Book Review of "Hitler's Philosophers" by Yvonne Sherratt: a Thatcherite View of German Philosophy

Hitler’s Philosophers by Yvonne Sherratt
Published May 01, 2013 by Yale University Press
Softcover version:
ISBN-10: 0300205473
ISBN-13: 978-0300205473
Hardcover version:
ISBN-10: 0300151934
ISBN-13: 978-0300151930

The edition used for this review: Kindle eBook version ASIN: B00B3R1E0O

In many ways, Hitler’s Philosophers by Yvonne Sherratt had the potential to be an interesting subject of serious academic research. Instead, the reader is fed unadulterated pulp fiction in the guise of history—and aggressive neo-Thatcherite revisionist rewriting of history—one which scarcely befits its description as a serious academic study. Heavily reliant on the acceptance of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a book described by the doyen of Holocaust historians, Raul Hilberg, as “worthless”, much the same could be same of Sherratt’s own Goldhagenist scribblings. Sherratt even condescends to crudely derogatory sexism in her polemic against Hannah Arendt by constantly referring to Arendt as “Hannah” (male authors are never referred to by their first names) along with a pathetic “docudrama” in which this tough-minded, chain-smoking twentieth-century intellectual heavyweight is reduced down to an “eighteen-year-old girl” (sic).

Even more unfortunately, this is the second such book from Yale Press I have critiqued within a short period of time, and the third overall, each taking the form of a thinly veiled ultra right-wing polemic accusing the left of “Nazism”—an enormous shame given that Yale Press also publish Raul Hilberg’s landmark three-volume historiographic study of the Holocaust: The Destruction of the European Jews. Obviously, Sherratt’s book escaped peer review by a professional historian with even the slightest of expertise in the field. Together with Joachim Köhler’s Wagner’s Hitler—The Prophet and his Disciple, Sherratt’s book represents a prime example on how to pass an extreme right-wing revisionist polemic off as an academic historiography of the period.

In some ways, everything that is worth saying about Sherratt’s book has already been more than adequately said by Sir Richard J. Evans in his justly damning review of her book for the Time Higher Education, in which he concluded with the words:

There are interesting and important things to be said about the relationship between philosophy and Nazism, that most anti-intellectual of political creeds, but you will not find them here.

Evans: Times Higher Education  (my emphasis)

I can only implore readers to study Evans’s superb review—and extremely carefully so, simply because there is an astonishing amount of quality information jam-packed into its short space. The reader learns vastly more from the review by Evans than from the entirety of Sherratt’s ridiculous book. On the other hand, the cynical pre-emptive ad hominem attack on all prospective critics by Yale Press should be universally condemned:

Sherratt not only confronts the past; she also tracks down chilling evidence of continuing Nazi sympathy in Western Universities today.

The meaning of this dictate is simple: either be forced to accept Sherratt’s views or be forever condemned as a Nazi. In other words, Sherratt is uncriticizable, reflecting similar assertions from Daniel Goldhagen, who, in the face of overwhelming criticism from historians from Cambridge to Tel Aviv to Vermont, could counter only by proclaiming his assertions to be “incontestable”. Sherratt is right now probably gloating over the fact that the very existence of criticism of her book is “incontestable” evidence of such “continuing Nazi sympathy” today.

Readers unfamiliar with the work of Cambridge historian, Sir Richard J. Evans, need only know that he was the key expert witness taken on for the David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt case. The incisive expert testimony of Evans was instrumental in the systematic demolition of the notorious Holocaust denier, David Irving’s, reputation. Evans went on to write a book about the David Irving trial:

So when Professor Evans writes a devastating review of Sherratt’s book that is as uncompromisingly damning of her right-wing revisionist pseudo-history as of the lies from David Irving, it pays to sit up and give due attention to its every single written word. Any attempt to dismiss the highly critical review by Professor Evans as being an example of such “chilling evidence of continuing Nazi sympathy in Western Universities today” could not possibly be wider of the mark.

My only real regret about the review of Hitler’s Philosophers by Professor Evans is that it is way too short and pithy. I fear that many readers may miss the remarkably pointed cogency of the ideas that are packed into his review. So even though, in some ways, the review says everything anyone could have wanted to about Sherratt’s piece of pulp fiction in the guise of history, in other ways I just wished it could have been longer and more comprehensive. The shortness is likely due to an editorially enforced word limit, although it could just as easily have been a case of Evans contemptuously dispatching Sherratt with short shrift. Perhaps Professor Evans simply felt the book unworthy of his time or effort in getting the rightful full-blown demolition it deserves. Fortunately, Evans peppers his review with fleeting allusions to subjects he has published about in more detail elsewhere. This allows us to reconstruct what the full-length version of his review might have said. Such a reconstruction is precisely the aim of this present review.

Dr Yvonne Sherratt

Sherratt is a lecturer at Bristol University, where her current profile at the time of writing states that:

Yvonne Sherratt has an Undergraduate, Masters and Doctoral degree from Cambridge University. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge before becoming a postgraduate at King’s College, Cambridge and then went on to win a prize research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which she held for three years. She has taught at a number of universities including Cambridge and New College, Oxford before coming to Bristol.   

Yvonne Sherratt currently teaches two Masters programmes, ‘Researching Society and Space’ and ‘Geographies of Knowledge: Nazi and Jewish Academics’.

Yvonne Sherratt’s teaching areas of expertise include:

Philosophy of Social Science

European—French and German hermeneutics, critical theory, genealogy, phenomenology, deconstructionism, postmodernism. Analytic—Kuhn, relativism, sociology of science.

Social Theory

Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, etc. Gender, Frankfurt School, Foucault, Psychoanalysis. Freud and psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Functionalism, Deconstructionism. Critical Theory. 

Political Theory

Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, J. S. Mill, Kant, Hegel, German Romanticism, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Marx, Marxism, Post-Marxism, Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Gadamer. Feminist theory from Mary Wollstonecraft. Concepts - Authority, the State, Justice, Sovereignty, Rights, Power, Materialism, Idealism, Democracy etc.

Cultural Theory

Theories of urbanism, space, social change, Walter Benjamin, Frankfurt School, Adorno, Foucault, early and late work, Heidegger, Sartre, existentialism, Edmund Husserl, Feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, French post-structuralism, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Paul Ricoeur, Clifford Geertz. Nature and Romanticism, Aesthetics, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Burke, Hegel, Nietzsche etc. 

From Bristol University professional profile as of July, 2014

Unfortunately, all of this astonishes me. That someone alleging to be an “academic” should so shamelessly condescend to write a trashy piece of pulp fiction in the guise of history like this utterly beggars belief. Even the author admits as much. As Evans points out in his review:

The problems start with the author’s confession that this is not an academic work but a “docudrama…which aims to transport the reader to the vivid and dangerous world of 1930s Germany” [Sherratt, p.2]. There is indeed a lot of scene-setting, much of it not really necessary...

Evans: Times Higher Education 

The histrionic “docudrama” (sic) style seems to have been adopted so as to allow Sherratt to pass her fairy tales off as serious historiographic research. Frighteningly, Sherratt even seems to be using the book as the basis of a Master’s course at an ‘academic’ faculty. Another reviewer for Marx and Philosophy also noted that:

The main problem with Sherratt’s text is its narrative style. I feel that her attempts to take the reader through unnecessarily descriptive explanations often detract from her research, I found myself repeatedly checking her notes to see whether she was taking artistic license in the delivery of the material.  

Sean Christopher Goda for Marx and Philosophy

I could not agree more: what is the point of replacing matter-of-fact academic styled presentations with meandering fairy tales (“docudrama”) unsupported by citations—other than to pull the wool over the readers’ eyes? A typical example of a particularly histrionic use of this docudrama style is this:

Now terrified, she ran to get past them to warn her father; the men blocked her way but she ducked beneath them, blistering her nails on the balustrade and screamed, ‘Poppi, Poppi, the police are here’.

Sherratt even indulges in rampant speculation over details of the execution by guillotine of Kurt Huber:

The caretaker cursed—warm, wet weather made his job even more irksome. The executions were scheduled for 5 p.m. and he had been tired, sweating profusely, looking forward to his day’s work coming to an end, when news had arrived that several SS officers wanted to observe the last execution. This would cause a delay. Spitting, he thought, how bloody minded can these officers be? Didn’t they realise that would add over an hour to his work day? —No extra pay, of course. And more to the point, things would have to be properly cleaned before they came. He had bent double over the guillotine, making sure he had removed all traces of blood; hair had got caught up and knotted in the blade, which made it harder to polish? Disinfectant was in short supply, so he had had to remove the dirt and human grime physically, scrubbing hard to remove the stains. If he didn’t get the job done properly, the officers would complain and there’d be yet more work. But nobody had thought about him [1].

Only on looking up the details of footnote [1] hidden away at the end of the book does the reader discover the author confessing that “the details of the caretaker are my own reconstruction”. Reconstruction based on what? Sherratt fails to reveal her sources. Sadly, it appears that the reader is left with little choice but to conclude the “reconstruction” is based entirely on artistic licence—namely upon pure fantasy.

At other times Sherratt simply has her facts completely incorrect. For example:

Adorno enjoyed the company of other members of the Schönberg circle too [no supportive citation]. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 180). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Far from it, Arnold Schoenberg actually took an intense disliking to Theodor Adorno:

I have never been able to bear the fellow [i.e. Adorno] ... it is disgusting the way how he treats Stravinsky. I am certainly no admirer of Stravinsky, although I like a piece of his here and there very much—but one should not write like that. 

A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life, p.335

Of Julius Friedrich Lehmann, Sherratt states that he was “a racist scientist [sic] and a publisher” (p. 19). However, Lehmann was merely a publisher who had no formal medical or scientific qualifications whatsoever. It is nonsense to credit Lehmann with the accolade of being recognised as a “scientist”. A more credible study of “intellectual” influences on Hitler by Timothy Ryback tells us:

...the remnant Hitler library contains a cache of books that is almost certainly more central to the shaping of the dark core of Hitler’s worldview than the high-minded musings of Schopenhauer, Fichte, and Nietzsche: more than fifty volumes inscribed to Hitler between 1919 and 1935 by Julius Friedrich Lehmann, an individual who has the dubious double claim to being both the single most generous contributor to Hitler’s private book collection and the public architect for the Nazi pseudoscience of biological racism.

Ryback, Timothy W.: Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life (Kindle Locations 2015-2019). Random House. Kindle Edition. 

It is typical that the author most heavily represented in Hitler’s private library scarcely rates little more than a fleeting mention in Sherratt’s book.

Careful scrutiny of Sherratt’s material sadly reveals that the book abounds with such inaccuracies and “artistic license” to the point that the whole book is entirely founded on pure and unadulterated fantasy (“docudrama”). A good example of this comes from the opening narrative:

[Hitler] was at this time a mere provincial politician, but with extremist fantasies [no supportive citation]. He loved fire [no supportive citation]. He enjoyed the power of its destruction, its vivid light, rank smoke and ability to destroy in seconds that which took centuries to form [no supportive citation]. He was an impatient man with a passion for the immediate, the dramatic [no supportive citation]. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 3). Chapter 1: Hitler: The Bartender of Genius. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis.

Later Sherratt alleges that Hitler’s request to have his body burnt in petrol after his suicide represented the ultimate consummation of a “pyromaniac fantasy” rather than representing a desire to avoid having his body publically displayed for passing crowds to spit and urinate on as had already happened to Mussolini and his mistress:

Shortly afterwards, ‘two corpses were taken and placed side by side ... and petrol ... was poured over them’. A rag was dipped in petrol and set alight and flung upon the corpses. They were at once enveloped in a sheet of flame. Hitler’s last pyromaniac fantasy had been indulged.

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 230). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Sherratt gives us no citation to check regarding her claims that “Hitler loved fire”, so I looked up several key biographies of Hitler by Alan Bullock, Sir Ian Kershaw (Volumes One and Two), Joachim Fest, John Toland, and Volker Ullrich, as well as the four-volume Third Reich series by Sir Richard J. Evans. I could find nothing whatsoever to corroborate Sherratt’s speculations. None of these major sources ever once comes remotely near corroborating Sherratt’s claims.

