Heidegger and Nazism

Full text

1
To be published in the US by Temple University Press in 1989.
HEIDEGGER AND THE NAZIS
Thomas Sheehan
The New York Review of Books,
Vol. XXXV, No. 10 (June 16, 1988), pp. 38-47.
[p. 38]
Heidegger et le nazisme
by Victor Farías, translated from Spanish and German into French
by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset, preface by Christian Jambet.
Editions Verdier, 332 pp., Fr125 (paper).
1
The spiritual strength of the West fails, its structure crumbles, this moribund
semblance of a culture caves in and drags all powers into confusion, suffocating
them in madness....
Whether or not this will happen depends on one thing: whether we
[Germans], as a historical-spiritual people, will ourselves again.
Martin Heidegger
May 1933
I.
Two facts about Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) are as incontestable as they are complicated:
first, that he remains one of the century's most influential philosophers and, second, that he was a Nazi.
On the one hand there is Heidegger the philosopher, whose monumental Sein and Zeit (Being
and Time), published in 1927, sought to change the course of philosophy by transforming the age-old
question about the meaning of reality. Heidegger thought that with the collapse of theism in the
nineteenth century (the "death of God") the West had entered the age of nihilism. His goal was to
overcome the metaphysical speculations that he believed had helped bring on that collapse and to
awaken the modern world to a new sense of what he called Òthe mystery of Being." His philosophy,
which fills over seventy volumes in his posthumous Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klostermann), has had
a profound effect on French philosophy from Jean-Paul Sartre through Jacques Derrida, on Protestant
and Catholic theologians like Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Rahner, and on two decades of literary
criticism in Europe and America. His works have been translated into all major languages, including
Chinese and Japanese.
Then there is Heidegger the Nazi, that is: the dues-paying member of the NSDAP from 1933 to
1945 (card number 312589, Gau Baden); the outspoken propagandist for Hitler and the Nazi
revolution who went on national radio to urge ratification of Hitler's withdrawal of Germany from the
League of Nations; the rector of Freiburg University (April 1933 to April 1934), who told his students,
"Let not theories and 'ideas' be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and he alone is German
reality and its law, today and for the future,Ó and who wrote to a colleague: "The individual, wherever

2
Texts in Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern: Suhr, 1962), pp. 135ff.; and in Hugo
Ott, “Martin Heidegger als Rektor der Universität Freiburg i. Br. 1933/34,” Zeitschrift des Breisgou-
Geschichtsvereins, Vol. 103 (1984), p. 117. Otto Pöggeler takes the first text as meaning: “not the
National Socialist Party program and theories of race”: “Heideggers politisches Selbstverständnis” in
Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, ed., Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Pöggeler
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 32. (Note: In this essay I often make my own translations from the
German.)
3
National Socialism: Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935), Gesamtausgabe Part II,
Vol. 40 (1983), p. 208 taken with p. 234 (cf. below). Democracy: Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Auf
einen Stern zugehen (Frankfurt: Societät, 1983), pp. 82 and 232; and Heidegger’s Spiegel interview,
“‘Only a God Can Save Us,’“ trans., William J. Richardson, in Thomas Sheehan, ed., Heidegger, the
Man and the Thinker (Precedent, 1981), pp. 45-67, here p. 55.
4
Karl Lowith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), p. 57.
he stands, counts for nothing. The fate of our people in their State is everything."
2
This is the Heidegger who, even after the Nazis allegedly began viewing him with disfavor,
continued to defend what he called "the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism." It is the same
Heidegger who despised the party system of the Weimar Republic, who liked to cite Homer (Iliad 11,
204): "The rule of the many is not good; let there be one ruler, one king,Ó and who apparently got his
wish. Years after the Nazi debacle had ended he excoriated the "democratized decay" of Germany's
political institutions and said he was not convinced that democracy was the best political system for the
modern age. In 1974 he wrote his friend Heinrich Petzet: "Our Europe is being ruined from below with
'democracy'...."
3
Heidegger's support for the Nazi movement has dogged his philosophy for over fifty years. If
the man himself was—to put it minimally—a Nazi sympathizer, is his philosophy also in some way
fascistic? Does his thought, in whole or part, lend itself to political reaction or at least a nondemocratic
view of the world?
Some philosophers answer in the absolute affirmative: Professor Jurgen Habermas of the
Goethe University, Frankfurt, for example, and the late Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt school. Many
more answer in the absolute negative and either treat Heidegger's philosophy as a pure act of thought
that developed in a political vacuum, or explain his political "error" as a misguided but well-intentioned
effort to "overcome metaphysics," but in any case as having nothing to do with his philosophy.
Still others (I include myself) would argue that despite the magnitude of Heidegger's intellectual
achievement, major elements of his philosophy are deeply flawed by his notions of politics and
history—and that this is so quite apart from the fact that he joined the Nazi party and, for whatever
period of time, ardently supported Hitler. Heidegger's engagement with Nazism was a public enactment
of some of his deepest, and most questionable, philosophical convictions. And those convictions did not
change when, in the mid-Thirties, he became disappointed with the direction the party was taking. In
fact, Heidegger admitted as much. In 1936, when his former student Karl Lowith suggested to
Heidegger that his support for Nazism seemed to come from the very essence of his philosophy,
"Heidegger agreed with me without reservations and spelled out for me that his concept of "historicity"
was the basis for his political 'engagement.'"
4
Victor Farías, a Chilean who studied with Heidegger and now teaches at the Free University of
Berlin, has dramatically reopened the question with his Heidegger et le nazisme. Written in Spanish,
rejected by a German publishing house, and finally published in French translation last October, the

5
In a work that purports to provide definitive documentation of Heidegger’s Nazi period, the
sloppiness of Farías’s notes is appalling. Apart from references to archival material, I have checked
virtually every one of his notes, and many of them cannot be traced with any reasonable ease because
the usual rules of critical apparatus have not been observed. The reader might try tracking down the
following references, a small selection among many that could be cited: p. 310, nn. 67, 68, and 75; p.
313, nn. 147 and 148; p. 316, nn. 42 and 51; p. 319, n. 130; p. 324, nn. 277, 287, and 296; p. 327,
n. 66; p. 329, n. 145; p. 332, nn. 255, 256, and 267. The works attributed to Karl Oehling are written
by Karl Moehling: p. 166, p. 322, n. 213, and p. 331, n. 203. (I am grateful to Ms. Lorna Newman,
Loyola University librarian, for helping me trace many of Farías’s references.)
The tendentiousness of the French translations of HeideggerÕs statements in Farías has been
noted by Fran_ois Fédier, who provides his own translations in Le débat, Vol. 48 (January-February,
1988), pp. 176-192. I would add that on p. 78 Heidegger’s statement is not “these times were devoted
to confronting brutality” but “one could endure these times only with toughness.” On the same page, he
did not say “combat had been healthy for him” but “he had come back from the [p. 39] war in good
health.” At p. 75 the French translation adds the prejudicial word “Aryan” and the phrase “of a
knowledge that comes from authenticity,” neither of which is found in the German. And ridiculous
though it might seem, on p. 29 Farías, without notice, makes the word “Kapaun” (“capon,” or “brat”)
come out as “Capuchin,” so that he can thereby bolster his claim that Heidegger, from his youth, was an
anti-Semitic follower of the monk Abraham a Sancta Clara.
Farías’s confusion of two places called Sachsenhausen—the seventeenth-century suburb of
Frankfurt that Heidegger mentioned in a 1964 lecture, and the concentration camp outside Berlin that
Farías thinks Heidegger meant—demolishes his absurd conclusion (p. 292ff.) that Heidegger was
making an approving reference to the death camps. Farías’s association of Heidegger with Roehm (pp.
202-210) is constructed entirely from circumstantial evidence; Hugo Ott’s research would seem to
discredit the claim: Ott, “Wege und Abwege,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, No. 275 (November 27,
1987), p. 39.
Farías’s claim on page 39 that a one-page article that Heidegger published in 1910 at the age
of twenty “articulates all the determining elements” of “Martin Heidegger’s later ideological and spiritual
development” is not demonstrated in the book, and his ruminations (pp. 33ff.) on the psychological
conflicts underlying Heidegger’s early heart condition are, to put it kindly, highly speculative.
book has been explosive: over the last six months virtually every French philosopher of note has taken a
very passionate stand, one way or the other, on l'affaire Heidegger. The book is currently being
translated into ten languages. Temple University Press will bring it out in English early next year.
Farías says his aim is to study the relation between a thinker and a political system, "and
although his historical method and political analysis have come under sharp fire from critics (particularly
his association of Heidegger with the SA leader Ernst Roehm), it would be wrong to say that one
cannot learn from this book. Farías has assembled much if not all of the available data on Heidegger's
relation to the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Even though some of his information has been
public knowledge for a long time, much of it, especially the documents Farías found in East German
archives and in the Documentation Center in West Berlin, had not been published before and is of
enormous value.
The merit of Farías's book is that it draws our attention anew to an important issue that
deserves more careful treatment than Farías has been able to give it. (I say this without having seen the
forth coming German edition of the work, which will add three new chapters and correct the numerous
errors that mar the French edition.
5
) The relation of Heidegger and Nazism has been thoroughly [p. 39]
investigated by the historian Hugo Ott of Freiburg University—whose book, to be published in
Germany in September, will be the definitive study of the topic—and by philosophers like Otto
Pöggeler of the Ruhr University, Bochum, and Karsten Harries of Yale. In what follows l use Professor

