Understanding Hitler’s Worldview (Part I)

“[Werner Catel] called for the continuation of the Nazi program of involuntary euthanasia, saying, “…We are not talking about humans here, but rather beings that were merely procreated by humans and that will never themselves become humans endowed with reason or a soul.”

Introduction: History and its Lessons

Johann Chapoutot’s book The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi is a horrific warning from history. It is a series of reminders about the lessons of history and the question of its relevance to our current political situation. History cannot dictate specific present actions nor provide explicit guidance for moving into the future. The present is not a direct replica of the past with minor updates, nor will the future perfectly fit some intricate plan built around a specific historical framework. Things do not repeat themselves with a few aesthetic changes. This, obviously, does not mean however that we cannot learn anything from our past. The past contains the seeds of the present, out of which our world has grown. Another way to look at history is to view it as the song of human experience, with the chords that bind us to those gone before reverberating in different ways up and down the generations. The act of writing history is the act of putting the words to the eternal melody. While the notes in the song of today are of course different to those played in the past, to pretend that they are exactly the same or completely different is wrong. We are a community of souls that stretches across time, united with those who have gone before, who lived in times different in many ways but who possessed the same human nature that we ourselves possess. And they were equally open to the possibility for virtue and vice as we are.

As historian Arthur Herman said in a recent interview, history is “an exploration of humanity, of human nature through our actions in the past.” As such, when reading or thinking about history and the lessons it has for today, the emotion that seems most called for is humility: humility at what faced those who lived before us, dealing with the social, cultural, political, economic, and military circumstances in which they found themselves. As Herman also said, “it’s always difficult for us to remember that events that are in the past were once in the future.” We do not know how we would have reacted if we found ourselves in the situations our forebears found themselves in. We like to think that we would be morally upright and honorable in our choices and actions. In reality it is more likely that we’d go down the path to a very dark place. Too often in life, played out today and in history, we witness vice displace the virtue in the hearts of human beings. This is a discomfiting notion, one which we mostly choose to ignore.

Johann Chapoutot’s book on the ideas that motivated the Nazis forces us to confront this part of ourselves and demonstrates in horrifying detail that ideas matter—that, as Richard Weaver memorably said, ideas have consequences. Ideas, in concert with a specific set of political, military, economic, and cultural circumstances, gave rise to the horrors of the Nazi regime. When reading this book and accounts of those times, it is wise to bear in mind that these people were as human as we were. This is the shock of history: discovering that through reading and learning history, you converse with a reflection of yourself in the past, with someone who had the same nature you do with its potential for heroism or horror. Today, with our increasing focus on the politics of identity, history should teach us that the politics of blood led to catastrophe in the past. It is essential that we should not be rushing headlong into our version of those politics in our time. In this part, I’ll focus on Chapoutot’s book. In part two, I’ll delve deeper into the possible lessons from it for today.