Though this represents a radical deviation from mainstream historiographic accounts of Hitler, not a single aspect of Sherratt’s “diagnosis” of pyromania is supported with anything remotely resembling a bibliographic citation or a cogent psychological study based on a systematic psychiatric mental state examination of credible evidence—astonishing, considering this is a text to be used for a Master’s teaching programme. This would have required a whole chapter, if not a book, but the closest thing to evidence Sherratt can provide is a claim to being “meticulously researched”. Sadly, Sherratt demonstrates a woeful lack of awareness that strict diagnostic criteria must be fulfilled in order to correctly diagnose pyromania:

A. Deliberate and purposeful fire setting on more than one occasion.
B. Tension or affective arousal before the act.
C. Fascination with, interest in, curiosity about, or attraction to fire and its situational contexts (e.g., paraphernalia, uses, consequences).
D. Pleasure, gratification, or relief when setting fires, or when witnessing or participating in their aftermath.
E. The fire setting is not done for monetary gain, as an expression of sociopolitical ideology, to conceal criminal activity, to express anger or vengeance, to improve one’s living circumstances, in response to a delusion or a hallucination, or as a result of impaired judgment (e.g., in Dementia, Mental Retardation, Substance Intoxication).
F. The fire setting is not better accounted for by Conduct Disorder, a Manic Episode, or Antisocial Personality Disorder. 

From DSM-5 American Psychiatric Association, 2013. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Not a shred of evidence is presented that Hitler fulfilled these diagnostic criteria.

There is naturally no compulsion to slavishly adhere to the DSM-5 or the ICD-10-CM diagnostic criteria, but it if Sherratt has utilised her own modified diagnostic criteria, based upon her own vast clinical experience, it is critical that this be explained and justified. In the absence of such clear-sighted academic clinical analysis, Sherratt presents us instead with rampantly speculative psychobabble speculating that Hitler was some pyromaniac bartender, thus instantly putting Sherratt’s book in the same basket as those suggesting he went berserk because of his allegedly missing testicle or from tertiary neurosyphilis contracted through sex with a Jewish rentboy.

In the old days, before the systematic elimination of reductionistic Freudian explanations, pyromania used to carry strongly psychosexual connotations, which have been mercifully expurgated from the modern DSM and ICD diagnostic criteria. Particularly since Sherratt’s Bristol University profile reveals an interest in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the speculative diagnosis of pyromania probably reflects Sherratt’s unfortunate attempt at reviving a psychosexually based reductionistic Hitlerism:

The ‘Hitlerism’ argument will not go away. In fact, there are some signs, amid the current preoccupation with sexuality in history (as in everything else), that the old psycho-historical interpretations are making a comeback, and in equally reductionist fashion. Hence, we have recent attempts to reduce the disaster of nazism to Hitler’s alleged homosexuality, or supposed syphilis. In each case, one or two bits of dubious hearsay evidence are surrounded by much inference, speculation and guesswork to come up with a case for world history shaped fatefully and decisively by Hitler’s ‘dark secret’. 

Sir Ian Kershaw in Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution. My emphasis

You can see the very same formula at work in Sherratt’s book, with ideas constructed around one or two bits of dubious evidence surrounded by “much inference, speculation and guesswork” culminating in the supposed revelation of Hitler’s ‘dark secret’, as Sherratt proclaims that:

... the academy held a terrible secret: the story of how philosophy was implicated in genocide.

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 2). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis

The quote about Hitler being “a bartender of genius” turns out to have been culled uncritically from the exceedingly problematic source of Hanfstaengl, and presented to the reader as though it were an indubitable fact. However, the reliance on the questionable sources of Strasser, Hanfstaengl and Rauschning is typical of this grossly speculative psycho-historical literature:

The other group that has joined the Freudians in promoting the notion of a sexual secret—indeed, formed, in effect, a strange explanatory alliance with them—consists of a number of embittered ex-Nazi defectors from Hitler’s inner circle, former intimates such as Otto Strasser, Ernst Hanfstaengl, and (to a lesser extent) Hermann Rauschning. If the mostly Jewish Freudians lacked inside information and the former Nazi insiders lacked objectivity and theory, the two groups found—at a distance—common ground in their vision of Hitler, with the Freudians frequently adapting the Strasser and Hanfstaengl perversion stories as confirmation for their speculations.

Ron Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (chapter 8)

Concerning Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, whose colourful anecdotes Sherratt enthusiastically accepts as holy writ, Sir Richard J. Evans tells us:

Hitler suffered from ‘schizophrenic mania’ according to a later German attempt to analyse his personality; or, in an even less plausible scenario, he never woke up from the hypnosis to which he was allegedly subjected following the ... hysterical blindness he suffered after ... a gas attack.... Neither of these two theories is supported by any evidence. The problem with many of such speculations is that the evidence they use is unprovable except on the basis of the kind of rumours that circulated round the bars of Europe and the USA during the war, and were retold and, no doubt, embellished, by barflies like Putzi Hanfstaengl, whose anecdotes provided much of the basis for Langer’s psychoanalytical account.

Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory. Chapter 9: Was Hitler Ill? My emphasis

This uncritical reliance on a dated speculative psychohistorical literature, which has largely been discredited as being little more than salacious psychobabble, casts immense doubts on Sherratt’s claims about her book that:

It is a work of non-fiction, carefully researched, based upon archival material, letters, photographs, paintings, verbal reports and descriptions, which have all been meticulously referenced.  

Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler's Philosophers (p. 2). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis

It is exceedingly peculiar for any academic text to start off with an introduction proclaiming itself to be “carefully researched” and “meticulously referenced”, while reassuring the reading that the “docudrama” contained therein actually is “non-fiction”. If Sherratt’s book were indeed graced with such supreme virtues, as Sherratt feels free to attribute to herself, she would likely have felt no need to blow her own trumpet over the stupendous qualities of her research, as such qualities would speak for themselves. Moreover, Sherratt would have actually critically scrutinised the reliability of sources such as Hanfstaengl, and refused to have passed rampant speculation off as fact. Sherratt even condescends to using the totally discredited source of Hermann Rauschning with only an extremely scant attempt at justification:

The quotes I use from Rauschning are consistent in their representation of the Führer’s character with other accounts such as those of Martin Bormann endorsed by Trevor-Roper.

Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler's Philosophers, endnote 31. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Since right-wing historian, Trevor-Roper’s time (who merrily authenticated the egregiously fake Hitler Diaries), Rauschning has entirely fallen into disrepute. Thus Kershaw says that:

I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether.

Sir Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris 

Sir Richard J. Evans talks about:

...dubious and discredited sources such as Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a record of interviews most of which never took place outside Rauschning’s mind.     

Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), p. 149. 

The dubious reliance on speculation fuelled by the occasional morsel of information from problematic sources totally undermines the credibility of Sherratt’s claim that her book is “meticulously referenced”. When you consider that there have been similarly speculative claims about Hitler’s alleged perversity stemming from him being gay, having a missing testicle, signing a compact with Satan, or having gone mad from tertiary syphilis caught off a young Jewish rentboy, piling more speculative rubbish upon rubbish like this is utterly unhelpful to us gaining genuinely insightful understanding of this seminal historical figure. This sort of wildly speculative “docudrama” involving satanism, UFOs, latent homosexuality, or missing testicles is immensely popular with the general public, but it merely gets in the way of genuine academic historiography.

An example of Sherratt’s dubious methodology is when she makes up the claim that:

Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche were as sacred to the German people as Shakespeare and Dickens were to the British... Respect for the great men of the past must once more be hammered into the minds of our youth: it must be their sacred heritage. Hitler’s fervent desire to be the most authentic of all Germans made these iconic figures [no supportive citation] deeply alluring.

Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler's Philosophers (p. 16). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

But the National Socialists did regard Shakespeare and Dickens as sacred Nordic-Protestant and völkisch-Germanic artists. Sherratt alleges that the National Socialists equally revered all famous German philosophers based on little more than being a famous German. That turns out to be a false assumption by Sherratt arising from her core dictum that ’em Krauts are all the same. However, Sherratt forgets that socialist thinkers Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels also belong to the great heritage of German thought, yet the National Socialists hardly considered them “sacred”.

Although Sherratt claims that Hegel held a revered place in the canon of National Socialist icons, she fails to provide any evidence for this. Hitler only ever once mentioned Hegel on record, only to repeat Schopenhauer’s polemical dismissal of Hegel as an “insipid, mindless, revoltingly nauseating, ignorant charlatan” (ein platter, geistloser, ekelhaft-widerlicher, unwissender Scharlatan) (Schopenhauer: Fragment on the History of Philosophy), a “repulsive, mindless charlatan, an unparalleled scribbler of nonsense” (Schopenhauer: Chapter VI, Book II, World as Will), and to quote Shakespeare”s Cymbeline in English calling Hegel’s writings “such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not” (Schopenhauer: Über den Willen in der Natur). In his diaries, Hermann Goebbels states in an entry dated the 13th of May, 1943 that Hitler merely reiterated Schopenhauer’s arrant contempt for Hegel:

Hegel is a thoroughly slavish philosophical bondsman of the princes. He deserves, in the opinion of the Führer, the harsh and ruthless intellectual pillorying which he undergoes from Schopenhauer.

Hegel ist ein durchaus gebundener philosophischer Fürstendiener; er verdient, wie der Führer meint, die harte und rücksichtslose geistige Stäupung, die er von Schopenhauer erfährt.

Aus den Tagebüchern von Joseph Goebbels seine Unterredungen mit Adolf Hitler. From the Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, His Conversations with Adolf Hitler 1939/1945: Volume 2, January 1943 - March 1945 (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 3215-3216). Sketec - Publishing House, Passau. Kindle Edition. My translation.

Likewise, party propagandist, Alfred Rosenberg, only ever expressed abject contempt for Hegel, possibly due to Hegel’s inherent Spinozism, and definitely due to his profound influence on Feuerbach, Marx, Engels and Lenin. Concerning the great Jewish philosopher, Spinoza, Hegel declared:

Spinoza is the high point of modern philosophy: either you are a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all 

Geschichte der Philosophy III, p163, Suhrkamp Verlag. 

Spinoza ist Hauptpunkt der modernen Philosophie: entweder Spinozismus oder keine Philosophie.

“Either you are a Spinozist or you are not a philosopher at all”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Rosenberg made it absolutely clear that he regarded Hegel as Marx’s predecessor:

After the collapse of absolute monarchy in 1789, Democratic principles struggled with the National idea. Separated from the start, and later bringing both movements into rigidity, a new doctrine of power alien to the blood was formulated which reached its peak in Hegel. It was then taken over in renewed falsification by Karl Marx, who equated state with class rule. 

Rosenberg: The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age, p.346

It is possible that Alfred Rosenberg might have been aware of the fact that Lenin had famously said:

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx! 

Vladimir I. Lenin: Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic (1914)

Rosenberg further talked about:

Abstract popular sovereignty of Democracy and the contemptuous words of Hegel... have produced the same insubstantial scheme of so called state authority.

Rosenberg: The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age, p.347. My emphasis.

And again:

Logic is the science of God, said Hegel. These words are an affront to a truly Nordic religion. It is the antithesis of all that is truly German and all that was truly Greek. These words are truly Socratic. It is not surprising therefore that university professors have canonised Hegel along with Socrates.

Rosenberg, Alfred: The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (p. 193). Kindle Edition. 

Despite the fact that the National Socialists clearly hated Hegel as an “insipid, mindless, revoltingly nauseating” proto-Marxist whose words are “such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not”, Sherratt declares that:

Hegel’s influence on Hitler has been noted by other scholars [in the plural]: ‘it is possible to detect Hegel’s view of the State having “supreme power over the individual” in Hitler’s writings and speeches’ [singular citation to Frank McDonough’s Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party].

Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler's Philosophers (p. 22). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

What McDonough writes is this:

While in Landsberg fortress, Hitler claimed he read works by Nietzsche, Hegel, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Treitschke, even though those present at the time later claimed he rarely read such works in any detail.

McDonough, Frank: Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party (Seminar Studies) (p. 55). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. My bold emphasis.

The omission of McDonough’s final qualifying line represents grossly unprofessional distortion and misrepresentation of secondary sources in a situation that required credible primary source material to support it in the first place. For Hitler might have claimed to have been extraordinarily well read, but that was pure self-adulatory narcissism. It is certainly true that Hegel’s polemicists have alleged to have “discovered” proto-Nazi ideology in Hegel in much the same way that President Obama’s political enemies claim that his political thought is just a garbled rehash of Mein Kampf. Yet neither McDonough nor Sherratt are able to give us primary source citations of Hegel ever stating that the State has “supreme power over the individual”, at least not any more than they have a credible proof demonstrating that Obama takes his inspiration from Mein Kampf. That is because Hegel never said any such thing about the state having “supreme power over the individual”.

Sherratt’s crudely polemical caricatures of Hegel-Hitler are about as
convincing as this depiction of Obama-Hitler found on the internet 

Nor did Hitler ever preach, as Sherratt claims he does, that:

Copying Hegel, Hitler preached of a force within history: ‘Just think: over a period of some two thousand years we can follow the German people in history, and never in the course of history has this people possessed this single formation both in the conceptions of its thought and in its action...’ [citation to a Hitler speech].  From German Idealism, Hitler stole the notion of a single idea animating world history. ‘The miracle is that [there] arose this mighty unity in Germany, this victory of a Movement, of an idea …’ [citation to a Hitler speech]. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 33). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.  