6
Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus, forthcoming,
September, 1988). Ott’s articles include: ÒMartin Heidegger als Rektor der UniversitŠt Freiburg i. Br.
1933/34,Ó Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsvereins, Vol. 102 (1983), pp. 121-136, and Vol.
103 (1984), pp. 107-130; “Martin Heidegger als Rektor der Universität Freiburg 1933/34,”
Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, Vol. 132 (new series, Vol. 93, 1984), pp. 343-358;
“Martin Heidegger und die Universität Freiburg nach 1945,” Historisches Jahrbuch, Vol. 105, No. 1
(1985), pp. 95-128; and “Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus” in Heidegger und die
praktische Philosophie, pp. 64-77.
Otto Pöggeler, Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger (Freiburg: Alber, 1972); “Den Führer
führen? Heidegger und kein Ende,” Philosophische Rundschau, Vol. 32 (1985), pp. 26-67; Martin
Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Humanities Press,
1987), pp. 274-280; “Heideggers politisches Selbstverständnis,” pp. 17-63.
Karsten Harries, “Heidegger as a Political Thinker,” Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 29 (1975-
76), pp. 642-669. Karl Moehling, Martin Heidegger and the Nazi Party, Ph.D. dissertation,
Northern Illinois University, 1972, and “Heidegger and the Nazis” in Sheehan, Heidegger, the Man
and the Thinker, pp. 31-44. Many of Heideger’s statements from 1933 to 1937 are documented in
Schneeberger, Nachlese.
7
Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” trans. Karsten Harries, Review
of Metaphysics, Vol. 38 (March, 1985), pp. 470-480, pp. 475, 480, and 471. Six months later
Heidegger linked science with “self-responsible völkisch existence”: text in Schneeberger, Nachlese, p.
149. On Heidegger’s attempt to transform Nazi language, see Graeme Nicholson, “The Politics of
Heidegger’s Rectoral Address,” Man and World, Vol. 20 (1987), pp. 171-187.
Ott's work to supplement, and sometimes to correct, Farías's account.
6
In outline, the story of Heidegger and the Nazis concerns (l) a provincial, ultra conservative
German nationalist and, at least from 1932 on, a Nazi sympathizer (2) who, three months after Hitler
took power, became rector of Freiburg University, joined the NSDAP, and tried unsuccessfully to
become the philosophical Führer of the Nazi movement, (3) who quit the rectorate in 1934 and quietly
disassociated himself from some aspects of the Nazi party while remaining an enthusiastic supporter of
its ideals, (4) who was dismissed from teaching in 1945, only to be reintegrated into the university in
1951, and who even after his death in 1976 continues to have an immense following in Europe and
America.
Whatever the value of his philosophy, the picture we now have of Heidegger's activities during
the Third Reich is deeply disturbing and frequently disgusting. For example:
Heidegger's inaugural address as Rector Magnificus of Freiburg University (May 27, 1933)
purported to assert the autonomy of the university against Nazi attempts at politicizing the sciences.
However, it ominously celebrated the banishing of academic freedom and ended up as a dithyramb to
"the greatness and glory" of the Hitler revolution ("the march our people has begun into its future
history"), which Heidegger tried to combine with the goals of his own philosophy. The essence of the
university, he says, is the "will to knowledge," which requires returning to the pre-Socratic origins of
thought. But concretely that means unifying Òscience and German fateÓ and willing "the historical
mission of the German Volk, a Volk that knows itself in its State"—all this within a spirituality "that is
the power to preserve, in the deepest way, the strengths [of the Volk] which are rooted in soil and
blood."
7
Three months later, as if to fulfill the promise of his inaugural address, Heidegger rushed to
establish the Führer-principle at Freiburg University (August 21, 1933)Ñhis first big step toward

8
Sauer’s remark and Heidegger’s letter of December 20 are cited in Ott, Zeitschrift des Breisgau-
Geschichtsvereins (1984), pp. 112 and 116.
9
Farías, Heidegger et le nazisme, p. 180. [p. 40]
10
[p. 40] Schneeberger, Nachlese, p. 137.
11
Farías, Heidegger et le nazisme, p. 176. The book was published as Bekenntnis der
Professoren an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem
nationalsozialistischen Staat (Dresden, 1933) and on pp. 36-37 contains the first translation of
Heidegger’s work into English: his speech in support of Hitler, November 11, 1933. The names appear
on pp. 129-135.
12
Ott, Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsvereins (1984), p. 117.
becoming the intellectual high priest of Nazism. According to the Führerprinzip the rector would no
longer be elected by the academic senate but would be appointed by the Nazi minister of education and
made the virtual dictator of the university, with authority to impose his own deans on the departments.
(On August 22, the vice rector, Joseph Sauer, wrote in his diary: "Finis Universitätum! And that idiot
Heidegger has gotten us into this mess, after we elected him rector to bring us a new spiritual vision for
the universities. What irony!") Heidegger prepared the ground with a public telegram to Hitler on May
20, 1933, and on October 1, 1933, got himself officially appointed Führer of Freiburg University,
thereby ending its autonomy. On December 20 he wrote a colleague that "from the very first day of my
assumption of the office" his goal had been "the fundamental change of scientific education in
accordance with the strengths and the demands of the National Socialist State" (his emphasis).
8
On September 4, 1933, in response to an offer to take the chair at the University of Munich,
Heidegger said: "For me it is clear that, putting aside all personal motives, I must decide to accomplish
the task that will allow me to best serve the work of Adolf Hitler."
9
[p. 39] On November 3, 1933, Führer-rector Heidegger issued a decree applying the Nazi
"cleansing" laws to the student body of Freiburg University. He announced that economic aid would
henceforth be awarded to students who belonged to the SS, the SA, or other military groups but would
be denied to ÒJewish or Marxist studentsÓ or anyone who fit the description of a "non-Aryan" in Nazi
law.
10
On December 13, 1933, Heidegger sent a letter to a group of German academics, requesting
financial support for a book of pro-Hitler speeches by professors that was to be circulated to
intellectuals around the world. At the bottom of his letter he added the editor's assurance that "Needless
to say, non-Aryans shall not appear on the signature page."
11
On December 22, 1933, Heidegger suggested to BadenÕs minister of education that, in
choosing among applicants for professorships, one should ask "which of the candidates (granted his
academic and personal appropriateness for the job) offers the greatest assurance of carrying out the
National Socialist will for education."
12
Equally disgusting are Heidegger's secret denunciations of his colleagues and students, actions
long the subject of rumor and now conclusively documented.
(1) Hermann Staudinger had been professor of chemistry at Freiburg University since 1926 and
would later (1953) be awarded a Nobel prize. On September 29, 1933—knowing full well that this
could cost Staudinger his job—Heidegger leaked information to the local minister of education that

