concerned, I’m devoid of all sense of pity.’[32] Indeed, God / Providence / The Will of Nature supports him in this race-war. Initially, he seems to have envisaged bullying Jewish people until they left Germany and moved elsewhere, perhaps to Palestine or Madagascar, although as we’ll see this hardened into a plan for their extermination.

A Nazi propaganda postcard aimed at children, showing the noble Aryan and the corrupt Jew

4) The aim of Nazism is the creation of the Volkstaat, dedicated to the purification and preservation of the Aryan-German race.

Hitler was scornful of the liberal nation-state, where anyone could call themselves ‘German’ simply by being given a visa. A living nation depended not on artificial laws, but on unity of biology, race or ‘blood’. In Mein Kampf, he declares that the state is an artificial entity while the volk (racial community or ethnic people) is an organic, spiritual entity. The state should exist purely to serve the volk and all other purposes are secondary. He wrote:

the supreme purpose of the volkstaat is to guard and preserve those racial elements which, through their work in the cultural field, create that beauty and dignity which are characteristic of a higher mankind. [33]

The volkstaat (ethnic people’s state) would be a new type of government. In the Nuremburg rally of 1937, after the Nazis had taken control of Germany, Hitler declared:

the greatest revolution Germany has undergone was that of the purification of the Volk and of race hygiene, which was launched systematically in this country for the first time ever.[34]

The volkstaat would serve the purification and ‘higher breeding’ of a master race. George J. Stein writes: ‘National socialism…was ultimately the first fully self-conscious attempt to organize a political community on a basis of an explicit biopolicy’. [35] As Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess put it in 1934, ‘National Socialism is nothing but applied biology’.[36]

All actions of the volkstaat should be geared towards avoiding volkstod, or race suicide. This meant that, more than any government before or since, the Nazis put eugenics at the heart of their ideology. In Mein Kampf, he called for

a nobler era, in which men will no longer pay exclusive attention to breeding and rearing pedigree dogs and horses and cats, but will endeavour to improve the breed of the human race itself.[37]

What eugenic writings influenced Hitler and other leading Nazis? He occasionally refers to Francis Galton, but more often to German ‘race hygienists’ like Hans Gunther and to American eugenics popularizers like Madison Grant, both of whom shared his racism and anti-Semitism. But his dream of the volkstaat was hardly scientific. Rather, it was inspired by vague and mystical terms like the volk, ‘the blood’, the Fuhrer, the ‘Will of Nature’, the ‘divine Aryan’ and the ‘demonic Jew’.

5) The breeding and training of ubermenschen

Hitler’s volkstaat had two goals: the ‘higher breeding’ and geographical expansion of Aryan ubermenschen, and the enslavement or eradication of untermenschen.

On the first goal, Hitler, like Teddy Roosevelt, believed that ‘the essential thing for the future is to have lots of children’.[38] In November 1937, Hitler informed Nazi Party leaders: ‘The lifelong relationships between the sexes is something we will regulate. We shall form the child!’ He insisted on women embracing traditional roles of motherhood. Every child brought into the world ‘is a battle which she wages for the existence or non-existence of her Volk’.[39] The ultimate meaning and purpose of any marriage was to serve the population needs of the Volk. ‘In this matter the State must assert itself as the trustee of a millennial future.’[40]

Nazi propaganda promoting larger Aryan families

What the volkstaat needed was not just more Aryans but healthier, stronger, harder Aryans — a race of ubermenschen:

We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only a highest race, become master people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome.[41]

The future Aryans would dominate not just the Earth but perhaps the cosmos too. He wrote in Mein Kampf that through ‘mutual higher breeding…at last the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free path for activity in domains which lie partly in and beyond the earth’.[42]

The rebirth of the nation, he declared in the Nuremburg rally of 1937, would be ‘brought about by the deliberate breeding of a new man’. [43] The same idea occurs in a propaganda booklet for new soldiers, called Why Are We Fighting?, which said one of the main goals of Nazism was producing a ‘new human type’ through ‘the preservation of purity of our blood and the higher evolution of our blood’.[44]

Was this Nazi eugenic fantasy a science fiction vision of homo novus (as it was for HG Wells) or a harkening back to a mythical Nordic past (as it was for Madison Grant)? It was both. This is the paradox of fascism — it looked forward to the evolution of a ‘new type of being’ but also all the way back to some sword-and-sorcery Germanic past.

