"You did not make any argument for Nietzsche as an anti-Semite or socialist by referencing a picture in a paper in 1981.
Duh! I never said he was either of those things so that's another straw man you've knocked down. Way to go; you really showed me on that one.
What I have said is that Hitler idolized Nietzsche and what Hitler did was perfectly compatible with Nietzsche's Philosophy . On the contrary Hitler despised Christ while using His name for crass political manipulation. Further, what Hitler did was in direct contradiction to the teachings of Christ. The truth is that Hitler was squarely and consistently in your (philosophical) camp.
<<<The other comment (beside having nothing to do with anything)is gratuitously silly and purposely insulting, but then I expect that sort of behavior from you by now.>>>
"That is precisely the sort of nonsense found in the National Enquirer"
Many credible scholars have seen the logical outworking of Nietzsche and Darwin in what the Nazi's did. You can sneer and mock but the facts are there for any thinking person to see.
"Ideas have consequences with regard to the Nietzsche-Hitler connection as well. Of course, Nietzsche’s influence on Hitler does not concern anti-Semitism or German nationalism per se,[5] and Zacharias is well aware of Nietzsche’s opposition to both of them. For instance, Nietzsche not only attacked anti-Semitism, but he broke ties with composer Richard Wagner because of the anti-Semitism of the latter. Since Nietzsche himself wasn’t anti-Semitic, he therefore could not directly influence later anti-Semitism or German nationalism. So in some ways Nietzsche was diametrically opposed to certain Nazi values. (For instance, besides anti-Semitism or German nationalism, Nietzsche never maintained that the Superman [Übermensch] was racial or inheritable. Admittedly, there has been a misreading by some scholars on points such as these.)[6]
But the influence at issue is the death-of-God and the Superman ideology proclaimed by Nietzsche, which was certainly picked up by Hitler. For instance, Nietzschean phrases such as "lords of the earth," "herd instinct," and "the will to force" appear in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.[7] Of course, to make Nietzsche the cause of Hitler’s actions would be unfair. Events and incidents related to the Holocaust (e.g., creating concentration camps, Kristallnacht, the invasion of Poland, medical experiments) did not deterministically occur. Each was a willed and intended event.[8] But to say that the death-of-God philosophy of Nietzsche had an influence upon Hitler’s thinking would not be an overreaching point. The extreme sarcasm and name-calling Krueger uses against Zacharias on this point is astonishing and appalling. Krueger assumes that there is absolutely no intellectual basis for making such a connection and claims that Zacharias should have known better.
However, the ideological connection between Nietzsche and Hitler has been made by various scholars. J. P. Stern, Professor of German at the University of London, who co-authored a book on Nietzsche,[9] points out that Mussolini, who read Nietzsche extensively, received a copy of Nietzsche’s Collected Works as a present from the Führer on the Brenner Pass in 1938.[10] Another point worth noting is that, according to historian William Shirer, "Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man."[11]
Historian Paul Johnson writes of the ideological connection between Nietzsche and Hitler:
Adolf Hitler . . . was a disciple of Friedrich Nietzsche. . . . Hitler hated Christianity with a passion which rivaled Lenin’s. Shortly after assuming power in 1933, he told Hermann Rauschnig that he intended ‘to stamp out Christianity root and branch.’ ‘One is either a Christian or a German -- you cannot be both,’ he added. . . . He said, ‘I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth. . . . The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes. . . .’[12]
The death of God movement helped support and add fuel to the fire of Nazism -- even if not on the matter of anti-Semitism and German nationalism. Thus Krueger’s statement regarding anti-Semitism still doesn’t refute the point that Nietzsche’s public ideas on the death-of-God ideology and its implications had a noteworthy influence on people like Hitler or Mussolini.
Krueger goes on to assert that Hitler was a theist: "In many of his speeches, Hitler asserted that he was acting in accordance with god’s will." But this type of political pandering is certainly not unusual. One can probably safely say that many politicians have glibly invoked the name of God to gain broader support from religious constituents. Hitler was no theist. We saw above that he despised Christianity. He also despised Judaism. Hitler reportedly claimed that conscience was a Jewish invention and had to be abolished.[13] That’s Christianity and Judaism down -- we’re quickly running out of theistic options.
Jehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describes the real "god" of Hitler and the Nazis:
They wanted to go back to a pagan world, beautiful, naturalistic, where natural hierarchies based on the supremacy of the strong [echoes of Nietzsche here?] would be established, because strong equaled good, powerful equaled civilized. The world did have a kind of God, the merciless God of nature, the brutal God of races, the oppressive God of hierarchies.[14]
So even if it were to be shown that Zacharias is being inaccurate in his historiography, one cannot deny that his position is intellectually defensible and respectable. Thus to insult Zacharias by saying that he "should have done some competent research" is wholly unwarranted. Zacharias is not making unjustified assertions from thin air.
Even if no historical connection exists between Nietzsche and Hitler, there is clearly a logical one. That is, if one takes the presuppositions of Nietzsche’s Superman to its logical conclusions, Hitler becomes no surprise. In Ron Rosenbaum’s study Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil,[15] he refers to Konrad Kweit, an Australian Holocaust scholar and resident fellow at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Summarizing Kweit’s view of the ideological connection between Nietzsche and Hitler, Rosenbaum writes that "the violent extremism of thought to be found in Nietzsche and Wagner made Hitler possible if not inevitable.""
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