DefinePK

Abstract

The re-emergence of post-revisionist historical discourse suggesting total German responsibility for Nazi occupation of Allied countries during World War II and its crimes against humanity have once again failed to fully acknowledge or encapsulate the key arguments of such debate. That is, the Nazi ideology was no singular, spontaneous, or sporadic lapse in intellectual thought that ultimately concluded in the most perverted and industrialized form of mass slaughter; it was the culmination of a decadent movement that had engulfed the cultural and intellectual centres of Europe in modernity for several decades. The failure of such debates to recognize it as such or, even more so, to see it as being an accessory to pseudo-authoritarianism itself, has set a precedent to contribute to adisingenuous dialogue and perception of societal movements and values of the time. Consequently, here the objective is to illuminate several aspects of Nazi ideology within a broader Euro-American context while, at the same time, contributing to debates about the relationship between Nazism, the Holocaust, and modernity. Specific analysis will be directed towards the ways in which Hitler shared some of Nietzsche’s critiques of modernity and rushed to fill the value vacuum left by the crumbling of JudeoChristian worldviews, but also to examine ways in which Hitler embraced aspects of scientific modernity, above all scientific racism and eugenics,with an emphasis on deconstructing these ideas as, partly or wholly, German products.