13
The information on Heidegger and Staudinger is from Ott, Zeitschrift des Breisgau-
Geschichtsvereins (1984), pp. 124-126 and “‘Es dürfte eher Entlassung in Frage kommen...,”
Badische Zeitung (December 6, 1984), p. 10.
14
Farías, Heidegger et le nazisme, p. 235. Cf. Karl Jaspers, Notizien zu Martin Heidegger, ed.
Hans Saner (Munich: Piper, 1978), p. 14f.
Staudinger had been a pacifist during World War I. The Gestapo investigated the matter and confirmed
Heidegger's tip. Asked for his recommendation as Führer-rector, Heidegger on February 10, 1934,
secretly urged the ministry to fire Staudinger without a pension.
Three weeks later Heidegger recommended a milder punishment, but only because he feared
adverse international reaction to the dismissal of such a famous scholar. On March 5, 1934, he wrote:
"I hardly need to remark that as regards the issue nothing of course can change. It's simply a question
of avoiding, as much as possible, any new strain on foreign policy" (Heidegger's emphasis). The ministry
humiliated Staudinger. It forced him to submit his resignation, then dangled it in front of him for six
months before tearing it up and giving him back his job.
13
(2) A bit closer to home was the case of Dr. Eduard Baumgarten, a student of American
philosophy. After lecturing at the University of Wisconsin in the Twenties, Baumgarten returned to his
native Germany to do advanced research under Heidegger. They struck up a close friendship;
Heidegger and his wife even became the godparents of Baumgarten's son. But in 1931 they had a
falling out over philosophy. Heidegger refused to support Baumgarten's work on American pragmatism,
and soon thereafter Baumgarten left Freiburg to teach American philosophy and culture at the
University of Göttingen.
On December 16, 1933, Heidegger, unbeknownst to Baumgarten, wrote a damning letter to
Dr. Vogel, head of the organization of Nazi professors at Göttingen:
By family background and intellectual orientation Dr. Baumgarten comes from the
Heidelberg circle of liberal-democratic intellectuals around Max Weber. During his stay
here [at Freiburg] he was anything but a National Socialist. I am surprised to hear he is
lecturing at Gšttingen: I cannot imagine on the basis of what scientific works he got the
license to teach.
After failing with me, he frequented, very actively, the Jew Fränkel, who used
to teach at Göttingen and just recently was fired from here [under Nazi racial laws]....
Have there been any changes in his political attitude since then? I know of none.
Unquestionably his stay in the United States—during which he became very
Americanized—allowed him to acquire a solid understanding of that country and its
inhabitants. But I have excellent reasons for doubting the sureness of his political
instincts and the capacity of his judgment.
14
Dr. Vogel, to his credit, found Heidegger's letter so "charged with hatred" as to be unusable,
and he filed it. But fourteen months later Vogel's successor dug out the letter and sent it to the minister
of education in Berlin, who thereupon suspended Baumgarten from teaching and recommended he
leave Germany. Through a friendly secretary at Göttingen University Baumgarten got to see and copy
out Heidegger's letter; and on appeal he managed to keep his job.
In 1946, after a de-Nazification committee had confronted him with the letter, Heidegger sent
Baumgarten a brief note. The present time, he wrote, "is a peril before which the past slips away.
Sophocles has a saying about time that may help us think of the future: 'It leaves tasks unopenable and

15
Heidegger’s 1946 letter is cited in Wilhelm Schoeppe, Heidegger und Baumgarten,” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, (May 28, 1983), p. 7. Schoeppe also refutes the attack on the authenticity of
Heidegger’s 1933 letter made by Jargen Busche, “Der Standpunkt Martin Heideggers,Ó Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung (April 30, 1983), p. 7. [p. 41]
16
[p. 41] The text of Heidegger’s letter appears in Ott, Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsvereins
(1984), p. 121f. The word “non-Jewish” (“nicht judischen”) is omitted in Ott’s “‘Es dürfte...,’” p. 10.
17
On Heidegger’s defense of Jewish scholars see “‘Only a God Can Save Us,’” pp. 50-52. On
dissertations: Bernd Martin and Gottfried Schramm, “Ein Gespräch mit Max Müller,” Freiburger
Universitätsblätter, Vol. 92 (June, 1986), p. 24. Toni Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer
(Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), p. 182. On the “dangerous international alliance of Jews,” see
Jaspers, Notizien zu Martin Heidegger, pp. 15, 257, and 274, and also Philosophische
Autobiographie, expanded edition (Munich: Piper, 1977), p. 101. And Petzet, Auf einen Stern
zugehen, p. 40.
18
Martin and Schramm, “Ein Gespräch mit Max Müller,” p. 25ff.
takes appearances back into itself."' Perhaps Heidegger thought this explained matters, or constituted
an apology.
15
In his 1933 letter on Baumgarten Heidegger mentions "the Jew Fränkel"—that is, Eduard
Fränkel, the noted professor of classics at Freiburg. It is interesting that five months earlier Heidegger
as rector had come to the defense of three Jewish professors, Siegfried Thannhauser, Georg von
Hevesy (Nobel laureate in chemistry in 1943), and Fränkel, all of whom were about to be fired for
racial reasons. In a letter of July 12, 1933, Heidegger appealed the dismissal of Von [p. 41] Hevesy
and FrŠnkel, but again, as with Staudinger, his real reasons were pragmatic. He assured the local
Ministry of Education of his own "full awareness of the necessity of implementing unconditionally the
law on reconstructing the Civil Service" (the decree "cleansing" the civil service of Jews); nonetheless,
he thought that firing two Jews of such international renown might prove embarrassing to Germany's
foreign policy interests "in intellectually prominent and politically important non-Jewish circles abroad."
16
The question of whether—or to what degree—Heidegger was an anti-Semite is much debated.
On the one hand, Heidegger claimed after the war that his defense of certain Jewish professors and his
support for certain of his Jewish students during the Thirties proved that he was not anti-Semitic; this
was before the Baumgarten letter became known publicly. On the other hand, as we have seen, Farías
and Ott have documented despicable conduct concerning Jews. And from other sources we now know
that after 1933 Heidegger declined to direct the doctoral dissertations of Jewish students: he sent all
those students to his Catholic colleague Professor Martin Honecker. Toni Cassirer, the widow of Ernst
Cassirer, claimed that she had heard of Heidegger's "inclination to anti-Semitism" by 1929.
Nonetheless, for all his opposition to Heidegger from 1936 on, Karl Jaspers, whose wife was
Jewish, never took Heidegger for an anti-Semitic, even though in June of 1933, when Jaspers ridiculed
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Heidegger replied, ÒBut there is a dangerous international alliance
of Jews.Ó In 1983 HeideggerÕs close friend Heinrich Petzet wrote, as if no explanations were needed,
that Heidegger felt ill at ease with big-city life, "and this was especially true of that mundane spirit of
Jewish circles, which is at home in the metropolitan centers of the West. But this attitude of his should
not be misunderstood as anti-Semitism, although it has often been interpreted that way."
17
(3) Finally there is the case of Max MŸller, who was to become one of GermanyÕs best-
known Catholic intellectuals after the war.
18
From 1928 to 1933 Müller was a member of the inner
circle of Heidegger's most gifted students. But he was also an active anti-Nazi, and when Heidegger

