To teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to prepare for great enterprises and collective experiments in discipline and breeding … for that a new kind of philosopher and commander will sometime be needed, in face of whom whatever has existed on earth of hidden, dreadful and benevolent spirits may well look pale and dwarfed.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The Nazi outlook was, in a selective way, Nietzschean, but the Nazis were not amoralists. They thought of themselves as living by a post-Christian morality, which gave them a strong sense of their own moral identity.
The Nazis disagreed with Nietzsche about the death of God. Hitler himself retained a belief in a supernatural power and at times he seemed to think that he himself had some supernaturally ordained destiny: ‘If my presence on earth is providential, I owe it to a superior will.’1 And in a speech in Linz in 1938 he said, ‘I believe that it was the will of God to send a boy from here into the Reich, to make him great, to raise him up to be the Führer of the nation.’
But Hitler was passionately hostile to Christianity: ‘I shall never come to terms with the Christian lie … Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn’t, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar.’ He accepted a broadly Nietzschean account of Christianity as a conspiracy of Jews for a slave revolt against their Roman conquerors: ‘Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society.’
Although he was passionately hostile to Christianity, Hitler said that he did not ‘want to educate anyone in atheism’.2 A Nazi was encouraged to be a Gottgläubiger, a believer in God, but the term carried no suggestion of Christianity. SS members were encouraged to leave the churches. Adolf Eichmann, taking the view that ‘the God I believe in is greater than the Christian God’,3 left the Protestant Church and registered as a Gottgläubiger. In his case the Christian outlook was replaced by something more Nietzschean. In his final statement in court in Israel, Eichmann also spoke of the ‘revaluation of values prescribed by the government’. And Joseph Goebbels used the same phrase: ‘Children of revolt, we call ourselves with a poignant tremor. We have been through revolution, through revolt to the very end. We are out for the radical revaluation of all values.’4 Hitler thought conscience was a Jewish invention. The effort to break free from the constraints of conscience was one of the central aspects of the Nazis’ own revaluation of values. They believed in crossing the moral or emotional barriers against cruelty and atrocity.
Nazism was conceived as a way of life, and its scope extended to the inner life. Harald Ofstad has reconstructed the total nature of its claims: ‘To fulfil one’s nazi duties and then relax is not enough. One must think, feel, fantasize – even relax like a nazi. The nazi faith must permeate one’s entire being, penetrate the very core of one’s soul.’5
One of the Nazis’ most incongruous features is their capacity for moral disapproval, vehement even when disproportionate or inappropriate. When Eichmann was in Jerusalem, a police officer lent him a copy of Lolita. After two days he returned it, indignantly describing it as ‘quite an unwholesome book’.6
Hitler, too, was strongly against prostitution and ‘filth’:
No, anyone who wants to attack prostitution must first of all help to eliminate its spiritual basis. He must clear away the filth of the moral plague of big city ‘civilisation’ and he must do this ruthlessly and without wavering in the face of all the shouting and screaming that will necessarily be let loose … Theatre, art, literature, cinema, press, posters and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political and cultural idea.7
Superimposed on the racism and Social Darwinism was this additional morality, whose categories were ‘filth’ and ‘cleansing’.
It is hard to see any coherent reasons for this moral mixture. The official moral theory was mainly a selective version of Nietzsche. There was also a highly distorted version of Kant. During his interrogation Eichmann claimed to believe in ‘fulfilment of duty’, saying, ‘In fact it’s my norm. I have taken Kant’s categorical imperative as my norm, I did long ago. I have ordered my life by that imperative, and continued to do so in my sermons to my sons when I realized that they were letting themselves go.’8 He made a similar remark at his trial, and when asked about this by Judge Raveh, he said that he had read the Critique of Practical Reason, and gave a decent account of the Categorical Imperative: ‘I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.’
Kant, who believed that people are to be treated as ends in themselves and not merely as means, would have been appalled by this particular Kantian. But there is a side of Kant to which the Nazis could claim a sort of adherence: the emphasis on obedience to rules for their own sake. Kantian rules are supposed to be generated purely rationally, in a way that is independent of their impact on people. And they should be obeyed out of pure duty, rather than out of any sympathy for people. For Kant, to act out of feelings of sympathy for others is to act on a mere inclination rather than out of duty, and so to do something without moral worth. The Nazis produced a grim variant of this austere, self-enclosed morality.