Sherratt fails to provide credible evidence to support her claim that Hitler was an authority on Hegel who read him well, “copied” Hegel, quoted from him, and was deeply influenced by him.

Nor does Sherratt make clear where this phrase “a force within history” comes from since no such phrase occurs in Hegel’s writings—nor does Sherratt, in her supposedly “meticulously referenced” book, have the simple academic decency to provide a reference that could be checked. So I was forced to undertake detailed electronic word searches of several major digitalised texts by Hegel (The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Philosophy of Right, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and all three parts of the complete Encyclopaedia including The Science of Logic). Nothing was found in these texts, so a search was undertaken of the Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe (complete works) of Hegel in digital format, which uncovered search 353 hits to the word “historisch” (historical). The word “Geschichte” (history) hit the current maximum 500 hit limit, but none of these 500 hits undercovered the alleged quote, so the words combinations of “in der Geschichte”, “in Geschichte”, and “innere Geschichte” were used instead. Searches around German synonyms of the word “force” (Kraft, Macht, Zwang, Gewalt, Wucht, Stärke) were also undertaken. Only one hit including a word like “force”, namely “Naturmächte” (powers of nature) used in a passage together with the “history” (Geschichte) was uncovered:

In this view, it is only the powers of nature which in truth act in history, and men and gods, though they belong to heaven, and are chosen for the summit of Olympus, are forfeited to nature and profoundly immersed in the very root of the earth, to be ruled unconditionally and blindly by its necessity.

In dieser Ansicht seien es nur Naturmächte, die in Wahrheit die Geschichte wirken, und Menschen und Götter, obgleich diese dem Himmel angehören und auf dem Gipfel des Olympus ihren Sitz gewählt, seien doch in innerster Wurzel gleich erdenhaft und an die Natur verfallen und von ihrer Notwendigkeit unbedingt und blind beherrscht.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 98558-98561). Talpa. Kindle Edition. My translation.

The reader can see that it bears no resemblance to Sherratt’s Hitler quote. This exhaustive fact-checking exercise only further shows that Sherratt thought she would get away with asserting the existence of Hegelian influences, imagined whenever Sherratt encounters Hitler using commonplace words such as “history” and “ideas”, under the assumption that nobody would spend hours checking her claims against the texts of Hegel’s complete works. For example, Sherratt goes on:

From German Idealism, Hitler stole the notion of a single idea animating world history [no supportive citation]. ‘The miracle is that [there] arose this mighty unity in Germany, this victory of a Movement, of an idea...’ [citation to a Hitler speech]

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 33). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

The simple occurrence of the word “idea” in a political speech by either Hitler—or any other politician—hardly proves the influence of philosophy, idealist or otherwise. Only in the most vulgar reading of German Idealism would it be construed as being about “ideas” or a “single idea animating world history”. So once again I found myself forced to conduct an exhaustive search through the whole Hegel Complete Works in German. The nearest I could find to anything like “the notion of a single idea animating world history” was this quote:

The Spirit is invigorating [belebendes] law in union with the manifold, which is then animated [belebtes]. If a person posits this animated [belebte] manifoldness as a simultaneous multitude of many, and yet in conjunction with the invigorating [mit dem Belebenden], these individual organs, the endless whole, become an infinite universe of life...

Der Geist ist belebendes Gesetz in Vereinigung mit dem Mannigfaltigen, das alsdann ein belebtes ist. Wenn der Mensch diese belebte Mannigfaltigkeit als eine Menge von vielen zugleich setzt und doch in Verbindung mit dem Belebenden, so werden diese Einzelleben Organe, das unendliche Ganze ein unendliches All des Lebens...

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Werke: Vollständige Ausgabe (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 6768-6773). Talpa. Kindle Edition. 

Once again, in this passage about the relation of the world-as-a-whole to its constituent parts (the relation of the Many to the One), contains nothing remotely resembling “the notion of a single idea animating world history” in it at all.

Thus Sherratt has failed miserably to substantiate the claim that National Socialist ideology was influenced by German philosophical Idealism in any way. Nor does Sherratt even give us an example of Hitler or any idealist philosopher ever using the bizarre phrase “single idea animating world history”, despite the fact that it is proclaimed to have been a key doctrine of both Hegel and the National Socialist Party a hundred years after Hegel’s death. Sherratt sadly evinces little evidence in her book that she has any more of an idea what romantic era philosophical Idealism actually entails than beer-hall expert, Hitler.

The exasperated Evans comes to the same conclusion that Sherratt’s book is thoroughly permeated with ridiculous unsupported speculations passed off as fact:

Unsupported assertions permeate the book. We are told that Hitler considered himself a “philosopher-leader”, and that his self-presentation as a prophet was directly derived from Nietzsche; no evidence is presented for either of these surprising claims. 

Evans: Times Higher Education. My emphasis

The passage in Sherratt’s book alleging that Hitler saw himself as a “philosopher-leader” carries a bibliographic reference to the landmark biography of Hitler by Sir Ian Kershaw:

[Hitler] had to incorporate the subject of philosophy within his sphere [no supportive citation] and he soon adopted the fantasy that he himself was a great thinker [no supportive citation]. Indeed he would soon come to regard himself as the ‘philosopher leader’ [citation to Sir Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler: Hubris, 1998, p.250]. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 16). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.My emphasis

Sherratt gives the misleading impression that Hitler himself had stated that he came to regard himself to as “the philosopher-king”.  However, on looking up the original text, we find that Kershaw says absolutely nothing of the like. Not only does Sherratt’s statement lack a credible primary source citation to back up her “surprising” assertions, but she grossly misrepresents secondary sources as well. When you check Sherratt’s supportive citation, this is what Kershaw actually wrote:

Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new Wagner—the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the Academy of Arts, Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art. 

Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936

It must first be said that any first-year philosophy undergraduate will know that the idea of the “philosopher-king” comes not from German philosophy, but from Greek philosophy—namely, Plato’s Republic. Whereas Kershaw writes “philosopher-king”, in the original Platonic sense, Sherratt not only shamelessly misquotes Kershaw by writing “philosopher leader”, but fails to declare the fact that these words represent Kershaw’s personal interpretation of Hitler, ripped completely out of context, rather than being a primary quote from Hitler directly announcing himself as “the philosopher leader” as Sherratt misleadingly implies. Notwithstanding the fact that Wagner is an opera composer rather than a philosopher, nowhere does Kershaw ever state that Hitler actually considered himself to be some sort of comical operatic philosopher-king. Nor does Sherratt even attempt to give a primary bibliographic citation to a credible primary source where either Hitler or a leading Party member can be found referring to their leader as “the operatic philosopher-Führer”.

This does nothing to stop Sherratt from considering her research so extraordinarily “meticulous referenced” that she can now go on to write repeatedly about Hitler as the operatic “philosopher Führer” as though her unsupported speculation were now an absolute and incontestable fact:

Hitler took for granted the status of philosophy, and his egotism about the subject spread to a fantasy that he himself was a great thinker. Indeed he came to regard himself as the ‘philosopher Führer’. To this end he wrote Mein Kampf, in which he outlined his atrocious beliefs. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 2). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis 

Once again:

When Hitler came to power as chancellor in 1933 he had convinced himself and his Party that he was the ‘philosopher leader’. He had found ammunition from the past to bolster his fantasy, but now he needed to convert the world.  

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 63). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis 

And yet again:

From 1933 and for the remainder of the decade Hitler’s dream was realized. By transforming himself into the ‘philosopher’ Führer, convincing the country of his genius, and sifting the past for its poisonous strands of thought, Hitler had paved the way for a new reality to underpin his world order.  

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 127). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis 

And still yet again:

As his defeat became inevitable, and his generals started to question his leadership, Hitler began to panic [no supportive citation]. In his bunker in Berlin, this great ‘philosopher-leader’ who had seemed infallible raged like a madman 
[no supportive citation]. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 229). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis 

And elsewhere Sherratt alleges she has uniquely penetrating insight into the inner working of Hitler’s imagination:

Hitler had set himself up as the ‘philosopher leader’—but only in his own imagination [no supportive citation]. He had yet to convince anyone else. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 35). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis 

If it cannot be firmly established by evidence that Hitler had unequivocally convinced himself that he was “the philosopher Führer”, as Sherratt alleges to have done through reading the mind of the dead, then the core tenet supporting the central thesis of the whole book just collapses. Sherratt fails miserably in her attempt to secure the credibility of her book’s central tenet, instead presenting the aggressive brute repetition of the same unsupported inference embellished with an audaciously self-certain tone imputing its incontestable certitude, as “proof”.

Elsewhere Kershaw provides us with more illuminating insights in his landmark Hitler biography, of a sort that contrast markedly with those of Sherratt:

Hitler’s scene was less high-flying. His milieu was that of the beer-table philosophers and corner-cafe improvers of the world, the cranks and half-educated know-alls. 

Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936

That is a far more accurate view of Hitler: the know-all, half-educated, beer-table “philosopher” and crank pseudo-intellectual. While Hitler would have delighted in being elevated from “beer-table philosopher” to the legitimate heir to the great German tradition of high philosophy, Sherratt gives us little reason to pander to his vanity as she obsequiously delights in doing.

Kershaw also reminds the reader that Kubizek’s claim about Hitler having read a whole host of high literary and philosophical luminaries is almost certainly propagandist nonsense:

Kubizek’s later claim that Hitler had read an impressive list of classics—including Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Herder, Ibsen, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—has to be treated with a large pinch of salt. Whatever Hitler read during his Vienna years—and apart from a number of newspapers mentioned in Mein Kampf we cannot be sure what that was—it was probably far less elevated than the works of such literary luminaries.

Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936

Sherratt fails to keep in mind the fact that Kubizek’s book, in which he makes these claims, started as a commission from the Party as a piece of National Socialist propaganda. It is propaganda that Sherratt eagerly laps up.

Unfortunately, historians have to put up with an enormous and ever-growing populist literature passing off every manner of lurid speculation about Hitler—a populist literature in which belligerently repeating wild speculation often enough turns falsehoods into incontestable “Truths”. Usually, historians cringe and ignore such literature outright, so Sherratt should consider herself privileged to receive constructive feedback from as imminent a historian as Evans—a remarkable review containing more useful insights than the whole of Sherratt’s book. If genuine historiographic research is to be presented for review by historians specialising in what is one of the most intensively studied eras of all time, it has to show awareness of the current literature, as well as being backed up with proper academic styled citations to credible sources—otherwise, the book goes in the bin along with Nazi UFO and missing testicle speculations. Unfortunately for Sherratt, the way Evans treats her unsupported speculations with dismissive disdain suggests that Sherratt might as well have presented historians with a “docudrama” about how Hitler was transported up to a UFO made by the Nazis in cooperation with the aliens, where his body is being kept in suspended animation ready to be reactivated for the impending Nazi UFO invasion of the world:

“Whenever more reports of UFO crews speaking Germany and behaving like German soldiers
or of sightings and documentation showing a UFO landing gear imprint in a clear swastika shape
reached the authors. ... [T]hey hinted at a possible connection between the appearance of UFOs
in large numbers and Hitler's possible survival and escape from Berlin.”

Unfortunately, Sherratt gives us little reason to suppose that her book has an iota more academic credibility than such a Nazi UFO “docudrama”.

One of the fatal weaknesses that Evans exposes is the fact that Sherratt shows a gross lack of awareness of current historiographic developments in the vast published literature on the Dritte Reich era. What she presents as original research turns out to be little more than a rehash of the sort of thing that used to be repeated around bars during the 1940s. Even after the war, the anti-Hun sentiment whipped up by war propaganda lead many English language speaking authors to demonise just about any German figure of history as being history’s original proto-Nazi Kraut, fit to be dutifully hated by patriots all and sundry. Unsurprisingly, if you read pre-WWI British literature on German philosophers, you will find none of these propagandist anti-Hun sentiments expressed anywhere. Sherratt seeks to revive this post-war pseudo-historiography based on wartime anti-German propaganda. In fact, Sherratt really need not have troubled us with a whole book, when really she needed only to have written one sentence: ‘em bloody Krauts—they’re all Nazis, always ’ave been, always will be.

Sherratt’s book is based on Allied war propaganda: “those bloody Krauts are all the same”

To quote Evans:

Back in the 1940s and 1950s, scholars such as Rohan Butler, William McGovern, Edmond Vermeil and Peter Viereck used to blame Germany’s philosophers for the rise and triumph of Nazism. Ripping quotation after quotation out of its contemporary context, they purported to show that Nazism’s core ideas had been held in advance by the entire German philosophical tradition, from Novalis to Nietzsche.