19
On the fate of Jews in Baden see John-peter Horst Grill, The Nazi Movement in Baden, 1920-
1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 354f.; there Grill also notes that on May 23, 1943,
and July 1, 1944, the Baden weekly Der Führer (which “was distributed mostly to party members who
used it to obtain party information,” p. 130) published threats about the extermination of the Jews: “At
the end of this war, [Kreisleiter Hans] Rothacker was quoted as saying, the Jews will have been
destroyed just as Hitler had predicted in 1939.”
entered the NSDAP on May 1, 1933, Müller stopped attending his lectures. Seven months later
Heidegger, as Führer-rector, fired Müller from his position as a student leader because he was "not
politically appropriate."
Then in 1938 Müller discovered that Heidegger had blocked him from getting a teaching
position at Freiburg by informing the university administration that whereas Müller was an excellent
scholar, he was "unfavorably disposed" toward the regime.
With his career in jeopardy Müller went to Heidegger's office and asked him to strike that one
sentence from the letter. As Müller recalls, Heidegger calmly explained that he had been asked about
Müller's politics and "I gave the answer that simply corresponded to the truth." He added: "As a
Catholic you must know that everyone has to tell the truth." With that, Müller's career was in shreds. As
he was leaving, Heidegger asked him not to take things badly. Müller replied, "It's not a question of
taking things badly. It's a question of my existence." In November of 1938 the Education Ministry in
Berlin informed Müller that he had been denied a lectureship "for reasons of world-view and politics."
Finally, there is Heidegger's stunning silence about the Holocaust. For the hundreds of pages
that he published on the dehumanizing powers of modern civilization, for all the ink he spilled decrying
the triumph of a spiritless technology, Heidegger never saw fit, as far as I know, to publish a single
word on the death camps. Instead, he pleaded ignorance of the fate of the Jews during the war—even
though the Jewish population of Baden, where Heidegger lived, dropped dramatically from 20,600 in
1933 to 6400 in 1940, and even though virtually all of the 6400 who remained were deported to
France on October 22, 1940, and thence to Izbica, the death camp near Lublin. As Heidegger was
lecturing on Nietzsche in the Forties, there were only 820 Jews left in all of Baden. We have his
statements about the six million unemployed at the beginning of the Nazi regime, but not a word about
the six million who were dead at the end of it.
19
Heidegger used to enjoy telling a humorous story about the rarified philosophy of his teacher
Husserl, who, when asked why he had omitted the topic of history from a series of lectures he was
preparing for London, told Heidegger, "I forgot it!" Did Heidegger, who had so much to say about the
"recollection of Being," suffer from a far deeper forgetfulness?
But even though he did not publish anything on the Holocaust, he did mention it in two
unpublished lectures and in at least one letter. All three texts are characterized by a rhetoric, a cadence,
a point of view that are damning beyond commentary.
On December 1, 1949, in a lecture entitled "Das Ge-Stell" (The Con-Figuration") Heidegger
listed some of the things technology had done to the world:
Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence, the same as the
manufacturing of corpses in [p. 42] gas chambers and extermination camps, the same
as the blockading and starving of nations [it was the year of the Berlin blockade] the

20
[p. 42] ”Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die
Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blockade und
Aushungerung von Ländern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben.” Cited in
Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit (Freiburg: Alber, 1983), p. 25, from p. 25 of a
typescript of the lecture. All but the first five words of the sentence is omitted from the published
version of the lecture, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Neske: Pfüllingen,
1967), Vol. I, p. 14, ad fin.; “The Question Concerning Technology,Ó trans., William Lovitt, in
Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Harper and Row, 1977), p. 296.
21
”Hunderttausende sterben in Massen. Sterben sie? Sie kommen um. Sie werden umgelegt.
Sterben sie? Sie werden Bestandstücke eines Bestandes der Fabrikation von Leichen. Sterben sie? Sie
werden in Vernichtungslagern unauffällig liquidiert. Und auch ohne Solches—Millionen verelenden jetzt
in China durch den Hunger in ein Verenden.
Sterben aber heisst, den Tod in sein Wesen austragen. Sterben kšnnen heisst, diesen Austrag
vermšgen. Wir vermögen es nur, wenn das Wesen des Todes unser Wesen mag.” From a typescript of
“Die Gefahr,” p. 47. My emphasis in the English.
22
”...kann ich nur hinzufügen, dass statt ‘Juden’ ‘Ostdeutsche’ zu stehen hat, und dann genau so gilt
für einen der Allierten, mit dem Unterschied, dass alles, was seit 1945 geschieht, der Weltöffentlichkeit
bekannt ist, während der blutige Terror der Nazis vor dem deutschen Volk tatsächlich geheimgehalten
worden ist.” I am grateful to Professor Theodore Kisiel for this text from the Marcuse archives in
Frankfurt. Marcuse’s letters to Heidegger on this matter are published in Pflasterstrand (Frankfurt),
Vol. 209, No. 4 (May 17, 1985), pp. 42-44.
same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
20
Heidegger in
That same day, in another lecture, "Die Gefahr" ("The Danger"), Heidegger remarked:
Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They succumb. They are done in.
Do they die? They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of
manufacturing corpses. Do they die? They are liquidated inconspicuously in
extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished
people are perishing from hunger in China.
But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be
capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes
our own essence possible.
21
Two years earlier, on January 20, 1948, Heidegger answered the letter of his former student,
Herbert Marcuse, who had inquired why he had not yet spoken out about the Nazi terror and the
murder of six million Jews. Heidegger responded by comparing the Holocaust to the Soviet Union's
treatment of Germans in Eastern Europe:
I can only add that instead of the word "Jews" [in your letter] there should be the word
"East Germans," and then exactly the same [terror] holds true of one of the Allies, with
the difference that everything that has happened since 1945 is public knowledge world-
wide, whereas the bloody terror of the Nazis was in fact kept a secret from the German
people.
22
II.
It is not as if, after the war, Heidegger made no attempt to explain or justify his actions under the Nazi
regime. In fact, he did a lot of explaining. In 1946 he produced three texts (one for a de-Nazification

