By Carolyn Yeager
The 125th anniversary of Hitler's birth on April 20th coincides with the publication of the “antisemitic” notebooks of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, arguably the most influential European philosopher of the 20th century (only Ludwig Wittgenstein rivals him for the title) according to this article.
There are other connections between the two. They were born in the same year, 1889. Heidegger joined Hitler's National-Socialist party, the NSDAP, in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor and he remained a member until 1945. He served as rector of Freiburg University in Baden-Württemberg for one year, from 1933 to 1934. He praised the "inner truth and greatness" of National-Socialism during a lecture in 1935. Never once did Heidegger express a word of moral condemnation of the Nazis or the "Holocaust."
On the other hand, there is said to be no evidence that Heidegger accepted National-Socialist racial theories, but that doesn't absolve him because the notebooks contain passages denouncing "world Jewry," the distinctively Jewish "talent for calculation," and the "collusion of 'rootless' Jews in both international capitalism and communism."