Evans: Times Higher Education (my emphasis)

Evans calls this a “teleological approach” to history. It is a view in which every sausage made in all of German history is seen as being some sort of quintessential link in the seamless continuum of a teleological chain pointing towards the providential rise and triumph of National Socialism in the twentieth century. It is a view that sees the seeds of National Socialism in anything German prior to the Dritte Reich era. Yet Sherratt provides no justification for viewing history in this dated manner, and just assumes that such a methodology can be accepted a priori without the slightest bit of critical thought. The biggest problem is that this teleological view tends to be highly self-serving in what it selects out as a prime example of proto-Nazism:

It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism. This has led to all kinds of distortions, with some historians picking choice quotations from German thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind obedience to authority within their own borders. Yet when we look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we discover that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual authority.  

Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich

It is particularly noticeable that Christian right-wing authors like Peter Viereck hurriedly skip over the seminal religious figure of Martin Luther to instead shift the blame towards keys figures in the German liberal-humanist tradition of thought. Nazism, we are then told, is a form of Godless National “Socialism”. Likewise, Sherratt avoids mentioning Martin Luther’s name even once. Instead, the political left—including Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Wagner, and Bakunin—is forced to shoulder the burden of blame for the rise of National “Socialism”. 

Marx and Engels regarded Feuerbach as a socialist
thinker intermediary between Hegel and themselves

The result is that, rather than National Socialist beer-hall pseudo-intellectualism being seen as a violent counter-reaction against the German liberal tradition of thought, it comes to be conveniently framed by right-wing historical revisionists as being the very teleological pinnacle of the German liberal academic tradition. National Socialism is thus framed as the apotheosis of “socialism”. Phrase after phrase is conveniently ripped out of context to “prove” the validity of such revisionist history. It is to this right-wing revisionist history that Sherratt chooses to lend her full weight of support as she insinuates that the Final Solution had Marxist origins:

Feuerbach’s anti-Semitic ideas were overshadowed by the notorious prejudice of Karl Marx. In On the Jewish Question Marx wrote: 

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its preconditions—the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler's Philosophers (p. 43). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.  

Here Sherratt conflates different forms of anti-Semitism, implying it is all the same, and all of the same historical origin as National “Socialist” racial eliminationism. Sherratt not only overlooks the existence of religious Christian anti-Semitism, but conveniently omits all mention of the fact that Marx himself came from a Jewish background. Left-wing anti-Semitism like that found in a Marx or Feuerbach is something of an entirely different social origin and character to right-wing racially deterministic anti-Semitism. Suggestions to the effect that National Socialist anti-Semitism arose in toto from left-wing theorists represents a common trick that right-wing polemicists like Sherratt love to pull in order to blame-shift responsibility for the Holocaust onto the left.

 

Sherratt’s book belongs amongst a growing number of polemical right-wing tracts attempting to blame the crimes of the National Socialist regime on the “socialist” left

This statement by Dinesh D'Souza is also a fair summary of Sherratt's book:

Against Hegel, regarded by Marx and Engels as an intellectual forerunner, Sherratt runs the following dated smear campaign:

Hitler laid the foundations of gleanings from other thinkers such as Hegel and Fichte while in his prison cell [no supportive citations]. One commentator noted that:

Hitler’s views articulated in Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), built in many ways upon more orthodox conservative German political theorists and philosophers. Hegel (1770-1831), for instance, had stressed the importance of a strong state ... and the existence of a ... [destiny] in history which justified war by superior states upon inferior ones. [quotation taken from Tansey and Jackson: Politics (The Basics) who give no supportive citation to justify their reading of Hegel, nor evince evidence of having ever read Hegel]

Hegel’s historical view of the formation of the state from ancient origins was, in garbled form, a favourite theme of Hitler’s and would often reappear in his orations.

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 22). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

No actual evidence of Hegel stating his support for Realpolitik through war waged by stronger states against weaker ones is ever shown. The reason is that no such quotes exist, forcing authors who make such claims to make fictional “quotes” up instead, such as the old chestnut about the “march of God”. This allows baseless speculation to be passed off as indubitable fact. Nor does Sherratt demonstrate, using direct primary quotations, the existence of any direct intellectual influence of “orthodox conservative German political theorists and philosophers” in Mein Kampf. If Sherratt wanted to present such as case, she needed to have devoted at least a whole chapter to systematically arguing this point rather than passing an unsupported statement off as fact buttressed by little more than narrativistic “docudrama”. Nor does a secondary bibliographic citation to a review for beginners such as Politics (The Basics), a book purporting to be “a basic introduction to twenty-first century politics”, by authors who casually repeat hearsay while failing to demonstrate the slightest familiarity with Hegel’s original texts, add an iota of substance to Sherratt’s case.

Sherratt then proceeds to quote from one of Hitler’s ‘orations’ even though Hegel is nowhere mentioned in it. If she wanted to argue that Hegel is present “in garbled form” (Sherratt, p.22), she needed to have made a stronger case for it with a detailed side by side analysis of primary quotations from Hitler and Hegel rather than passing off vague and unsubstantiated insinuations as an open and shut case. Otherwise, it looks like the only thing “garbled” is the confused nonsense Sherratt presents as fact. It is all nothing new, and in the post-war anti-Hun intellectual environment, it was the sort of “march of God” fantasy that used to be all too common—post-war revisionist distortions about Hegel as the Ur-Kraut of German history, long ago thoroughly debunked, yet which Sherratt insists on reviving purely for the sake of her self-serving right-wing crusade.

Frederick Beiser, an unfailingly insightful commentator on Hegel and German idealism, summarises Hegel’s political views, and its wilful post-war misrepresentation by neoliberal polemicists such as Karl Popper, far better:

Given the pluralistic structure of Hegel’s state—its inclusion of intermediate groups and the whole realm of civil society—it should be clear that the common liberal criticisms of Hegel as a defender of absolutism, or as a forerunner of modern totalitarianism, are very wide of the mark. What is so unfair about these criticisms is that Hegel shares the liberal’s hatred of totalitarianism and develops his organic model of the state to prevent it. It was one of the chief aims of his organic state to avoid the ‘machine state’ of Prussian absolutism or French Jacobinism, where everything is controlled from above, leaving no room for local self-government...

Frederick Beiser: Hegel (The Routledge Philosophers)

Nor, as Richard J. Evans has pointed out, is it methodologically acceptable in academic historiography to conflate the Prussia of Hegel’s era (1770–1831) with either Imperial Germany after its unification under Bismarckian Prussia in 1871, or with the Wilhelmine Germany of WWI—let alone with National Socialist Imperialist Germany. To do so is to assume that ‘em bloody Krauts are all the same—always ‘ave been, always will be.

Evans is particularly critical of Sherratt’s allegation that Wagner’s operas are an artistic aestheticization of the traditional German love of murdering and torturing Jews:

Wagner was “perhaps the most virulent anti-Semite of them all. In some of his operas”, Sherratt asserts, “he turned Jew hatred into an aesthetic experience” [Sherratt, p.43]. Again, no evidence for this—to put it mildly, controversial—claim.

Evans: Review for Times Higher Education, 2013                               

Sherratt seems unaware that nineteenth-century figures like Wilhelm Marr, Eugen Dühring, Bernard Förster, and Adolf Stoecker were far more prominent anti-Semites than Wagner in his time, but all were fringe figures. It is all too easy to ignore the fact Friedrich Engels pilloried Dühring for his racist views, and Rudolf Virchow did much the same to Stoecker. A serious historian like Mark Roseman does not even mention Wagner in a roll-call of key nineteenth-century anti-Semitic German writers:

Some authors have argued that there is therefore a continuity of intent stretching from writers such as Wilhelm Marr, Eugen Dühring and de Lagarde through to the Holocaust, but it seems extremely unlikely that Hitler’s precursors really conceived of the mass biological destruction of hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals. 

Roseman, Mark: The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (p. 8). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

In making grossly exaggerated unsupported claims demonising Wagner as the singular writer who provided the backbone to this fatal “continuity of intent”, Sherratt sinks to the level of the speculative kitsch of lurid Occult Reich books—first cousin to Nazi UFO conspiracy books. One such book alleging that Hitler had signed a “compact with the forces of evil” makes audacious claims to the effect that:

Wagner described the Jews as ‘the devil incarnate of human decadence’ [no bibliographic citation] and called for ‘a Final Solution’ to ‘the Jewish problem’ [no bibliographic citation].  

From section entitled Pagan Revivalism and Völkisch Christianity in The Nazi Occult War: Hitler's Compact with the Forces of Evil by Michael Fitzgerald (Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2013).

As with Sherratt, supportive citations are absent because such sweeping statements are completely fictitious. Another populist Occult Reich book concurs with Sherratt’s view of Wagner as an “intuitive magician” controlling world-destiny from beyond the grave in stating that:

Wagner provided the musical setting for Hitler’s vision of German global domination. His epic melodramas are a granite monument in music to the grandeur of Aryan superiority and sacrifice. Without Wagner’s Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) tempered with pastoral interludes, Nazism would not have acquired its mythic undertones.  

Both Theodor Reuss, a practitioner of Tantric sex magick [sic], and Sar Peladan, the French writer on the occult, believe that Wagner was an intuitive magician.  

From The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich by Paul Roland. 

Writing about the huge speculative popular literature on the Dritte Reich, Frank Lost tells us:

It does not add anything to the uncanny spell of such stories to pollute them with material that cannot be verified or, even worse, with pure lies coming straight out of the imagination of poor authors in search of quick money and fame. These made-up stories are usually rewritten in a thousand ways on the Internet, and everyone ends up adding their own personal touch or interpretation, feeding on each other as makeshift sources... Any book that dealt with Nazis and the occult, Satan, UFOs or secret treasures was assured to be sold at thousands of copies. 

Frank Lost: Nazi Secrets—an Occult Breach in the Fabric of History

Sherratt follows the non-academic speculative methods of Roland or Fitzgerald in failing to adequately support sweeping speculations that get routinely blurted out without the slightest bit of support—speculations, which for all of their enthralling audaciousness, turn out to be completely fictitious right down to luridly titillating nonsense about “Tantric sex magick”. It is the sort of Occult Reich pseudo-history that David Luhrssen described in his excellent study of the Thule Society, Hammer of the Gods, as “pulp fiction in the guise of history”:

The Third Reich was so aberrant and, for many, so perversely intriguing, that irrational explanations have been eagerly and often carelessly embraced by popular audiences as supplement or substitute for the economic and political rationales of mainstream historians. 

Luhrssen: The Hammer of the Gods, p.203

It is to this very same base populism that Sherratt also sinks.

Sherratt further states without an ounce of support that Wagner, a friend of socialist anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, supposedly belonged to “a very different end of the political spectrum” from Karl Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach. Once again, despite her claims to the effect that the book is “carefully researched” and “meticulously referenced” she seems to be blissfully unaware of the profound influence of Feuerbach on Wagner:

Dedication by Wagner of Art and Revolution to Ludwig Feuerbach “in grateful reverence”

Wagner made it very clear that his anti-Judaism was a demand for Jewish assimilation, which in those days was considered the next logical step after emancipation. 

Richard Wagner called for the “Assimilation” of the Jews.
From an original printing in German 

In this regard, Wagner and Marx were very much ideologically in step, and to conflate this assimilationism with a racially based eliminationism for the sake of running a right-wing polemic against the left is highly disingenuous. However, there is no possibility of such nuance to Sherratt: ‘em bloody Krauts are all Nazis—they’re all the same, they never change. 

Sherratt goes on to claim that:

In Mein Kampf, Hitler also wrote of Wagner as one of the intellectual precursors of National Socialism for not only his music but his anti-Semitism struck a chord. Hitler's identification with Wagner was so profound that Hitler declared ‘to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner’.

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 30). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

This too is gross misinformation, since the alleged quote that goes “whoever wants to understand National Socialist German must know Wagner” is almost certainly fake. What Hitler actually wrote was this:

To these belong also the great fighters of this world, who, though not understood at present, nonetheless have carried out the fight for their ideas and ideals. They are those who some day will stand close to the heart of the people.  To these belong not only the great statesmen but also the great reformers. Alongside Frederick the Great stands also Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.  

Zu ihnen aber sind zu rechnen die großen Kämpfer auf dieser Welt, die, von der Gegenwart nicht verstanden, dennoch den Streit um ihre Idee und Ideale durchzufechten bereit sind. Sie sind diejenigen, die einst am meisten dem Herzen des Volkes nahestehen werden . . . Hierzu gehören aber nicht nur die wirklich großen Staatsmänner, sondern auch alle sonstigen großen Reformatoren. Neben Friedrich dem Großen stehen hier Martin Luther sowie Richard Wagner.   

Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, p.232. My translation. Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H.; Munich, 1943

Hitler vaguely implies through his name-dropping is that he wished to be remembered alongside three great German forebears. However, he never actually states that Wagner—nor Luther or Frederick the Great—were “intellectual predecessors” of National Socialism as Sherratt claims. Frederick was an enlightened monarch who was to pave the way for Prussia to grant emancipation to the Jews, and Wagner advocated assimilation of the Jews. As Evans has stated elsewhere:

Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner’s writings. 

