page_title: Martin Heidegger and Nazism
section_title: Support for the "Führer principle"
hierarchical_section_title: Martin Heidegger and Nazism / Timeline / Heidegger's rectorate at the University of Freiburg / Support for the "Führer principle"
caption_attribution_description: English: Adolf Hitler sitting on his desk in his Berghof residence, cropped photo. Français&#160;: Adolf Hitler assis sur son bureau dans sa résidence montagnarde du Berghof, photo réduite.
context_page_description: Philosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, ten days after being elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. A year later, in April 1934, he resigned the Rectorship and stopped taking part in Nazi Party meetings, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until its dismantling at the end of World War II. The denazification hearings immediately after World War II led to Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg, banning him from teaching. In 1949, after several years of investigation, the French military finally classified Heidegger as a Mitläufer or "fellow traveller." The teaching ban was lifted in 1951, and Heidegger was granted emeritus status in 1953; however, he was never allowed to resume his philosophy chairmanship.
  Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, his attitude towards Jews and his near-total silence about the Holocaust in his writing and teaching after 1945 are highly controversial. The Black Notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941, contain several anti-semitic statements.
context_section_description: According to Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger supported the "necessity of a Führer" for Germany as early as 1918. But Heidegger spoke actually of the "necessity of leaders" or "guides" (genitive plural: die Notwendigkeit der Führer) because "only individuals are creative (even to lead), the crowd never", which sounds more platonic than Nazi; Heidegger in the same letter speaks about people who are rightly "appalled at the Pan-Germanic chimerae" after first World War.
  In a number of speeches during November 1933, Heidegger endorses the Führerprinzip ("leader principle"), i.e. the principle that the Führer is the embodiment of the people; that he is always right and that his word is above all written law and demands total obedience. For example, in one speech Heidegger stated:
  Let not propositions and 'ideas' be the rules of your being (Sein). The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: that from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility. Heil Hitler!
  In another speech a few days later, Heidegger endorsed the German election of November 1933, in which the electorate was presented with a single Nazi-approved list of candidates:
  The German people has been summoned by the Führer to vote; the Führer, however, is asking nothing from the people; rather, he is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether it – the entire people – wants its own existence (Dasein), or whether it does not want it. [...] On November 12, the German people as a whole will choose its future, and this future is bound to the Führer. [...] There are not separate foreign and domestic policies. There is only one will to the full existence (Dasein) of the State. The Führer has awakened this will in the entire people and has welded it into a single resolve.
  Later in November 1933, Heidegger attended a conference at the University of Tübingen organized by the students of the university and the Kampfbund, the local Nazi Party chapter. In this address, he argued for a revolution in knowledge, a revolution that would displace the traditional idea that the university should be independent of the state: 
  We have witnessed a revolution. The state has transformed itself. This revolution was not the advent of a power pre-existing in the bosom of the state or of a political party. The national-socialist revolution means rather the radical transformation of German existence. [...] However, in the university, not only has the revolution not yet achieved its aims, it has not even started.
  Heidegger addressed some of these remarks in the 1966 Der Spiegel interview "Only a God Can Save Us" (see below). In that interview, he stated: "I would no longer write [such things] today. Such things as that I stopped saying by 1934."
  In a recent book, however, Hans Jonas, a former student of Heidegger, argues that Heidegger's endorsement of the "Führer principle" stemmed from his philosophy and was consistent with it:
  But as to Heidegger's being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Führer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger's thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls—linguistically or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of being that issues the call.
  Jonas' reading can be supported by citations from Heidegger's lectures during and immediately following the time he was rector.  In "On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History and State", for instance, Heidegger appears to give a direct ontological sanction to Hitler's absolute rule:
  ...The origin of all political action is not in knowledge, but in being.  Every Führer is a Führer, must be a Führer [italics in original], in accordance with the stamp in his being, and simultaneously, in the living unfolding of his proper essence, he understands, thinks, and puts into action what 
caption: Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany in January 1933.
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