23
Appendixes B and C in Karl Moehling, Martin Heidegger, pp. 264-272; Heidegger, “The
Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” trans. Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 29
(1975-1976), pp. 481-502; and “‘Only a God Can Save Us.”’ See also Heidegger’s untitled letter in
Der Spiegel, (February 7, 1966), p. 12.
24
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Yale University Press, 1959),
p. 199; in German (cf. n. 3, above), p. 208.
25
Heidegger, “Heidegger über Heidegger,” Die Zeit (September 24, 1953), p. 18, to be taken with
Christian E. Lewalter, “Wie liest man 1953 Sätze von 1935?” Die Zeit (August 13, 1953), p. 6; and
Jürgen Habermas, “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (July
25, 1953).
26
”’Only a God Can Save Us,’” p. 55.
committee, one for the rector of Freiburg University, and one for his own files), and in 1966 he gave a
long interview to Der Spiegel, which at his request was published posthumously.
23
To be sure, a certain
rationale for his support of Nazism does emerge from these apologias pro vita sea. However, so
riddled are they with omissions, historical errors, and self-serving interpretations that these texts can be
used only with the greatest caution and a constant cross check of the facts.
One of the most glaring examples of how, after the war, Heidegger tampered with his earlier
statements about Nazism is found in the published version (1953) of a lecture course he gave in 1935,
Einführung in die Metaphysik. In the book, which was issued eight years after the fall of the Third
Reich, Heidegger attacks certain hack Nazi philosophers and, in the process, makes a daring
affirmation:
The stuff which is now being bandied about as the philosophy of National
Socialism—but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this
movement (namely, the encounter between global technology and modern man)—is
casting its net in these troubled waters of "values" and "totalities."
24
The publication of this passage in 1953 caused a great stir in Germany. Was it, as many argued,
an attempt by Heidegger to defend a philosophically "good Nazism" as distinct from the "bad Nazism"
of the NSDAP? And even if Heidegger did make this statement in 1935, shouldn't he have struck it out
of the published version in 1953?
Heidegger responded to such questions in a letter to the editors of Die Zeit (September 24,
1953):
It would have been easy to drop the aforementioned sentence, along with other ones
you cite, from the printed manuscript. But I did not, and I will keep it there in the future
because, for one thing, the sentences belong historically to the lecture course....
25
And again, in the Spiegel interview of 1966, Heidegger reiterated that the sentence as printed in
1953 corresponded exactly to the text of the handwritten manuscript from which he had lectured in
1935—no changes. However, he said he had not read the comment in parentheses during the actual
course because even without it "I was sure my listeners understood correctly."
26
But now we know that Heidegger [p. 43] intentionally misrepresented the facts. First: in 1935
he actually spoke of the inner truth and greatness not of "this movement" (a more generalized political
reference) but rather of National Socialism. Second: in 1953, when Professor Hartmut Buchner was

27
[p. 43] Hartmut Buchner, “Fragmentarisches,” in Günther Neske, ed. Erinnerung an Martin
Heidegger (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1977), p. 49.
28
Petra Jaeger, “Nachwort der Herausgeberin,” in Gesamtausgabe, Part II, Vol. 40, p. 234. In a
further twist that comes down to the same thing, Prof. Walter Bröcker, who followed the course in
1935, remembers distinctly that Heidegger did not say either “National Socialism” or “this movement”
but “the movement.” He writes: “And by the phrase ‘the movement’ the Nazis themselves, and they
alone, meant ‘National Socialism.’ That is why I could never forget Heidegger’s word ‘the.’” Cited in
Pöggeler, “Heideggers politisches Selbstverständnis,” p. 59, n. 11.
29
Adams, letter to me, October 21, 1974, and letter in The New York Times, February 23, 1988.
Heidegger also mentioned that the Nazis watched him closely after 1934; but Grill (p. 317) points out
that even the new deans that the Nazis themselves appointed were closely watched.
helping Heidegger correct the galley proofs of the forthcoming book, Buchner saw in them the original
1935 phrase—"the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism," with no explanatory phrase
followingÑ and he warned Heidegger to change the sentence lest his intentions be misunderstood. But
Heidegger responded: "That I cannot do: it would be a falsification of history. I said it that way then,
and if today's readers do not want to understand what was really meant by it in the context of the whole
lecture course, then I cannot help them."
27
Nonetheless, a few weeks later, with out Buchner's knowledge, Heidegger did alter the printed
text. He changed "National Socialism" to the more general political term Òthis movement,Ó and he
added the explanatory comment about technology that now appears in parentheses—thereby reading
back into 1935 his much later, and in fact revised, understanding of the historical role of Nazism. And
yet, to the day he died, he continued to maintain that his 1935 lecture notes read exactly that way and
that he had never tampered with them.
The matter could be easily settled, of course, by checking Heidegger's hand written manuscript
of the 1935 lecture course. But in the Heidegger archives in Marbach, West Germany, that page of the
original manuscript is missing.
28
All this is to say that caution is in order when one reads Heidegger's postwar interpretations of
his actions and motives between 1933 and 1945. Some matters are trivial. For example, during his
1945 de-Nazification proceedings Heidegger wrote: "I neither attended the Party assemblies, nor wore
the Party pin, nor began my lectures and addresses after 1934 with the so-called German salute ['Heil
Hitler'].Ó But in fact there is a picture of Heidegger with a Nazi emblem, and Karl Lowith saw him
wearing a swastika pin in Rome in 1936. Moreover, Professor James Luther Adams reports that
Heidegger gave the "Heil Hitler" salute before and after his lectures as late as 1936.
29
Other matters are not so trivial. For example, Heidegger's claim that the Nazi minister of
education and some university professors "conspired" against him as rector, and that he dramatically
resigned under protest in February of 1934, has now been demolished by Professor OttÕs research.
Against HeideggerÕs account Ott finds that in April of 1934 the Ministry of Education still expected
that Heidegger would be continuing in office and that Heidegger resigned because he had made too
many academic enemies in his role as Führer-rector, in part by forcing deans of his own choosing on
departments that did not want them and by trying, as he himself put it, to "tear down departmental
barriers." (In a more grandiose reading of the faculty's opposition to him, Heidegger claimed in 1945
that "the case of the rectorate 1933/34 would seem to be a sign of the metaphysical state of the essence
of science: attempts at renewing it no longer have any effect, and no one can stop the transformation of

30
Ott, Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichts vereins (1984), p. 118, and Zeitschrift für die
Geschichte des Oberrheins (1984), pp. 355-357. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion,” p. 478, and “The
Rectorate,” p. 497.
31
Lowith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933, p. 57.
32
The text has been omitted from the published version of the course, Schellings Abhandlung
“Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit” (1809) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971). It is cited by
Carl Ulmer in Der Spiegel (May 2, 1977), p. 10.
33
[p. 44] Ernst Jünger, Werke (Stuttgart: Klett, 1960ff.), respectively Vol. V, pp. 123-147 and Vol.
VI, pp. 9-329; also ÒLe travailleur planétaire: Entretien avec Ernst Jünger,” ed. Frédéric de
Towarnicki, in Martin Heidegger, ed. Michel Haar, Cahiers de l’Herne (1983), pp. 145-150. Cf.
Julius Evola, L’“Operaio” nel pensiero di Ernst Jünger (Rome: Volpe, 1974). On the collapse of the
West: texts in Moehling, Martin Heidegger, pp. 264 and 31; and Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion,” p.
479ff. Eschatology of Being: Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell (Harper and
Row, 1975), p. 18.
its essence into pure technology.")
30
Equally suspect are his claims that he broke with the regime and its projects in 1934. Karl
Lowith reports a conversation he had with Heidegger in Rome in April of 1936.
He also left no doubt about his faith in Hitler; only two things had he underestimated: the
vitality of the Christian Churches and the obstacles to the Anschluss of Austria. Now,
as before, he was convinced that National Socialism was the prescribed path for
Germany; one simply had to "hold on" long enough. The only thing that seemed
questionable to him was the endless organizing, at the expense of vital energies.
31
And later that summer, in his course on Schelling, Heidegger had some good things to say about the
leaders of European fascism, even if he thought they had not gone far enough:
The two men who, each in his own way, have introduced a counter movement to
nihilism—Mussolini and Hitler—have learned from Nietzsche, each in an essentially
different way. But even with that, Nietzsche's authentic metaphysical domain has not yet
come into its own.
32
In any case, regardless of when he took some distance from Hitler and the party, Heidegger's
often repeated explanation of his involvement in the Nazi regime contains few surprises and goes
something like this:
Like many German intellectuals after the Great War, Heidegger thought Western civilization
was on the verge of total collapse. (His Bosch-like vision of the impending apocalypse is cited at the
beginning of this essay.) For Heidegger, Europe had entered upon the climactic—in fact, the
"eschatological"—phase of a "forgottenness of Being" that had plagued the [p. 44] West since Plato.
Having experienced the exhaustion of the Platonic-Christian tradition of meaning, the West was
stumbling like a drunken Dmitri Karamazov into the dark night of a global technology that Nietzsche
had long predicted and that Heidegger thought Ernst Junger had accurately described in his essay "Die
totale Mobilmachung" and his book Der Arbeiter.
33
However, hiding behind or within this dreary age of technology was its potentially redemptive