Evans: The Third Reich in Power 

Evans goes on in his criticism of Sherratt:

In ransacking all these authors for “anti-Semitic” quotes she reduces Nazism to the single aspect of anti-Semitism and ignores every contemporary context in which they were written. But the Jews were not the only “targets of Hitler’s wrath”; many more people, among them liberals, socialists, communists, homosexuals, gypsies and pacifists, were targets of his wrath as well. 

Evans: Times Higher Education           

The biggest problem is that Sherratt fails to realise that writing history from the perspective of 1940s Allied war propaganda is completely unhelpful. This is especially so when you consider that Allied anti-Hun propaganda represented a crude inversion of German war propaganda. For example, National Socialist propaganda alleged that hatred of Jews, pacifists, and other liberals was eternally written in the blood of true Germans. Allied war propaganda just reiterated that it was eternally written in the national character that Germans loved war and murdering Jews while hating peace and liberal ideals. Both the National Socialist propaganda and Allied propaganda saw the German national character as monolithic and eternally unchanging because it was determined by “blood and soil” rather than by socio-political and historical circumstance: “once a German—always a German”. Sherratt seems to think that by tipping the Swastika on its head and inverting German propaganda that it automatically makes her worthy of being awarded a medal for being a valiant anti-Nazi while firing up the thousand-year British Empire for eternal glorious battle against those “bloody Krauts”. 

Once again, many of these issues are addressed by Evans in a public talk on German national identity. It is noticeable that Sherratt’s view of German national identity shares much in common with that of Margaret Thatcher, who at a meeting at Chequers on German unification in 1990 stated that the German Mind had been eternally marred by:

Angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality, their obsession with themselves, their inclination towards self-pity, a longing to be liked, a capacity for excess, a tendency to overdo things.... 

Thatcher’s words are an elaboration of Lord Vansittart’s 1941 wartime propaganda book Black Record: Germans Past and Present:

In the book, Vansittart argued that the three elements of “German psychology” were “Envy, Self-pity and Cruelty” (Vansittart, p.4). Sherratt follows the same line of argument found in Vansittart and Goldhagen that the “German Mind” had forever been mired with a Cruelty all-consumed with psychopathic genocidal blood-lust. Vansittart went on:

 ...the remnants of the German conscience are easily satisfied by the drug of mechanical obedience to any order, however cruel. Prussianism, militarism, lust of world-conquest, Nazism—that sequence has made Germans the exponents of every variety of dirty fighting and foul play” (p.9).

Sherratt’s book constitutes the very epitome of this Thatcherite neoliberal and reactionary right-wing imperialist view that the “bloody Krauts” were an inferior race that needed to be exterminated by vast swarms of Spitfires and Lancasters as a reminder that “once a German—always a German”. This is why Sherratt devotes a whole book aimed at rekindling hate-filled notions found in Allied war propaganda asserting that the eternally immutable Nazi-German character had been exuded in everything Germans did and thought for centuries. 

Sherratt performs a thoroughly aggressive right-wing Thatcherite hatchet job on history.
Cartoon of Margaret Thatcher by Chris Madden

The great irony is that Theodor Adorno, on whom Sherratt published a book entitled Adorno’s Positive Dialectics, sternly warns against the ongoing perpetuation of such war propaganda stereotypes in his post-war essay, “On the Question: What is German?” (Auf die Frage: Was ist Deutsch? From p.691–701 of Suhrkampf complete works; Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II):

The formation of national generalisations, however—common in the abominable war jargon that opines over the Russians, the Americans, and certainly also over the Germans—obeys a reifying consciousness, one that is not quite true to experience. They confine themselves within these stereotypes, which directly absolve them from thinking. It is uncertain if something like The Germans, or The German, or anything similar in other nations, even exists. The True and Better in every nation is probably rather what does not fit the collective subject, possibly that which withstands it. In contrast to that, the formation of stereotypes promotes collective narcissism. That with which one identifies as the essence of one’s insider-group will unwittingly be good; whereas that of the outsider-group—the Other—bad. Likewise, the image of the Germans fares contrariwise amongst that Other. However, since under National Socialism, the ideology of the primacy of the collective subject at the expense of the individual wreaked the most extreme disaster, there is doubly reason to be wary in Germany of a relapse into self-adulatory stereotypes. 

Die Bildung nationaler Kollektive jedoch, üblich in dem abscheulichen Kriegsjargon, der von dem Russen, dem Amerikaner, sicherlich auch dem Deutschen redet, gehorcht einem verdinglichenden, zur Erfahrung nicht recht fähigen Bewußtsein. Sie hält sich innerhalb jener Stereotypen, die von Denken gerade aufzulösen wären. Ungewiß, ob es etwas wie den Deutschen, oder das Deutsche, oder irgendein Ähnliches in anderen Nationen, überhaupt gibt. Das Wahre und Bessere in jedem Volk ist wohl vielmehr, was dem Kollektivsubjekt nicht sich einfügt, womöglich ihm widersteht. Dagegen befördert die Stereotypenbildung den kollektiven Narzißmus. Das, womit man sich identifiziert, die Essenz der Eigengruppe, wird unversehens zum Guten; die Fremdgruppe, die anderen, schlecht. Ebenso ergeht es dann, umgekehrt, dem Bild des Deutschen bei den anderen. Nachdem jedoch unterm Nationalsozialismus die Ideologie vom Vorrang des Kollektivsubjekts auf Kosten von jeglichem Individuellen das äußerste Unheil anrichtete, ist in Deutschland doppelt Grund, vorm Rückfall in die Stereotypie der Selbstbeweihräucherung sich zu hüten.  

Adorno: Auf die Frage: Was ist Deutsch? From p.691. My translation.

It is unsurprising that Sherratt is unfamiliar with this essay, since no English translation has been published, and based on what can be gleaned from any of the books she has written, she appears not to read German, thus making the vast majority of Adorno’s writing inaccessible to her. If Sherratt did read German she would have found Adorno sternly rejecting collective stereotypes about  “The Germans” as merely promoting narcissistic nationalistic stereotypes across the board.

This is why the Goldhagen thesis appeals to Sherratt so profoundly. Sir Richard J. Evans tells us 

Goldhagen argues that Germans killed Jews in their millions because they enjoyed doing it, and they enjoyed doing it because their minds and emotions were eaten up by a murderous, all-consuming hatred of Jews that had been pervasive in German political culture for decades, even centuries past (pp. 31– 2 [of Hitler’s Willing Executioners]). Ultimately, says Goldhagen, it is this history of genocidal antisemitism that explains the German mass murder of Europe’s Jews, nothing else can. 

This is a bold and arresting thesis, though it is not new. Much the same was said during the Second World War by anti-German propagandists such as Robert Vansittart or Rohan Butler, who traced back German antisemitism—and much more—to Luther and beyond; a similar argument was put forward by the proponents of the notion of a German ‘mind’ or ‘character’ in the 1960s, and by William L. Shirer in his popular history of Nazism.

Evans: Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification 1800-1996 (pp. 150-151). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. 

The end result of Sherratt’s gratuitous perpetuation of these sorts of war propaganda stereotypes is that she constantly paints black-and-white caricatures of what she regards as proto-Nazi Kraut-Think, with its allegedly immutable antisemitism, racism, militarism and authoritarianism, that Sherratt assumes has been all-pervasive in the “blood and soil” of “The Germans” throughout history. She even finds evidence of such Kraut-Think in Immanuel Kant. Sherratt alleges that Hitler quoted Kant in Mein Kampf:

[Hitler] wrote Mein Kampf, in which he outlined his atrocious beliefs... Hitler quoted from the founding fathers of the German tradition such as Immanuel Kant...

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 2). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Since Sherratt fails to give us the specific citation to the alleged quote in question,  I looked up the original German text of Mein Kampf myself (Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H., Munich, 1943). I could not find even a single quotation from Kant anywhere in the book—nor for that matter in his Table Talk, Speeches 1932-1945, Speeches 1921-1941, Speeches 1925-1945, or Zweites Buch.

Sherratt further insinuates that Kantian ethics were used by Adolf Eichmann to justify the mindless obedience to the killing apparatus of the Final Solution on the basis of observance of mindless deontological duty. Sherratt evinces little awareness that Eichmann’s claims that he was forced to obey a decisive Hitler Order to commit mass genocide has been demonstrated to be a fiction he concocted in his own defence only after his capture (see Peter Longerich for a detailed discussion)—no evidence exists that such a decisive Hitler Order was ever issued, and those in the “polycratic jungle”, like Heydrich and Eichmann, were likely taking their own initiatives in ordering mass murder. This is what Arendt had to say in her report of the Eichmann trials:

[Eichmann] suddenly declared with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty. This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience. ... Judge Raveh, either out of curiosity or out of indignation at Eichmann’s having dared to invoke Kant’s name in connection with his crimes, decided to question the accused. And, to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative : “I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws” (which is not the case with theft or murder, for instance, because the thief or the murderer cannot conceivably wish to live under a legal system that would give others the right to rob or murder him). Upon further questioning, he added that he had read Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. He then proceeded to explain that from the moment he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had consoled himself with the thought that he no longer “was master of his own deeds”, that he was unable “to change anything”. What he failed to point out in court was that in this “period of crimes legalized by the state”, as he himself now called it, he had not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had distorted it to read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the law of the land—or, in Hans Frank’s formulation of “the categorical imperative in the Third Reich”, which Eichmann might “Act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it”. Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of the sort; on the contrary, to him every man was a legislator the moment he started to act: by using his “practical reason” man found the principles that could and should be the principles of law. But it is true that Eichmann’s unconscious distortion agrees with what he himself called the version of Kant “for the household use of the little”. 

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem—A Report on the Banality of Evil. (pp. 135-136). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. My emphasis in red

Compare this with Sherratt’s distorted account of this incident:

In his defence, controversially, [Eichmann] argued not that he had not acted unthinkingly but that he had followed Kant’s moral philosophy, to be precise, Kant’s categorical imperative [no supportive citation]. His version of Kant was that the moral law is not obeyed for specific reasons but solely because it is a law. The moral act is to be understood not as an expression of the good but as pure duty: ‘your duty is ... to do your duty’. This, for Eichmann, became the duty to follow the Führer’s will. Precisely because this duty was imperative (categorical), he could avoid thinking. ... But the fact remains that, like Hitler, here was another Nazi quoting Kant. It was becoming increasingly difficult to extricate philosophy from any involvement with Nazism. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 253). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. My emphasis 

It is hardly plausible to point the finger of blame at Kant for the Holocaust merely because his name was mentioned by Eichmann some 150 years or more after Kant’s death. Any first-year philosophy undergraduate studying Kantian ethics would be able to spot the gross errors in Sherratt’s misrepresentation of Kant from a mile away. Sherratt further conveniently omits the fact that Arendt mentions that Eichmann fully admitted that, as an administrator of the Final Solution, he had “ceased to live according to Kantian principles”. Instead, Sherratt makes up an utterly malicious claim that Eichmann made a fair case in applying Kantian ethical principles to justify his actions, thus implicating Kant as a proto-Nazi and archetypal blood-thirsty Kraut who paved the way towards the teleological pinnacle of German philosophy in the Final Solution.

Next come old-fashioned Christian anti-Semitic statements that can be found in any English or French author of the same era too, except with the insinuations that it is uniquely genocidal Kraut anti-Semitism and ergo proto-Nazi. In the words of Sir Richard J. Evans:

Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte and other thinkers are portrayed as anti-Semites and proto-Nazis without the reader being made aware of the fact that their anti-Semitism was religious and not racial. 

Evans: Times Higher Education 

Elsewhere Sherratt writes:

Hitler considered Kant a gift [no supportive citation]; he wanted away with the Jews because they were irrational, immoral and unfit for civic life. What could have delighted him more [no supportive citation] than that the trophy philosopher of the Enlightenment should have provided theories to echo his cause [no supportive citations]. But if Hitler had found a rationale for Jew hatred in Kant [no supportive citation], this might perhaps be an isolated incident, just one particular philosopher’s eccentric prejudice. Unfortunately this appeared not to be the case.

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 41). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Nowhere does Sherratt provide us with the quotation from Hitler stating that “I consider Kant a gift” because this docudrama fairytale is just more speculative fiction passed off as fact. The closest thing I can find to Hitler referring to Kant is from Hitler’s Table Talk:

In our parts of the world, the Jews would have immediately eliminated Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kant.

Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944: Secret Conversations (p. 70). Enigma Books. Kindle Edition.

