Heidegger and Nazism - Post-war

Post-war

During the hearings of the Denazification Committee, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's former student and lover, who was Jewish, spoke on his behalf. (Arendt very cautiously resumed her friendship with Heidegger after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt for Heidegger and his political sympathies, and despite his being forbidden to teach for many years.) Heidegger's former friend Karl Jaspers spoke against him, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on German students because of his powerful teaching presence.

In September 1945, the Denazification Committee published its report on Heidegger. He was charged on four counts: his important, official position, in the Nazi regime; his introduction of the Führerprinzip into the University; his engaging in Nazi propaganda and his incitement of students against "reactionary" professors. He was subsequently dismissed from university the same year. In March 1949, he was declared a "follower" (Mitläufer) of Nazism by the State Commission for Political Purification. But he was reintegrated in 1951, given emeritus status, and continued teaching until 1976. In 1974, he wrote to his friend Heinrich Petzet: "Our Europe is being ruined from below with 'democracy'".

Thomas Sheehan has noted "Heidegger's stunning silence concerning the Holocaust," in contrast to his criticism of the alienation wrought by modern technologies: "We have his statements about the six millions unemployed at the beginning of the Nazi regime, but not a word about the six million who were dead at the end of it." Heidegger did not publish anything concerning the Holocaust or the extermination camps, but did indeed mention them. In a 1949 lecture entitled "Das Ge-stell" ("Enframing"), he stated:

Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry — in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

Commentators differ on whether these statements are evidence of a profound disregard for the fate of the Jews or rather, a recontextualization of their suffering in terms of the mechanization of life and death. The French Jewish philosopher Jean-Claude Milner once said: "It's a fact, as to gas chambers, the only proper philosophical sentence is by Heidegger. (..) It is not satisfactory, but no one else did better." Heidegger's defenders have pointed to the deep ecology dimension of Heidegger's critique of technological "enframing" - i.e., that the way human beings relate to nature has a determining influence on the way we relate to one another. At least Heidegger does not say that the mechanization of agriculture and the extermination camps are equivalent, "the same thing" (in German : dasselbe) but "the same" (das Selbe, a very strange turn of phrase in German), so only "in essence", but not in the technical or metaphysical meaning of identity. Heidegger explains during his lecture : "The same is never the equivalent (das Gleiche). The same is no more only the indistinctive coincidence of the identical. The same is rather the relation of the different."

Moreover, many of those who align themselves with Heidegger philosophically have pointed out that in his work on "being-towards-death" we can recognize a much more salient criticism of what was wrong with the mass-produced murder of a people. Thinkers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler have made this point sympathetically. It might be worth pointing out that the SS physician Josef Mengele, the so-called "Angel of Death", was the son of the founder of a company that produced major farm machinery under the name Karl Mengele & Sons. This side of Heidegger's thinking can be seen in another controversial lecture from the same period, "Die Gefahr" ("The Danger"):

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.

In other words, according to Heidegger, the victims of death camps were deprived not only of their life, but of the dignity of an authentic death, since they were "liquidated" as if they were inventory or problematic accounting, rather than killed in combat as one would kill an enemy.

Another citation levied against Heidegger by his critics, is his answer to a question by his former student Herbert Marcuse, concerning his silence about the Nazi racial policies. In a letter to Marcuse he wrote:

I can add only that instead of the word "Jews" there should be the word "East Germans," and then exactly the same 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.

The reference to East Germans concerns the expulsion of Germans after World War II from territories across eastern Europe, which displaced about 15 million people and killed between 0.5 and 2 million, involved gang-rapes throughout East Germany, East Prussia, and Austria, and harshly punitive de-industrialization policies. Heidegger was correct that the mass-murder of Jews was not known to the German people during the war; however, antisemitic legislation and deportation of Jews was common knowledge, as was the "bloody terror of the Nazis" in many other regards.