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new race of supermen, the philosopher could be enlisted for the Third
Reich. This method was employed even more cynically by the Nazi
regime's official ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, who in
1944
claimed
Nietzsche as a "spiritual brother" whose alleged enemies- the Marx–
ists, Jews, and international profiteers-were the same as those who
confronted the Nazi Reich. His selective quotations from Nietzsche
were primarily intended to mobilize the German people for total war.
Such crude distortions were also echoed in Allied war propaganda and
in newspaper headlines in Britain and America which (continuing the tra–
ditions of the First World War) depicted the "insane philosopher" as the
source of a ruthless German barbarism and as Hitler's favorite author.
Phrases torn out of context such as the "Superman," the "blond beast,"
"master morality," or the "will to power" were turned into slogans that
demonstrated Nietzsche's supposed identification with German mili–
tarism and imperialism, though nothing had been further from his mind.
Not everyone shared this increasingly broad consensus before
1939
that Nietzsche was the intellectual godfather of fascism and Nazism.
Even in the Third Reich there were Nazi philosophers such as Ernst
Krieck (a professor of philosophy and pedagogy in Heidelberg) who
realized how radically Nietzsche had opposed all forms of German
nationalism, socialism, and racist anti-Semitism-three core compo–
nents of National Socialism. Others like Arthur Drews (a professor of
philosophy in Karlsruhe) stressed that Nietzsche was an extreme indi–
vidualist lacking any concept of the
Volksgemeinschaft
(the
Yolk
com–
munity) or understanding of the importance of collectivism in the Nazi
creed. Drews pointed to Nietzsche's "good Europeanism," his enmity to
all things German and his positive view of the Jews, as elements in his
worldview which made it wholly inappropriate to honor him as the
philosopher of National Socialism.
In wartime America, the dominant trend was to emphasize the com–
patibility between the Nietzschean transvaluation of values and the
"revolution of nihilism" that Nazism was seeking to implement. This
was the thesis put forward in
1939
by Hermann Rauschning, a former
Nazi who had fled to the United States .
It
was echoed two years later by
Rohan Butler in a book on the German roots of National Socialism.
Another prominent wartime advocate of the thesis that Nietzsche had
been a proto-Nazi was the Harvard historian Crane Brinton, though he
did acknowledge another side to his thought.
The first major change in this picture was brought about by an Amer–
ican scholar of German background, Walter Kaufmann, who subse–
quently provided some of the most authoritative translations into