In the Great Hall of the Linz Library are the busts of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the greatest of our thinkers, in comparison with whom the British, the French and the Americans have nothing to offer. His complete refutation of the teachings which were a heritage from the Middle Ages, and of the dogmatic philosophy of the Church, is the greatest of the services which Kant has rendered to us. It is on the foundation of Kant’s theory of knowledge that Schopenhauer built the edifice of his philosophy, and it is Schopenhauer who annihilated the pragmatism of Hegel.

Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944: Secret Conversations (pp. 546-547). Enigma Books. Kindle Edition. 

The claim that Hegel’s philosophy constitutes “pragmatism” must surely represent one of the most comical outbursts of half-educated beer-table philosophy ever to have been uttered by any leading member of the regime.

As Ryback notes, however, all of this abject nonsense is little more than empty name-dropping:

These references are made with no intellectual bearing or depth: they are mere catchphrases, and as easily could have been snatched from a passing conversation or casual reading. 

Ryback, Timothy W.. Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life (Kindle Locations 1955-1958). Random House. Kindle Edition. 

How Sherratt derives the conclusion about Hitler thinking that “Kant was a gift” remains a complete mystery. No mention of Kant is made elsewhere in Mein Kampf, Zweites Buch, or in his The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: 1921 - 1941, The Complete Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, Adolf Hitler Reden 1925-1945.

Sherratt also neglects to mention that, like Kant, Fichte was very much regarded as a radical liberal in his age. About Kant, Frederick Beiser writes:

It is indeed significant, and surely not surprising, that the Wolffians associated Kant with the French Revolution, which “the old Jacobin” was known to support. Their critique of Kant therefore became part and parcel of their reaction against events in France. The Wolffians were convinced that Kant’s critique of metaphysics would lead to skepticism and atheism, which would ultimately result in the complete collapse of social order.

Frederick Beiser: The Fate of Reason (7.2 Revolution versus Reaction)

Fichte’s idealist and republican political theories were based on the idea of an endless struggle for freedom and self-determination derived from the radically liberal ideals of the French Revolution:

Who am I really? That is, what am I as an individual? And what is the reason that I am just this one [and no other]? I answer: I am, from the moment I have come to consciousness, that to which I make myself according to freedom, and I am this simply because I so make myself.

Fichte: System der Sittenlehre, Werke IV, p.222; quoted in Beiser: German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivity 1781-1801, p.277 (addendum in square brackets in original text).

Frederick Beiser, in his remarkable study of German idealism, expresses the relationship between Fichtean Idealism and the French Revolution extremely well:

While Schlegel would soon voice his doubts about Fichte’s idealism, he never ceased to regard it as an achievement of the greatest cultural significance. He wrote in a famous aphorism that Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre—along with the French Revolution and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister—was one of the greatest tendencies of the age. Fichte’s idealism had become “the central point and foundation of the new German literature”, he wrote in 1802, because it expressed the spirit of freedom characteristic of the modern age, the spirit that was the heart and soul of the new romantic literature’.

There were not only philosophical but also political motives behind Schlegel’s admiration for Fichte. Since 1793 Schlegel had supported the cause of the Revolution in France, and his political interests became so strong that they eventually began to overshadow and displace his classical studies. In 1796 he published an essay, ‘über den Begriff des Republikanismus’, which defends a left-wing interpretation of republican principles, and which criticizes Kant for both restricting the franchise and denying the right of revolution. It is not surprising, then, that Schlegel came to admire Fichte, who was notorious as one of the most outspoken champions of the Revolution. It is indeed telling that when Schlegel praises Fichte so highly in his August 1795 letter he refers to Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urtheile des Publikums Über die französische Revolution, Fichte’s radical defense of the course of the Revolution. No doubt, Schlegel came to regard Fichte as his ally in the philosophical and political struggle against the ancien régime. 

Beiser: German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivity 1781-1801 (my emphasis)

Sadly, if Sherratt exhibits a facile command of the history of National Socialism and the Dritte Reich, she seems to know even less about German philosophy. If her book fails as a study of history, it fails even more miserably as a study of philosophy, leading one to ponder whether there is even the slightest saving grace of residual merit to be salvaged from the wreckage—such as even the worst books usually yield, but, it seems here is an exception that proves the rule.

Nor does Sherratt give us a single example of Kant ever having a credibly tangible direct influence on National Socialist ideology. Kant’s only guilt seems to have been that of having been just another one of ‘em bloody Krauts. Yet it is a testimony to how poorly researched Sherratt’s book is that she has overlooked Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythus des 20ten Jahrhundert where she could have pulled out the following quote:

Immanuel Kant brought this primal phenomenon of the methodology of thought to the brightest consciousness in our lives—never may it vanish from our eyes.

In Immanuel Kant gelangte dieses Urphänomen der Denkmethodik unseres Lebens zum lichtesten Bewußtsein und darf nimmermehr unseren Augen entschwinden.

Rosenberg: Der Mythus des 20ten Jahrhundert. Erstes Buch p.131. My own translation 

Also on p.134-135, Book One of Rosenberg’s Mythus:

Through Immanuel Kant, philosophical consciousness becomes Nordic spirit, whose fundamental work lies in the final separation of powers between religion and science developed through freedom-mysticism and naturalistic-mechanics.

Zum philosophischen Bewußtsein jedoch ist nordischer Geist dann in Immanuel Kant gelangt, dessen wesentliches Werk in der [135] Freiheit-Mystik und Natur-Mechanistik endlich einmal durchgeführten Scheidung der Befugnisse von Religion und Wissenschaft liegt.

Anyone who knows their Kant will know these interpretations are utterly bizarre, and smack of empty name-dropping. Nor should the fact be overlooked that Rosenberg, on p.112 of his Mythus, emphasises Kant’s Scottish ancestry, along with Beethoven’s Dutch heritage in order to articulate the idea that National Socialism is the supposed zenith of the entirety of European culture. Rosenberg constantly indulges in name-dropping including luminaries such as Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dante, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, and Cervantes. Jesus Christ is mentioned much more frequently than Kant. Even Gandhi is mentioned no less than six times. Is the finger of blame for National Socialism also to be pointed at all these other figures, including Jesus, just because Rosenberg mentioned their names or quoted from them? “This above all”, says Rosenberg quoting Shakespeare: “to thyself be true”. Rather, it is high time to refuse to validate these blatant attempts by propagandists to give National Socialism a phoney air of cultural legitimacy by petty name-dropping like this.

After all, in addition to mentioning Kant and Shakespeare in the name-dropping, the National Socialists also often called on Christ.  For example, Goebbels wrote in his Michael—A German Fate:

Christ is the genius of love, such as the diametrical antithesis to Judaism, which represents the incarnation of hatred. The Jew forms a non-race among the races of the earth. It has the same task, which has in the human organism the poisonous bacillus: to mobilise the healthy forces of resistance, or to have those creatures deemed for death die more quickly and more noiselessly. 

Christ is the first opponent of the Jews out of principle. “Thou shalt devour all peoples!” Upon this He has declared war. Hence why Judaism had to eliminate Him. Because He shook his future world-power to its very foundations. 

The Jew is the incarnate lie. In Christ he has nailed the eternal truth on the cross for the first time before history. This has been repeated dozens of times over the subsequent twenty centuries and repeated again today. 

The idea of ​​sacrifice won visible form for the first time in Christ. The sacrifice belongs to the essence of socialism. Surrender yourself to the other. For this, however, the Jew has no understanding. His socialism is the sacrifice of others for themselves.  

The war we are fighting until victory or the bitter end is in its deepest sense a war between Christ and Marx.

Christ: the principle of love.

Marx: the principle of hate.

Christus ist das Genie der Liebe, als solches der diametralste Gegenpol zum Judentum, das die Inkarnation des Hasses darstellt. Der Jude bildet eine Unrasse unter den Rassen der Erde. Er hat dieselbe Aufgabe, die im menschlichen Organismus der Giftbazillus hat: den Widerstand der gesunden Kräfte mobil zu machen oder ein zum Tode bestimmtes Lebewesen schneller und geräuschloser sterben zu lassen.

Christus ist der erste Judengegner von Format. „Du sollst alle Völker fressen!“ Dem hat er den Krieg angesagt. Deshalb mußte das Judentum ihn beseitigen. Denn er rüttelte an den Fundamenten seiner zukünftigen Weltmacht.

Der Jude ist die menschgewordene Lüge. In Christus hat er zum erstenmal vor der Geschichte die ewige Wahrheit ans Kreuz geschlagen. Das hat sich an die dutzende Male in den darauf folgenden zwanzig Jahrhunderten wiederholt und wiederholt sich heute aufs neue.

Die Idee des Opfers gewann zum erstenmal in Christus sichtbare Gestalt. Das Opfer gehört zum Wesen des Sozialismus. Sich selbst hingeben für die anderen. Dafür hat der Jude allerdings kein Verständnis. Sein Sozialismus heißt: die anderen zum Opfer bringen für sich selbst.

Der Kampf, den wir heute ausfechten bis zum Sieg oder bis zum bitteren Ende, ist im tiefsten Sinne ein Kampf zwischen Christus und Marx.

Christus: das Prinzip der Liebe.

Marx: das Prinzip des Hasses. 

Joseph Goebbels: Michael—ein Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (Michael: a German fate in diary notes). Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf., Munich, 17th edition, 1942, p.82. My emphasis.

If the merest invocation of just the name of Kant by National Socialists incriminates him, then the equally incriminating invocation of the name of Jesus by Goebbels could be used to claim that they own Jesus too. After all, according to Sherratt, when the Devil speaks your name, He owns you.

 A large literature on the complicity of the churches
with the National Socialist regime exists

Likewise, Sherratt claims that:

Hitler alleged a love of Schiller’s philosophy. 

However, as usual, Sherratt fails to provide even a single citation to support this allegation evincing unequivocal certitude. The closest to supportive evidence Sherratt provides to prove Hitler’s alleged familiarity with Schiller as a philosopher is a quote from the notoriously unreliable Hanfstaengl claiming that Hitler liked Schiller’s William Tell:

As one of his closest friends [i.e. Hanfstaengl] ‘he prefers the dramatic revolutionary Schiller to the Olympian and contemplative Goethe’.

Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler's Philosophers (p. 21). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

However, William Tell is a dramatic stage work by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), and not a philosophical tract. Of this work, Hitler is quoted as stating rather contemptuously in Hitler’s Table Talk that:

Our Schiller found nothing better to do than to glorify a Swiss crossbowman! The English, for their part, had a Shakespeare—but the history of his country has supplied Shakespeare, as far as heroes are concerned, only with imbeciles and madmen. 

Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: Secret Conversations (p. 221). Enigma Books. Kindle Edition. 

Sherratt also claims that Hitler’s personal maxim was the line “the strong man is mightiest alone” from William Tell, which Sherratt tells us “became his motto during his later years as the Führer”. The only time the line Der Starke ist am mächtigsten allein occurs is in Mein Kampf, in the title heading to the start of Chapter 8, where it is not even attributed to Schiller. This book dates from around eight years before Hitler became Chancellor. Sherratt fails to supply us with an example from his “later years as the Führer” in which he even once quoted this line, let alone any supportive evidence that it was his “motto”.  So I was once again forced to look for my own corroborative evidence for these claims. I looked through Hitler biographies by Sir Ian Kershaw (both volumes I and II), Joachim Fest, and John Toland, as well as Sir Richard J. Evans’s The Third Reich in Power and The Third Reich at War. I searched through Hitler’s The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: 1921 - 1941, The Complete Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, Adolf Hitler Reden 1925-1945, Zweites Buch and Table Talk. I found absolutely nothing to confirm Sherratt’s speculations, which once again turn out to be fictional “docudrama” passed off as fact.

It is rather surprising that Sherratt seems to be unaware that most people know Schiller as a poet and playwright, rather than as a philosopher. To call Schiller a philosopher is rather like calling George Bernard Shaw a “philosopher”. While it is certainly true that like Shaw, Schiller did also write some philosophical works, but the output—mostly dealing with aesthetics—is tiny, and these have been almost entirely overshadowed by his dramatic and poetic writing. Relatively few are even aware of the existence of the philosophical side of Schiller’s output. Nor is this the only instance that Sherratt refers to thinkers (such as biologist Charles Darwin, and composer Richard Wagner) as “philosophers”, even if they are not traditionally regarded as philosophers in the traditional Platonic sense.

It is an enormous speculative leap to assume that if Hitler was familiar with Schiller’s plays, that Hitler must, therefore, have been thoroughly steeped in Schiller’s obscure writings on philosophy—something generally only studied by academic specialists. Frederick Beiser tells us that the number of studies in German of Schiller’s philosophical writings have been few and far between. The Heidegger Gesamtausgabe suggests even he was unacquainted with the philosophical side of Schiller, making Sherratt’s insinuation that Hitler was such a brilliant genius that he was more steeped in the arcane aspects of German philosophy than even a leading philosophy professor of the period seem exceedingly implausible, doubly so when it is supported only by a largely tangential quote from the already unreliable Hanfstaengl.