The creation of Aryan ubermenschen would involve a national regime of physical fitness. Hitler writes: ‘Physical training is, therefore, not an affair for the individual in the volkstaat, nor even a matter which affects parents alone…but it is a requisite for the maintenance of the race…’ Like Teddy Roosevelt, he especially encouraged boxing, which would give young bodies ‘the hardening necessary for later life’.[45] Hitler devotes pages of Mein Kampf to the importance of fitness and character-education in the training of the Aryan master-race. Nazi boarding schools modelled themselves on English boarding schools like Eton and Harrow, and organized exchanges in the 1930s.[46]

6) The sterilization, segregation, displacement and extermination of untermenschen (or subhumans)

The flipside of Hitler’s Nietzschean dream of the ubermensch is a contempt, fear and loathing of those deemed untermenschen. He promotes the need to sterilize those deemed unfit, in Mein Kampf:

If for a period of only 600 years those individuals would be sterilized who are physically degenerate or mentally diseased, humanity would not only be delivered from an immense misfortune but also restored to a state of general health such as we at present can hardly imagine.[47]

The state must be as hard and brutal as nature herself:

Protests against this on so-called humanitarian grounds ill befit an epoch which allows any corrupt degenerate to reproduce himself and so lay a burden of unspeakable suffering both on his contemporaries and on his offspring…[48]

He took direct inspiration from the United States, where 30 US states passed legislation to allow involuntary sterilized of those deemed unfit, and state laws against inter-racial marriages were only deemed unconstitutional in 1967. Hitler wrote:

in North America the Teutonic element, which has kept its racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock, has come to dominate the American Continent and will remain master of it as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.[49]

At the heart of Hitler’s worldview was the need to purify the Aryan race and keep its sacred blood unmixed with ‘inferior’ races. He wrote

of all the tasks which we have to face, the noblest and most sacred for mankind is that each racial species must preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it.[50]

Like Madison Grant, he thought racial inter-breeding destroyed civilizations:

The adulteration of the blood and racial deterioration conditioned thereby are the only causes that account for the decline of ancient civilizations; for it is never by war that nations are ruined, but by the loss of their powers of resistance, which are exclusively a characteristic of pure racial blood[51]

Like Steiner and other Volkisch spiritual racists, he believed God / Nature / the Cosmos desires Aryan purity. In Mein Kampf, he wrote that marriage should be an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape’. A few pages later he asked if we should not ‘put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created?’[52] Nature Herself was also against ‘the blending of a superior race with an inferior, because in such a case all her efforts to evolve higher beings, over hundreds of thousands of years, may thus be rendered futile’.[53]

7) Expand the Reich to create lebensraum, enslave other races

Hitler was a Malthusian. He believed that species and human races were engaged in a zero-sum struggle for food and living space on a small planet. In a speech in 1929, he declared: ‘If men wish to live, then they are forced to kill others. The entire struggle for survival is a conquest of the means of existence, which in turn results in the elimination of others from these same sources of subsistence.’ [54]

The struggle for living space played a central role in Hitler’s unpublished Second Book: ‘a volk’s entire struggle for survival in reality consists only of securing the necessary territory and land as a general precondition for feeding the growing population’. [55]

He seems to have envisaged early on the need for Germany to expand eastwards, conquering eastern Europe and Russia. He wanted to emulate the American conquest of the West, and Great Britain’s conquest of India and large parts of Africa. ‘What India was for England, the spaces of the East will be for us’. [56] He also envisaged enslaving inferior non-German races and turning them into beasts of burden. This was in line with Nietzsche’s philosophy, in which higher cultures depended on the enslavement of lower ones. Hitler wrote:

Thus, for the formation of higher cultures the existence of lower human types was one of the most essential preconditions…It is certain that the first culture of humanity was based less on the tamed animal than on the use of lower human beings.[57]

This reveals the strong streak of sadism in Hitler’s character, the pleasure he and other Nazi leaders took in denigrating other humans, bullying them, treating them as subhuman slaves.