34
”’Only a God Can Save Us,” p. 62. By “the French” perhaps Heidegger had in mind his disciple,
the late Professor Jean Beaufret.
"essence": the self concealing (and therefore long overlooked) "mystery of Being" which, like a cosmic
power, apportioned to each epoch of Western history its finite world of meaning. The process whereby
Being dispensed meaning to each new age, while keeping itself concealed, Heidegger called "the history
of Being." And in this fateful drama, which stretched from 600 BC to today, the pre-Socratic
philosophers held a privileged position. They had been granted a brief, penumbral vision of the mystery
of Being just before it slipped into oblivion with Plato and left behind in its place the cheap substitute
called "metaphysics."
For Heidegger, who stood at the other end of the history of Being, metaphysics was a
nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Western philosophy had culminated in nihilism, and
Heidegger thought his mission was to help European culture recover the long-forgotten mystery of
Being and thereby find its way through the tortured night of nihilism and on to a better dawn.
And as fate would have it, the Germans, as a unique "Western-historical people of poets and
thinkers," were destined to play a special role in this mission of saving the West. At the beginning of the
history of Being—the First Origin (der erste Anfang)—the Greeks alone had had the privilege of
glimpsing Being before it sunk into oblivion. And today, in what Heidegger called the Second Origin
(der andere Anfang), the Germans were destined to lead the way in "recollecting Being" in a new age
beyond technology.
Why was the German Volk fated to play such a special role in the coming of the Second
Origin? One reason was that (as Stanislaus Breton used to put it) "Being speaks Greek"—and
Heidegger thought that German, unlike other languages had a unique relation to that ancient language of
the First Origin. Therefore, German poetry (especially Hölderlin's) and German thought (especially
Heidegger's) were particularly qualified to reflect on and celebrate the long-forgotten mystery of Being.
In 1966 Heidegger discussed the return to Being in the Second Origin:
SPIEGEL: Do you believe that Germans have a special qualification for this return?
HEIDEGGER: I think of the special inner kinship between the German language and the language and
thought of the Greeks. This is something that the French confirm for me again and again today. When
they begin to think [about the mystery of Being], they speak German. They assure me that they do not
succeed with their own language.
34
Indeed, a year later, when discussing a possible translation of Sein und Zeit into
Spanish, Heidegger told Victor Farías that he did not think Romance languages were
capable of getting to the essence of Being.
Although these notions were fully developed only after the mid-Thirties, nonetheless even in
their inchoate form they were the presuppositions that Heidegger brought to his encounter with the Nazi
movement in the early Thirties, and without them we cannot understand his political engagement.
Heidegger wanted nothing less than, in his words, "the complete overturning of our German
existence"—beginning with the university system—so as to bring about the spiritual rebirth of the West.
And with a blindness and naiveté that only a philosopher could muster, he chose to ride the tiger of
Nazism to what he thought would be the greatest cultural revolution since Plato.
For Heidegger, saving the West entailed, of necessity, saving Germany from the degradation to
which the Treaty of Versailles had reduced her. To that end Heidegger began to support Hitler and the

35
Pöggeler, “Den Führer führen?”, p. 62 and n. 18. Heidegger’s correspondence with Bultmann
between 1927 and 1933 shows that he placed great hopes in National Socialism: Antje Bultmann
Lemke, “Der unveröffentlichte Nachlass von Rudolf Bultmann,” in Bernd Jaspert, ed., Rudolf
Bultmanns Werk und Wirkung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), p. 203.
36
Friedrich Naumann, Central Europe, trans. Christabel M. Meredith (Knopf, 1917) and Werke
(Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964), esp. Demokratie und Kaisertum (1900) and “Der Kaiser im
Volksstaat” (1917), respectively Vol. II, pp. 1-351 and pp. 461-521. Cf. “‘Only a God Can Save
Us,”’ p. 48. Heidegger’s enthusiasm for Hitler extended even to the Führer’s delicate hands (“sehen
Sie nur seine wunderbaren Hände an!” cited in Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie, p. 101); so
too Toynbee (“He had beautiful handsÓ), Arnold J. Toynbee, Acquaintances (Oxford University
Press, 1967), p. 281.
37
Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 37f.; (in German, cf. n. 3, p. 40ff.). In 1932 Jaspers held a
similar position: cf. Eduard Baumgarten in Klaus Piper and Hans Saner, eds., Erinnerungen an Karl
Jaspers (Munich: Piper, 1974), p. 127.
38
Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (1942), Gesamtausgabe Part II, Vol. 53 (1984), p.68; cf. p.
179.
Nazis, at the latest by the spring of 1932.
35
He saw in the NSDAP much more than just a political
program that might pull Germany out of the Depression. Although he never accepted the party ideology
in its entirety, particularly its racism and biologism, he did see Nazism as a movement that could halt the
spread of Marxism and realize the ultraconservative vision of one of his favorite political theorists,
Friedrich Naumann (1860-1919): the vision of a strong nationalism and a militantly anticommunist
socialism, combined under a charismatic leader who would fashion a middle-European empire that
preserved the spirit and traditions of pre-industrial Germany even as it appropriated, in moderation, the
gains of modern technology.
36
The immediate concern governing Heidegger's bizarre "Greek-German Axis"—his weird
mixture of metaphysical ethnocentrism and ultra-conservative nationalism—was the political and cultural
imperative of saving Germany from the two great dangers of the century: Bolshevism and
"Americanism."
This Europe, which in its ruinous blindness is forever on the point of cutting its own
throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America
on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same: the
same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average
man....We [Germans] are caught in a pincers. Situated in the center, our nation incurs
the severest pressure. It is the nation with the most neighbors and hence is the most
endangered. With all this, it is the most metaphysical of nations. We are certain of this
vocation....
37
Whatever hesitations Heidegger might have had about Nazism in the later years of the Reich, he
never wavered in his hatred of both communism and "Americanism." Soon after the United States
entered the war, Heidegger told his students (as if Pearl Harbor had not been bombed, as if Germany
had not first declared war on the United States):
The entry of America into this planetary war is not an entry into history. No, it is already
the last American act of America's history-lessness and self-destruction. This act is the
renunciation of the Origin. It is a decision for lack-of-Origin.
38