The sense of duty was important. As Martin Bormann put it, ‘But you know, don’t you, that in my dictionary DUTY is written in capitals.’9 And Eduard Wirths, one of the leading Nazi doctors in Auschwitz, wrote to his wife in 1945, ‘I can say that I have always done my duty and have never done anything contrary to what was expected of me.’10
Eichmann was also punctilious in carrying out small duties. At the end of the war, he sent his men home and gave the remaining money to his legal adviser, ‘because, I said to myself, he is a man from the higher civil services, he will be correct in the management of funds, he will put down his expenses … for I still believed that accounts would be demanded some day’.11 Sometimes at his trial he congratulated himself for his refusal to act for personal gain, as when he wanted to learn Hebrew: ‘It would have been easy to say, let’s grab a rabbi and lock him up and he’ll have to teach me; but no, I paid three marks per hour, the usual price.’ Martha Gellhorn described how he was bewildered by the reaction this provoked in the court: ‘How could he know, this hollow man, that what seemed to him a natural phrase exposed wastelands of feeling to people who, under no circumstances on earth, would have imagined that you could “grab” an innocent scholar and jail him in order to get lessons for nothing.’12
Himmler too attached great importance to SS members not stealing anything from Jews for themselves, in contrast to the ease with which he felt he could justify their other actions:
We had the moral right vis-à-vis our people to annihilate this people which wanted to annihilate us. But we have no right to take a single fur, a single watch, a single mark, a single cigarette, or anything whatever. We don’t want in the end, just because we have exterminated a germ, to be infected by that germ and die from it. I will not stand by while a slight infection forms. Whenever such an infected spot appears, we will burn it out. But on the whole we can say that we have fulfilled this heavy task with love for our people, and we have not been damaged in the innermost of our being, our soul, our character.13
The view that duties are quite independent of any concern for other people, and yet that they are binding, gave rise to a striking piece of moral indignation in Franz Stangl, the Commandant of Treblinka. When Gitta Sereny interviewed him after his trial, she asked him about his reputation for being superb at his job: ‘Would it not have been possible for you, in order to register some protest, if only to yourself, to do your work a little less “superbly”?’ She reports that this was one of the few questions that made him angry: ‘Everything I did out of my own free will I had to do as well as I could. That is how I am.’14
The SS saw the very repulsiveness of what they did as evidence of a devotion to duty which made criticism particularly unfair. SS-Obersturmbannführer Strauch arrested seventy Jews employed by a colleague, Kube, who criticized him for this. Strauch said:
I was again and again faced with the fact that my men and I were reproached for barbarism and sadism, whereas I did nothing but fulfil my duty. Even the fact that expert physicians had removed in a proper way the gold fillings from the teeth of Jews who had been designated for special treatment was made the topic of conversation. Kube asserted that this method of our procedure was unworthy of a German man and of the Germany of Kant and Goethe.
Strauch said it was regrettable that his men, ‘in addition to having to perform this nasty job, were also made the targets of mudslinging’.15
The more horrible the acts the SS committed, the more they were able to think of themselves as showing heroism, remaining morally pure themselves at the same time as overcoming revulsion against atrocities in order to obey the commands of duty. Himmler, in 1943, congratulated his men on this:
Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie there, or 500 lie there, or 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this and – apart from the exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent, that has hardened us. That is a page of glory in our history never written and never to be written.16
The SS, despite its central role in the brutality and killings, had a conception of itself as a moral elite. Its catechism said that ‘the prisoner must know that the guard represents a philosophy superior to his, an unblemished political approach and a higher moral level, and the prisoner must take these as a personal example as part of his efforts to correct himself so that he may be once again a loyal citizen of his community’.17 But their idea of a higher moral level is a dramatic illustration of the limitations of a morality detached from concern for others. It was based on taking very seriously duties which were trivial in human importance. Again the contrast is between this sense of duty and how they saw the human disaster they were creating. It is a contrast which displays an overwhelming distortion of perspective. One senior officer wrote: ‘On that same pile of trash … were used articles of clothing and blankets. It was a terrifying sight. What horrible waste. A large portion of the uniforms thrown there were still usable. It is hard to believe that something like this could happen here.’18 ‘Here’ was Auschwitz.