Polish prisoners deemed ‘untermenschen’, doing slave labour in a quarry in Krakow. On the right, one of the enslaved prisoners, Karolina Sowinska. Source here.

8) The Fuhrer’s role in the apocalyptic race war

Finally, Hitler’s worldview was apocalyptic. He thought the world was facing a cosmic war between the divine Aryan and the demonic Jew: ‘The only question is whether the outcome will be propitious for the Aryan portion of mankind or whether the everlasting Jew will profit by it’. [58] He was fairly sure Providence favoured the Nazis, but should the demonic Jew win, it would mean the end of the world:

Should [the Aryan] be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert.[59]

In this apocalyptic race war, a divinely-appointed figure called the Fuhrer will play a special role. He will be the Chosen One, the Saviour, the Teutonic Hero. The Volkisch movement had long called for and prophesized the arrival of such a Fuhrer. In I9I6, leading racist Houston Chamberlain announced: ‘The Germans stand ready; all they lack is the Fuehrer appointed by the Holy Ghost.’ [60] The German predilection for hero-worship had already found such genius-icons in the poet Stefan George or the composer Richard Wagner, both of whom were worshipped as ‘the Master’ by their followers. The 1920s occulture was also bubbling with expectation of the incarnation of a superbeing — for some, it was Krishnamurti, or Sri Aurobindo, or Walt Whitman, or Rudolf Steiner.

As Ian Kershaw explored in The Hitler Myth, there was an expectation of a Fuhrer within the Nazi party before Hitler assumed that mantle. The Nazis, like many Germans, rejected parliamentary democracy as weak and called instead for rule by a charismatic firebrand, along the lines of Mussolini. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

no really great achievement has ever been effected in this world by Coalitions; but they have always been due to the triumph of one individual man…Out of the army of millions who feel the truth of these ideas, and even may understand them to some extent, one man must arise. This man must have the gift of being able to expound general ideas in a clear and definite form[61]

Hitler gradually came to believe that he was the Fuhrer, that he ‘goes the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker’. [62] By the late 1930s, after a decade of astonishing political successes, he was sure that he was the Chosen One, and that ‘there streams down upon him that force which has marked all greatest in the world’s history’[63]. He would lead the Aryans to final triumph over the Jews.

Hitler as Teutonic hero, and on the right, child survivors of Auschwitz in 1945

This, then, was his weltanschauung, his ‘new and exalted political faith’.[64] It is coherent enough, and he stuck to it his entire political career, although it rests on mystical and vague terms like the volk, the ‘Aryan’, the Fuhrer and the ‘will of Nature’, which were so nebulous that they were a blank cheque for a ruthless dictatorship.

Yet it’s clear enough that he held a brutal form of evolutionary spirituality or nature-worship, in which it is the will of Nature or Providence that the strong conquers and exterminates the weak. It’s also clear that Hitler was totally lacking in empathy and compassion, that he was filled with hate, and that he rose to global power by channeling the resentment of the German people into the absurd conspiracy theory of Jewish world domination. He truly believed his own hype that he was the Chosen One. And for a few years the gambler got lucky. But he crumpled into physical and mental senility as soon as other countries stood up to his bullying. And then, of course, the loss of the war wasn’t his fault — nothing was ever his fault. It was the German people’s fault. They had shown insufficient fight, so they deserved to be exterminated, according to the iron law of Nature. If he could have handed out poisoned Kool Aid to the entire German people, he probably would have.

We notice, throughout this project, that the eugenic religion of strength and perfection is often the fantasy of misfits, crackpots and losers, who are generally far from the perfect vision themselves. A joke of the time went that, to be a perfect Aryan, you should be ‘as blond as Hitler, as slim as Goehring, as tall as Goebbels, as perfect-sighted as Himmler, as good-looking as Rohm, and as German as Rosenberg’.

In the next section we will look further at the Nazis’ plans for ‘higher breeding of humanity’, looking in particular at the breeding policies of Heinrich Himmler and R. Walther Darre.