39
Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell, Vol. IV (Harper and Row, 1982), p. 116.
40
[p. 45] Nietzsche, p. 144f.
41
Parmenides (1942-43), Gesamtausgabe Part II, Vol. 54 (1982), p. 114.
42
Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p.
665.
In fact, Heidegger read all of World War II through the lens of this surcharged metaphysical
vision of history. When the panzers of the Third Reich rolled into Paris on June 14, 1940, Heidegger
suggested to his students that the defeat of France was a fated event, a moment in the collapse of
Western metaphysics and specifically of Cartesian subjectivity.
These days we are witnesses to a mysterious law of history which states that at a certain point a
people no longer measures up to the metaphysics that has sprung from its own history; and this
happens precisely when that metaphysics has been transformed into the absolute.
39
[p. 45] And he touted the Germans' moral superiority during the war, especially after the British
destroyed Vichy France's fleet on July 3, 1940:
When the British recently blew to smithereens the French fleet docked at Oran, it was from
their point of view "justified"; for "justified" merely means what serves the enhancement of
power. At the same time, what this suggests is that we [Germans] dare not and cannot ever
justify that action....
40
But soon enough, in pursuit of their mission to save the West, the "Western-historical people of
poets and thinkers" fell on hard times. In the winter of 1942-1943, as Hitler's Sixth Army was
crumbling at Stalingrad, Heidegger told his students that victory had a deeper meaning for the "most
metaphysical of nations."
It is important to realize that, when it comes to "victory," this historical people has already won
and is unconquerable so long as it remains the people of poets and thinkers that it is in its
essence, so long as it does not fall victim to the ever-pressing and thus fearful threat of straying
from, and thereby misunderstanding, its essence.
41
There was a good deal of talk in those days about "saving the West," and much of it had to do with
saving Europe from Bolshevism. For example, at the end of January 1943, Hitler telegraphed General
Friedrich von Paulus at Stalingrad: "Forbid surrender. The army will hold its position to the last soldier
and the last cartridge, and by its heroic endurance will make an unforgettable contribution to the
building of the defensive front and the salvation of Western civilization."
42
That summer, as the Red
Army was rolling the Wehrmacht back toward Central Europe, Heidegger, for his part, proclaimed to
his students that "the Germans and they alone [nur sie] can save the West for its history." (No doubt as
a philosopher he meant something very profound by that.) Indeed:
The planet is in flames. The essence of man is out of joint. Only from the Germans can there
come a world historical reflection—if, that is, they find and preserve "the German essence"
["das Deutsche"]
that is,

43
Heraklit (1943), Gesamtausgabe, Part II, Vol. 55 (1979), pp. 108, 123, and 181.
44
”The Rectorate,” p. 485.
45
”The Rectorate.” p. 499.
[if] they prove strong enough, in readiness for death, to rescue the Origin from the small-
mindedness of the modern world, and to preserve it in its simple beauty.
43
After the war, when he was forced to account for his actions, Heidegger laid the blame for
everything—without differentiation—not on Versailles or Hitler or the Depression or imperialism, but on
an impersonal planetary force that lay beyond anyone's responsibility or control: the Will to Power.
Everything wrong with the modern world was a manifestation of that. (This is why Heidegger could not
even see, much less understand, the Holocaust for itself.) In a memorandum written during his de-
Nazification hearings he spoke of "the universal rule of the Will to Power within global history":
Today everything stands within this reality, whether it is called communism or fascism or world
democracy.
From the standpoint of the reality of the Will to Power I saw even then [1939-1940] what is.
This reality of the Will to Power can be expressed, with Nietzsche, in the proposition: "God is
dead." . . .This means: The supersensible world, more specifically the world of the Christian
God, has lost its effective force in history.... If that were not the case, would World War I have
been possible? Even more: If that were not the case, would World War II have become
possible?
44
That statement has about as much explanatory power, and displays as much historical and political
wisdom, as the claim that the world is in the grip of Original Sin. Surely if Adam and Eve had not fallen
from grace, neither World War I nor World War II would have happened.
III.
It seems that the Nazis tired of Heidegger before he tired of them. Already at the beginning of his
rectorate (May 1933) Baden's minister of education, Otto Wacker, criticized Heidegger for his "private
Nazism," his advocacy of a spiritual revolution that did not promote the NSDAP's program of racism,
biologism, and the politicization of the sciences. Indeed, Heidegger's politics (if they can be called that)
were inspired, more by Hölderlin than by Hitler, more by his idiosyncratic vision of Western history
than by Nazi mythologies. After the war he frequently insisted that he had tried to save Nazism from its
worst instincts: he wanted to help Hitler rise above Party interests and become the leader of all
Germans. But Heidegger's ultraconservative Wilhelmian view of the state, combined with the fervent
anti-Communism of the Catholic peasant in him, played right into the hands of the regime. He was their
"useful idiot."
Heidegger is on record as saying that his eyes were opened to the real intentions of the Nazi regime
only on June 30, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler began the three-day bloodbath that
left Ernst Roehm and well over a hundred members of the SA dead. After that date, Heidegger said in
1945, "one could know beyond the shadow of a doubt with whom one was dealing."
45
Is it possible that it took Heidegger a year and a half—from Hitler's seizure of power in January of
1933 to the murder of Roehm in mid-1934—before he managed to see what was going on in
Germany? How could he not have known earlier? In 1945 he railed against those Germans who he

46
[p. 46] ”The Rectorate,” p. 486. It is possible that one of the people Heidegger had in mind was
Jaspers, whose Die geistige Situation unserer Zeit appeared in 1931 and who on December 22,
1945, wrote a letter critical of Heidegger to the de-Nazification committee; for the contents see Ott,
Historisches Jahrbuch (1985), p. 105f., n. 28.
47
”The Rectorate,” p. 492.
claimed did nothing to correct the regime and yet later declared him guilty for at least trying:
And when it comes to looking for guilty people and judging them for their guilt: Isn't essential
neglect also a form of guilt? The people who even then [1933] were so endowed with prophesy
that they saw everything [p. 46] that was coming as it came (I was not so wise)—why did they
wait almost ten years before opposing the disaster? Why not in 1933? If they thought they
knew what was going on, why didn't they stand up right then and start radically turning
everything towards the good?
46
He may have been right about all those vates ex eventu with their postwar wisdom and self-
interested finger-pointing. However, he neglects to mention those who voted with their feet or resisted
very early in 1933. In any case the silence of the "good Germans" during the Third Reich in no way
absolves Heidegger from his own blindness to the Nazi terror, which was at work from the very
beginning of the regime. Surely the Nazi program was clear to everyone, long before Heidegger joined
the party. On February 1, 1933, Hitler called for the extermination of Marxism and three days later he
assumed the right to ban the meetings and publications of rival parties. On February 28, the day after
the Reichstag fire, constitutional government was suspended and replaced with a permanent state of
emergency. All important civil liberties were also suspended: the rights of personal freedom, free
expression, free assembly, and the privacy of the telephone, telegraph, and mails.
On March 7, Hitler arrested all eighty-one of the Communist deputies who had been duly elected
to the Reichstag the day before, and on March 8, Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior, announced the
opening of the first concentration camps, one of them at Heuberg, close by Heidegger's home town of
Messkirch.
On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving Hitler absolute powers to make laws
and change the constitution. This decree marked the definitive end of parliamentary government in
Germany. To support Hitler after that date was to support dictatorship.
On April 5, two weeks before Heidegger became rector of Freiburg University, the Nazi regime
issued its first anti-Semitic laws for the purpose of "cleansing" the civil service of Jews. (In 1945
Heidegger admitted that this Säuberungs aktion "often threatened to exceed its goals and
limits"—which implies that he thought it did have some legitimate goals and limits.
47
Six months after the
"cleansing" laws were promulgated, Heidegger applied them to Jewish students at Freiburg University.)
On May 1, Heidegger, now rector for ten days, very publicly joined the Nazi party on the newly
proclaimed National Day of Honor for Labor. On May 2, the SA and the SS occupied labor union
offices throughout Germany, arrested hundreds of labor leaders, and sent them to concentration camps.
On May 10, twenty thousand books were burned in German cities. By the end of the year one
thousand titles would be banned. On May 20, Heidegger publicly sent Hitler a telegram stating his
willingness to cooperate in the "alignment" ("Gleichschaltung") of the universities with the NSDAP's
programs.
What did Heidegger know and when, did he know it? The point is: what he knew, he generally
liked. It corresponded, in his words, to "what mattered." After the war he described his convictions in