Notes:

[1] Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, p.804

[2] Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, Norton 1990, p.63

[3] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin 1939, p.223

[4] Hitler vor Offizieren und Offiziersanwärtern am 15. Februar 1942, in Es spricht der Führer: 7 exemplarische Hitler-Reden, ed. Hildegard von Kotze and Helmut Krausnick., 306–7

[5] Otto Dietrich, The Hitler I Knew, Methuen, 1957, p. 19

[6] Mein Kampf p.223, and ‘Ein Kampf um Deutschlands Freiheit’ (February 5, 1928), in Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, 6 vols. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992–2003), vol. 2, part 2: 665.

[7] Hitler monologue, May 12, 1942, in Hitlers Tischgespräche, p.284.

[8] Hitler’s Table Talk, New York: Enigma Books (2000), p.141

[9] Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p.240

[10] Hitler’s Table-Talk .p.720

[11] R. Walther Darre, A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, Antelope 2021, p.207; see Max Whyte, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich’, Journal of Contemporary History, April 2008. For the SS use of Nietzsche in marriage rituals, see Longerich, Hienrich Himmler: A Life, OUP 2012, p.288

[12] See Vox, 2018, ‘The Alt-Right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche’ https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/alt-right-nietzsche-richard-spencer-nazism

[13] Hitler’s Table-Talk, p.33

[14] Mein Kampf, p.226

[15] Ibid, p.226

[16] Ibid, p. 256

[17] Hitler’s Table-Talk, p. 12

[18] Ibid, p. 124

[19] Ibid, p. 66

[20] Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, intro

[21] Mein Kampf, p.297

[22] Percy Ernst Schramm, Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader, Quadrangle 1971, p.87

[23] Mein Kampf, p. 226

[24][24] Hitler, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus als Weltanschauung, der Marxismus ein Wahnsinn!’

April 2, 1927, in Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, 2: 228–229.

[25] Quoted in David Redles, Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation, NYU Press, 2008, p. 65

[26] Mein Kampf, p. 234

[27] Hitler’s Table-Talk, p. 77

[28] Mein Kampf, p. 58

[29] Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, p. 688

[30] Hitler’s Table-Talk, p. 62

[31] Ibid, p. 332

[32] Ibid, p. 260

[33] Mein Kampf, p. 307

[34] Quoted in Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Palgrave MacMillan 2009, p. 157

[35] George J. Stein, ‘Biological science and the roots of Nazism’. American Scientist, Vol. 76, №1 (January-February 1988), pp. 50–58

[36] Quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, Basic Books 2017, p. 31

[37] Mein Kampf. p. 494

[38] Hitler’s Table-Talk, p.74

[39] Quoted in Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic, p. 121

[40] Mein Kampf, p.314

[41] Ibid p. 298

[42] Ibid, p.298

[43] In Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations: 1935–1938, Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990, p. 925

[44] Quoted in Weikart, Hitlers Ethic p. 138

[45] Mein Kampf, p. 318

[46] See Helen Roche, The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas, OUP 2022, p. 163

[47] Mein Kampf, p. 315

[48] Ibid, p. 313

[49] Ibid, p. 224

[50] Speech to German Reichstag, 30 January 1937: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/hitler1.htm

[51] Mein Kampf, p. 231

[52] Ibid, p. 313, 316

[53] Ibid, p. 223

[54] Speech in Munich, March 15 1929: https://www.uncp.edu/sites/default/files/2019-01/2b.%20%20Hitler%26%23039%3Bs%20Speeches.pdf

[55] Quoted in Weikart, Hitler’s Evolutionary Ethic, p. 165

[56] Hitler’s Table-Talk, p. XXXII

[57] Mein Kampf, p. 230

[58] Ibid, p. 332

[59] Ibid, p. 226

[60] Quoted in Peter Viereck, ‘Stefan George, Perilous Poet’, The Antioch Review, Vol. 9, No 1 (Spring 1949), p. 111–116

[61] Mein Kampf p. 397

[62] Quoted in Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p.530

[63] Quoted in Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, p. 384

[64] Mein Kampf, p. 296