48
”The Rectorate,” p. 486. In “‘Only a God Can Save Us,” p. 48, Heidegger says that in 1933 he
was “convinced” of the “greatness and glory of this new era [Aufbruch] .”
49
In Moehling, Martin Heidegger, Appendix, B, p. 266. Cf. “‘Only a God Can Save Us,’” p. 53.
But Pöggeler writes that “a minimum of intellectual honesty” demands that such sentiments of resistance
(which virtually all Germans had) be distinguished from cases where people sought alternatives and in
many cases gave their lives: “Heideggers politisches Selbstverständnis,” p. 61, n. 17.
50
”The Rectorate,” p. 497. Re Heidegger’s students: François Fédier, “Trois attaques contre
Heidegger,” Critique, Vol. 12, No. 234 (1966), pp. 903f. Walter Biemel, “Le professeur, le penseur,
l’ami,” in Cahiers de l’Herne, p. 131, and his statement cited in Moehling, “Heidegger and the Nazis,Ó
p. 38.
1933:
The positive possibilities I then saw in the movement had to be under scored and affirmed in
order to prepare a gathering of all the capable forces, a gathering grounded not just in facts, but
in what mattered. Immediate and mere opposition would not have been in keeping with my
conviction at the time (which was never blind faith in the Party). Nor would it have been
prudent.
48
During his de-Nazification hearings Heidegger claimed, in his own defense, that in 1934 he began to
speak out in his lecture courses against the philosophical bases of Nazism, especially biologism and the
Will to Power.
After resigning the rectorate it was clear to me that the continuance of my teaching had to lead
to an increasing resistance to the bases of the National Socialist worldview. This did not require
any special attacks on my part; it would be enough to articulate my basic philosophical position
in contrast to the dogmatic obduracy and primitiveness of the biologism proclaimed by [Alfred]
Rosenberg.
49
Heidegger maintained that his opposition to the regime was not lost on his students, and some of those
who heard his lectures confirm this. Nonetheless, it seems Heidegger eventually saw that this
"intellectual resistance" did not amount to much. In 1945 he wrote:
But in the following years, teaching was more a monologue of essential thinking with itself.
Perhaps here and there it struck people and woke them up, but it did not shape itself into a
dynamic structure of specific conduct, from which, in turn, there might have come something
Original.
50
Heidegger's rude awakening came not with the Night of the Long Knives but with the end of the
war. As the Free French army approached Freiburg in the spring of 1945, he and his colleagues in the
philosophy department took to the hills of the Black Forest east of the city. In the idyllic village of
Wildenstein they taught their courses to the remaining students and awaited the inevitable.
While most of the other professors lived down the mountain in Leibertingen, Heidegger was lodged
comfortably enough in "Werenwag," the forest house of Prince Bernhard von Sachsen-Meiningen,
whose wife was in Heidegger's lecture [p. 47] course. There, on the evening of June 27, 1945, the
prince threw a farewell party for the professors, complete with a piano concert and a lecture by
Heidegger, who took as his theme a verse attributed to Hölderlin: "We must become poor to be rich."
Indeed, Heidegger was on the edge of poverty. He returned to Freiburg to find that the French

51
[p. 47] Cf. Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp.
53-73; and “Heidegger, l’enfer des philosophes,” Le Nouvel Observateur (November 6-12, 1987),
pp. 170-174, esp. p. 173: “I believe in the necessity of showing—without limit, if possible—the
profound attachment of Heidegger’s texts (writings and deeds) to the possibility and reality of all
nazisms” (my emphasis).
52
For example, in the text from November 11, 1933, in Schneeberger, Nachlese pp. 148-150.
Heidegger has never clarified, or retracted, his use of these concepts in the 1933 text.
occupying forces were threatening to confiscate his house and give away his library, and that the
university, at the insistence of the French, had set up an internal de-Nazification committee to investigate
his conduct during the Third Reich. In September of 1945 the committee issued its report, which
charged Heidegger with four things: having an important position in the Nazi regime; changing the
structure of the university by introducing the Führer-principle; engaging in Nazi propaganda; and
inciting students against allegedly "reactionary" professors. The debate over the report stretched well
into 1946 and finally broke Heidegger's health. He suffered a nervous breakdown and in March of
1946 was admitted to a sanatorium, the Schloss Haus Baden in Badenweiler, where he remained for
three weeks under the care of Dr. Viktor Baron von Gebsattel.
The long and complicated de-Nazification hearings ended in March of 1949 when the State
Commission for Political Purification declared Heidegger a Nazi "fellow traveler" ("Mitläufer") and
prohibited him from any future teaching. (He had not been in the classroom since the end of the war.)
But the mood of the times was changing. The university, and especially the philosophy department,
came to Heidegger's defense, and in 1951 he was given emeritus status and was allowed to teach and
lecture again at the university. He did so on and off into the Sixties.
4.
The point of revisiting Heidegger's involvement with Nazism is not primarily to pass judgment on the
past. Nor is it born of a desire, as Heidegger once suggested, to attack the man because one cannot
attack his works. Quite the contrary. The point is precisely to sift the works for what might still be of
value, and what not. To do that, one must re-read his works—particularly but not exclusively those
from 1933 on—with strict attention to the political movement with which Heidegger himself chose to
link his ideas. To do less than that is, I believe, finally not to understand him at all.
51
To be sure, an enormous amount of Heidegger's work during the Third Reich— for example, his
commentaries on texts from Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and other major figures—would seem to be
no more affected by his political involvement than Gottlob Frege's work on logic was vitiated by his
anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, one would do well to read nothing of Heidegger's anymore without raising
political questions.
To take only one example from his early philosophy: some might want to argue that much of what
he says about human existence in Being and Time (1927) suggests a new way to understand ourselves
philosophically. But then what do we do with Heidegger's remarks in that same book about "fate,"
"destiny," "resolve," "the historical process of a Volk," and even "truth," especially when, six years later,
as we have seen, he used those very same ideas in the service of the Nazi revolution?
52
Similar
questions must be raised about his interpretations of Hšlderlin, or his reflections on the "essence of
technology." Above all I believe that we can ill afford to swallow, as so many Heideggerians do, his
grandiose and finally dangerous narrative about the "history of Being," with its privileged epochs and
peoples, its somber insistence on the fecklessness of rational thought, its apocalyptic dirge about the
present age, its conclusion that "only a god can save us."
After the war, holed up in his cabin in the Black Forest, Heidegger wrote: He who thinks greatly

53
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper and Row, 1971), p. 9.
must err greatly."
53
Not exactly a modest statement, and apparently one more attempt to give a
highblown, philosophical excuse for his political blindness, his astonishing blunders, his despicable
actions during the Third Reich. We now know how greatly he "erred." The question remains about how
greatly he thought. The way to answer that question is not to stop reading Heidegger but to start
demythologizing him.
End