It is particularly convenient that Sherratt chooses to avoid all mention of the National Socialists’ great admiration for Shakespeare, whom they regarded as being a Nordic, Protestant-Germanic, and hence Aryan artist. Joseph Goebbels tell us (Tagebücher, band 3, 1935-1939) that Hitler regarded Shakespeare to be greatly superior to either Goethe or Schiller, leading Hitler to own a sumptuously leather-bound complete edition of Shakespeare’s works—thus, doubtless, rendering Hitler’s total ownership over Shakespeare eternal:

Hitler’s personal copy of the complete Shakespeare

Rosenberg also wrote about the figure of Shylock with glowing admiration:

The figure of Shylock cannot please us as such since the thought of him contradicts our spiritual precepts. Seldom does a creation impress us in the same degree as this figure, because it is racially spiritually perfect in itself. It is outwardly conditioned, encompassing all Jewish racial features from the rock pictures of Egypt up to Trotsky. Spiritually, Shylock portrays the essence of the old testament ideal—as well as the essence of the figures from the Talmud—up to the modern Wall Street banker. This thousand year old organism represented in Shylock is also the new creation of the Jewish essence... Shylock acts as he must; once brought forward he necessarily has an effect on us as a further evidence of the aesthetic will of the artist. The surmise by Schiller, that in great criminals we are impressed by the strength which, in its magnitude, reveals the possibility of a sudden alteration of character, is thus at fault here. Shylock can never transform himself. His body follows a commandment which, in the unalterability of his nature, has a similar effect as the law which prescribes his course. Shylock is thus both an individual as well as a type, both a Jew and Jewry as a whole. 

Die Gestalt des Shylock kann uns als solche nicht “gefallen”, auch ihr Denken widerspricht unseren Seelengeboten in allen stücken. Und trotzdem ergreift selten eine Schöpfung in dem Maße wie diese Gestalt: weil sie in sich rassisch-seelisch vollendet ist. Äußerlich bedingt ist sie durch alle jüdischen Rassenzüge von den Felsbildern Ägyptens bis zu Trotzki, seelisch zeigt Shylock das Wesen vom alttestamentlichen Ideal, über Talmud, Schulchan-Aruch bis zum modernen Bankier der Wallstreet. Dieses jahrtausendalte Wesen wurde im Shylock Neuschöpfung des Jüdischen... Shylock handelt wie er muß; einmal hingestellt, wirkt er sich notwendig aus als ein weiteres Zeugnis für den aesthetischen Künstlerwillen. Die Vermutung Schillers, beim großen Verbrecher imponiere uns die Kraft, welche durch ihre Größe die Möglichkeit einer plötzlichen Umstellung offenbare, geht hier also fehl. Shylock kann sich nie und nimmer umstellen, sein Körper folgt einem Gebot, das in der Unabänderlichkeit seines Wesens ähnlich wirkt wie das Gesetz, das den Sternen ihren Kreislauf vorschreibt. Shylock ist also sowohl Einzelmensch wie Typus, ein Jude sowohl wie das Judentum. 

Rosenberg: Mythus p.411-412

“The French Shylock in the Ruhr region”.
Germania is stabbed in the back by Shylock in a cartoon from the Völkischer Beobachter

By Sherratt’s methodology then it would be perfectly legitimate to locate the origins of National Socialist ideology in Shakespeare over whom Sherratt would grant them eternal hegemony. To have one’s name admiringly mentioned by the National Socialists is, after all, to be forever owned by them.

Even Charles Dickens is singled out for glowing admiration as a great Nordic-Germanic völkisch (“folkish”) artist by Alfred Rosenberg:

...the art of Dickens, the paintings of Cranach—everywhere we find the quietly working Germanic personality taking effect in its essence as pleasant and agreeable. 

Rosenberg: Myth of the Twentieth Century, p.286

Germanic art is deep and active, the will given form. Dickens gilds men and the world with eternal, but with a completely and absolutely unGrecian, beauty. His sense of inward beauty is a play of will, first darker, then brighter and vividly toned, but always linked with effervescent action. Bleak House is perhaps the most precious fruit of this art, of an even more penetrating atmosphere than David Copperfield.  

Rosenberg: Myth of the Twentieth Century, p.287 (my emphasis)

The Nordic man in middle class garb is a humorist. ... Goethe could be just as much a humorist as Leonardo or Shakespeare. Cervantes is not a humorist as many still believe. But profound humorists like Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Busch, even Charles Dickens and Spitzweg, nevertheless belong in the gentle thundering of the European essence. ... As a folkish unit the people are struggling, triumphing, defeated, laughing and mourning. ... Thus the quietness of storm and Raabe and Keller belong alongside the greatness of Goethe and Wagner; the smiling tragedy of Busch alongside the pathos of Schiller. A dark undercurrent of the blood and soul binds them all, and even the quietest of them sounds the German song of eternal becoming and struggle for being. 

Rosenberg: Myth of the Twentieth Century, p.288 (my emphasis)

If to be admiringly mentioned by the National Socialists is to be eternally owed by them, they would have hegemony over the entirety of Western art from Leonardo, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Dickens to Wagner. Sherratt is willing to obsequiously hand them all over to the National Socialists on a silver platter, without so much as the slightest resistance.

In her discussion of Nietzsche, Sherratt further tells us that:

Hitler copied Nietzsche in admiring the ancient Greek ideals of strength and beauty... The Nazi obsession with ‘public health’ was no socialist ideal, but an aspiration Hitler had usurped from Nietzsche’s bewitchment with ancient Greek beauty. Hitler went all the way in his veneration of Nietzsche’s ideal and claimed that the Nazis were the modern renaissance of ancient culture: ‘the gigantic works of the Third Reich are a token of its cultural renascence and shall one day belong to the inalienable cultural heritage of the Western world, just as the great cultural achievements of this world in the past belong to us today’ [citation to: Hitler, Kulturatagung, Nuremberg, 6 September 1938, in A. Hitler, vol. 1, 1942, p. 597].

Hitler copied Nietzsche in admiring the ancient Greek ideals of strength and beauty, and even mimicked Nietzsche's phrases such as ‘affirmation of life’: ‘The German people of this twentieth century is the people of a newly awakened affirmation of life, seized with admiration for Strength and Beauty and therefore for that which is healthy and vigorous. Strength and Beauty – these are fanfares sounded by this new age.’

Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler's Philosophers (p. 25). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Sherratt adds in the citation to the quote from p.597 of the 1942 English translation of the 1938 Hitler speech that “the incorrect spelling is in the original”. Presumably this incorrect spelling refers to the word “renascence”. Unfortunately, the Oxford English dictionary lists the word “renascence” defining it as “the process or fact of being born anew; rebirth, renewal, revival”. Yet again another example of the poverty of research that has gone into Sherratt’s astonishingly ignorant book.

Notice that in the quotation Sherratt gives us to ‘substantiate’ her claim, there is nothing in there about Nietzsche at all. She just implies that Hitler might be forcibly interpreted as talking about Nietzsche in this speech—and that therefore he is. Sherratt even calls Nietzsche “the man that Hitler would claim as his greatest influence”. Yet nowhere does Sherratt produce anything remotely resembling a credible citation to prove that Hitler ever stated such a thing. As usual, Sherratt believes that merely stating something transforms it into an indubitable fact. In actuality, when Leni Riefenstahl asked Hitler about Nietzsche, he allegedly told her:

No, I can’t really do much with Nietzsche, ... He is more an artist than a philosopher; he doesn’t have the crystal-clear understanding of Schopenhauer. Of course, I value Nietzsche as a genius. He writes possibly the most beautiful language that German literature has to offer us today, but he is not my guide.

Riefenstahl Memoiren quoted in Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler’s Private Library

Romantic idealisation of the Greeks is hardly anything unique to Nietzsche, since this can be found in the works of Byron and Shelley as well, amongst many other European authors, who could then all be accused on this basis of being Nordic and Aryan proto-Nazis. Yet in the given Hitler quote there is nothing about the idealisation of Greek classicism either, only the usual propagandist line suggesting that National Socialism formed the cultural zenith—not just of German culture—but of the entirety of Western civilisation, hence the reason for their mentioning of artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare during their name-dropping exercises.

Another rightfully critical reviewer of Sherratt’s dreadful book rightfully points out that:

As Sherratt notes, it was Immanuel Kant who wrote that “the Jewish religion is not really a religion at all” and described Jews as “a nation of cheats”. As she comments, “the greatest thinker of the Enlightenment... provided a legitimate basis deep within European culture for the potential criminalisation of the Jews”. She might also have mentioned that Voltaire—the other great Enlightenment worthy—promoted a version of the pre-Adamite theory of human origins in which Jews were remnants of a pre-human species. 

John Gray in The Independent

Stuart Kelly, in his damning review of Sherratt’s book, also reminds us that Voltaire had said that:

In short we find them only ignorant and barbarous people with long united and most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred of every people by whom they are tolerated. 

Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary, passage as quoted by Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman 

Kelly also reminds us that anti-Semitism could just as equally be found in D.H. Lawrence. It could have been equally mentioned that T.S. Eliot is also notorious for the implicit anti-Semitism found in some early works, or that Oscar Wilde wrote:

A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. ... He was such a monster.

On the first night I was at the theatre, the horrid old Jew came round to the box after the performance was over ... He was a most offensive brute ...

Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray 

One of the more important subject matters barely touched on by Evans in his review is the subject of Social Darwinism. Evans writes in his review of Sherratt:

Elsewhere, the biologist and eugenicist Ernst Haeckel is characterised as a precursor of Nazism without any recognition of the fact that his Monist League was actually a pacifist organisation because it believed that war killed off the best and bravest in every generation and was therefore counter-evolutionary.

Evans: Times Higher Education 

It is once again typical of Sherratt that she puts her weight of support behind right-wing revisionist historians who have attempted to portray National Socialism as a left-wing secular movement principally driven by the “Godless monstrosity” of Social Darwinist ideology. This sort of propaganda is beloved of the religious right in pointing out the alleged dangers of teaching evolutionary theory in schools. Darwinian evolutionary theory, it is alleged, leads ideologically straight to the crematoria of Auschwitz—instead, the sermons goes, we must all be pious and repentant creationists:

Sherratt sides with right-wing polemics against Charles Darwin.
An advocate of creationism, Bergman is also author of The Dark Side of Darwin
of which it is claimed that the “book reveals Darwin’s less-than-above board
methods of attempting to prove his so-called scientific beliefs, and
his plot to ‘murder God’ by challenging the then-dominant biblical worldview”.
Oddly, Bergman’s books are not published by Yale Press

Paul Hinlicky puts things rather well that:

There is, say, a straight line running “Luther-Bismarck-Hitler”, or rather “Darwin-Nietzsche-Hitler”. Unsurprisingly these facile characterizations correspond to contemporary culture wars... 

Hinlicky: Before Auschwitz: What Christian Theology Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism

In supporting the case for the existence of such a “straight line running Darwin-Nietzsche-Hitler”, Sherratt leaves us in no doubt where her prejudices lie. Far from being the scandalous exposé of the chilling “terrible secret” about the true nature of National Socialism that it claims to be, Sherratt’s book is little more than a grand revelation of her own right-wing prejudices.

It is entirely convenient for the religious right that while drawing an imaginary “straight line” running from Darwin to Hitler, they systematically ignore the fact that Hitler also wrote in Mein Kampf that:

If the Jew gains victory over the people of this world with the help of his Marxist Confession of Faith, then his crown will become the Dance of Death (Totentanz) over the human race . . . That is why I believe that I am acting as the agent of the Almighty Creator. In that I am warding off the Jews, I am fighting to do the Lord’s work. 

Siegt der Jude mit Hilfe seines marxistischen Glaubens-bekenntnisses über die Völker dieser Welt, dann wird seine Krone der Totentanz der Menschheit sein . . . So glaube ich heute im Sinne des allmächtigen Schöpfers zu handeln: Indem ich mich des Juden erwehre, kämpfe ich für das Werk des Herrn. 

Mein Kampf. From the chapter entitled: Marxismus als Zerstörer der Kultur  (Marxism as the Destroyer of Culture). My own translation.

In actuality, whereas the names of neither Darwin nor Haeckel are mentioned once in either Mein Kampf or the Zweites Buch, the name of Christ is evoked numerous times. For example:

The best mark of identification, however, is the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature was to the great founder of the New Teachings themselves two thousand years ago. 

Die beste Kennzeichnung jedoch gibt das Produkt dieser religiösen Erziehung, der Jude selber. Sein Leben ist nur von dieser Welt, und sein Geist ist dem wahren Christentum innerlich so fremd, wie sein Wesen es zweitausend Jahre vorher dem großen Gründer der neuen Lehre selber war.  

Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, section entitled Die jüdische Religionslehre; p.336. My translation. Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H.; Munich, 1943

Evans correctly tells us that:

[Daniel Gasman] argued in 1971 that all forms of Social Darwinism were part of the ‘scientific origins of National Socialism’, to borrow the title of his book on Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel, a leading German popularizer of Darwin’s views, had long been regarded as a liberal, but Gasman went to the other extreme and portrayed him instead as a fascist avant la lettre.  

Yet Haeckel also believed that war was wrong because it meant the slaughter of the best and bravest of the nation's youth, which would be a eugenic disaster. The ‘Monist League’, which he founded, was therefore a pacifist organization, as far removed from Nazism in this respect as it was possible to be. ... It was quite wrong of Gasman, therefore, to reduce Haeckel in toto to the originator of ‘the scientific origins of National Socialism’. 

Evans: Rereading German History (In Search of German Social Darwinism)

As a result of such pacifist tendencies, during the National Socialist period, Haeckel’s books were systematically removed from libraries in 1935—the Bible, however, was not subject to such banishment.

If you actually search, for example, Mein Kampf, Hitler’s Table Talk, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: 1921 - 1941, Adolf Hitler Reden 1925-1945, The Complete Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, the Zweites Buch, the diaries and speeches of Joseph Goebbels, or Julius Streicher’s The Jew as Criminal, nowhere are Social Darwinist ideas, nor the even the names of Darwin or Haeckel, ever encountered once. Thus to elevate Darwinism to the central dogma of National Socialism is little more than polemical distortion. The only place Darwin rates a mention is in Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, which clearly attacks Darwinism as a “bestial” nineteenth-century biologism, unrelated to the National Socialist “religion of blood”:

Humanity, the universal church, or the sovereign ego, divorced from the bonds of blood, are no longer absolute values for us. They are dubious, even moribund, dogmas which lack polarity and which represent the ousting of nature in favour of abstractions. The emergence in the nineteenth century of Darwinism and positivism constituted the first powerful, though still wholly materialistic [bestialisch], protest against the lifeless and suffocating ideas which had come from Syria and Asia Minor and had brought about spiritual degeneracy. Christianity, with its vacuous creed of ecumenicalism and its ideal of HVMANITAS, disregarded the current of red blooded vitality which flows through the veins of all peoples of true worth and genuine culture. Blood was reduced to a mere chemical formula and explained in that way. But today an entire generation is beginning to have a presentiment that values are only created and preserved where the law of blood still determines the ideas and actions of men, whether consciously or unconsciously. At the subconscious level, whether in cult or in life, man obeys the commands of the blood, as if in dreams or, according to natural insight, as a happy expression describes this harmony between nature and culture. But culture, with the growth of all subconscious activity and of expanding consciousness and knowledge, becomes more and more intellectual, and ultimately engenders not creative tension but, in fact, discord. In this way, reason and understanding are divorced from race and nature and released from the bonds of blood. The ensuing generation falls victim to the individualistic system of intellectual absolutes, and separates itself more and more from its natural environment, mixing itself with alien blood. It is through this desecration of the blood that personality, people, race and culture perish. None who have disregarded the religion of the blood [Religion des Blutes] have escaped this nemesis...

Rosenberg, Alfred: The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (pp. 17-18). Kindle Edition. My emphasis

Rosenberg condemns Social Darwinism as a Marxist liberal concept:

This crass [plumpe] Darwinist-Marxist attempt to proclaim an inescapable “economic law” is now regarded as overcome.

Rosenberg, Alfred: Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts [403], end of Chap. IV discussion of Spengler as “Faustian man”; First 1930 edition. Hoheneichen Verlag, Munich, 1934. My translation (this sentence is missing in the Kindle Edition English translation). 

He also links Darwinism with Liberalism:

...the Roman Church feels no fear before Darwinism and Liberalism...

Rosenberg, Alfred. The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (p. 8). Kindle Edition. 

Rosenberg attacks Social Darwinism by linking it with feminism:

...the dusty milieu theory, according to which man is nothing other than a product of his environment. This Darwinian white elephant must even today bear the burden of providing the ideological support and scientific backbone of the champions of women’s rights.

Rosenberg, Alfred. The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (pp. 327-328). Kindle Edition. 

Rosenberg never once mentions the name of Haeckel.

Social Darwinist concepts were once commonplace amongst the political left, such as amongst feminists and Marxists. At the most, an unrecognisable vestige of a vulgarised and crude pseudo-scientific, quasi-religious form of extreme right-wing Social Darwinism remains in National Socialist racial ideology. Evans also refers the reader to a seminal study by Alfred Kelly on this subject:

Perhaps the most radical attempt to restrict the concept of Social Darwinism was undertaken some years ago by Alfred Kelly. According to Kelly:  

[For the historian, German Social Darwinism seems trapped in the dark shadow that Nazism casts backward into the late nineteenth century. Certainly Hitler’s crude bombast recalls the very worst of Social Darwinism, and the analogies between extermination camps and the twisted dreams of earlier pseudoscientific prophets are all too obvious.] However, the common historical treatment of German Social Darwinism as a theoretical rehearsal for Nazism is a mistake. [Reading history “backward” may have its rewards: only the full horror of the Nazi experience could expose the true dangers that lurked beneath the surface of the nineteenth century’s biologistic thinking. But such insights are likely to be bought at the price of distorted perspective.] Cast in the role of proto-Nazism, Social Darwinism almost inevitably takes on not only a malevolence, but also a prominence, coherence, and direction that it lacked in reality.  

[Kelly, Alfred. The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860-1914 (p. 101). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition. The italicised sections in square brackets were omitted by Evans]

Kelly argued that the ‘rhetoric of struggle’, which (in his view) was usually equated with Social Darwinism, antedated Darwin. Militarists did not need Darwinian language to tell themselves and the world that war was a good thing. The occasional appropriation of ‘a Darwinian phrase or two’ did not make someone a Social Darwinist. 

Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification 1800-1996 (p. 129). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. My bold emphasis.

Hitler also likened himself to one of the pioneers of modern microbiology, Robert Koch, who discovered the microbiological cause of tuberculosis:

I feel like the Robert Koch of politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the ferment of all social decomposition. 

Hitler quoted in Tagebuch Walter Hewel, 1941 as quoted by Ian Kershaw in Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis

Yet nobody blames Koch or microbiology for the Final Solution merely because Hitler admiringly mentioned Koch’s name. Only the most eccentric theologian would decry the germ theory of disease causation (as opposed to tuberculosis being caused by an imbalance in the humours etc) as being a proto-Nazi ideology akin to Darwinism in favour of a return to faith healing. Evans summarises the situation well when he goes on to write:

... the Nazis only took certain ideas from Social Darwinists, vulgarizing them and combining them with other crude political doctrines in the process. 

Evans further quotes Kelly:

In 1981, Alfred Kelly [wrote] ‘If Haeckel and the Monist League can be forerunners of Nazism’, he commented, ‘then so can most any other thinker or organization’.

More precisely, so can almost any other thinker or organisation, as it suits the aim of the revisionist historian’s polemical purpose.

Compare this extensive body of literature on Haeckel and Social Darwinism, of which Sherratt evinces not the slightest of awareness, with the dated speculations from Sherratt about the alleged direct line of influence running from Darwin and Haeckel straight to Hitler. Sherratt leads in with a typical lengthy anticipatory narrative about Darwin’s birth that sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale docudrama starting “once upon a time”:

From the pine-clad Bavarian forests, through northern France and across the English Channel to the white cliffs of Dover, across the pastoral landscape of southern England just north to the Welsh border—all this was a very long way from the world of nineteenth-century Prussia. Yet it was here in a large Georgian house in the small market town of Shrewsbury that one of Hitler’s most crucial influences was born [no supportive citation].

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 53). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Despite the fact that Hitler never once uttered Haeckel’s name on record, Sherratt tells us that:

[Hitler] was fond of German interpretations of Charles Darwin [no supportive citation]

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 2). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

About Haeckel she tells us that:

The enormously influential zoologist and social philosopher Ernst Haeckel elected himself to be Darwin’s voice to the German-speaking people. He became the greatest advocate of ‘Social Darwinism’, and in his own time his books vastly outsold Darwin’s. Moreover, he, along with fellow Social Darwinists advanced ideas that were to influence National Socialism.

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 54). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Sherratt fails to present evidence for such a direct line of ideological influence going directly from Haeckel to the heart and core of National Socialist dogma. As usual with authors who concoct such arguments, all they can do is to proceed with vague hearsay and insinuation to create unstable arguments of inference which invariably collapse on more cautious analysis of the matter. Thus Sherratt triumphantly proclaims the Goldhagenist conclusion that:

Hitler’s readings [of Haeckel] [no bibliographic citation] seemed to be validated. By the end of the First World War, anti-Semitic ideas pervaded every aspect of German thought from the Enlightenment to Romanticism [no bibliographic citation], from nationalism to science [no bibliographic citation]. Men of logic or the passions [no bibliographic citation], Idealists [no bibliographic citation] or Social Darwinists [no bibliographic citation], the highly sophisticated or the very crude, all supplied Hitler with ideas to reinforce and enact his dream [no bibliographic citation].

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (pp. 60-61). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Yet at no point does Sherratt ever give us the opportunity to examine what Hitler’s readings of Haeckel might have been, let alone having convincingly demonstrated that he had even read Haeckel, let alone having shown any direct influence on him, let alone that Hitler’s “readings seemed to be validated”. Sadly, Sherratt substitutes the claim to being “carefully researched” and “meticulously referenced” with actually being so. In actuality, Sherratt’s book overflows with one sweeping unsubstantiated speculation followed by another based on false a priori acceptance of the Goldhagenist hypothesis about the all-pervasiveness of genocidal anti-Semitism in pre-National Socialist Germany.

Once again, none of these speculations are anything new or original. For example, already in 1941, Jacques Barzun had published his wartime propagandist book Darwin Marx Wagner—Critique of a Heritage attempting to implicate these liberal thinkers with the common charge of proto-Nazism.

Sherratt’s ideas are often a rehash of older dated literature from the 1940’s

Evans also tells us that:

Gasman’s [view of Haeckel as a proto-Nazi] in fact ultimately derives from Allied wartime propaganda, which cannot really be considered serious in scholarly terms. Books such as William McGovern’s From Luther to Hitler, published in 1941 and containing a chapter on ‘Social Darwinists and their Allies’, or Rohan Butler’s The Roots of National Socialism, published the previous year, trawled German writings in the past, from Novalis to Nietzsche, not only in the search for antecedents of Nazism but also in the attempt to prove that all German ‘ideology’ had always been Nazi in one way or another, and that Nazism, in essence, was not new. 

Evans: Rereading German History

Yet it is precisely this dated view of the cultural origins of National Socialism deriving from wartime Allied anti-Hun propaganda that Sherratt wishes to revive.

Another problem with Sherratt’s book is the superficiality of her handling of Heidegger. This is a subject over which much ink has been spilt, and Sherratt offers absolutely no new insights on the subject. Evans understandably criticises Sherratt for this:

...there are descriptions of the lives of the dramatis personae, but nothing about the actual philosophical ideas they held. Thus, for example, the crucial question of whether Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in itself overlapped with the doctrines of Nazism is ducked in favour of a lengthy account of his affair with Hannah Arendt.

Evans: Times Higher Education 

I suspect that Sherratt’s annoyance over the way Heidegger’s National Socialist Party membership has proven little barrier to his wider acceptance is one of the driving motives behind the writing of her book. Sherratt shows a seething resentment that writers such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin are less widely read in philosophical circles than Heidegger. It is unfortunate that this leads on to insinuations to the effect that this is the result of widespread sympathy towards National Socialism arising from latent anti-Semitism in academic circles. Adorno and Benjamin would be turning in their graves at any suggestion that academics should be forced value them over writers under the duress of fear of being accused of being a Jew-hating Nazi sympathiser.

If Sherratt wishes to advocate for Adorno and Benjamin that is admirable, however, to do so by attempting to publicly shame Heidegger’s advocates for being Nazi sympathisers is an unconvincing way of approaching this. Like it or not, Heidegger is a much more systematic thinker, someone who developed a far more rigorously structured philosophical system than either Adorno or Benjamin. I say this as an Adorno admirer, someone who happens to also own Adorno’s complete works. By comparison with Adorno and Heidegger, Benjamin’s output is minuscule. Sherratt also conveniently neglects to mention that the acceptance of Heidegger in the English speaking world almost entirely represents the influence of Jacques Derrida—a French-speaking Algerian-Jewish philosopher. Before the rise of Derrida’s influence, in the anti-Kraut mood of the post-war years, Heidegger was widely ignored in the English speaking world, with his Being and Time only appearing in English for the first time in 1969—a stark contrast to the appearance of several Japanese translations in the 1930s. Any attempt to undermine the hegemony of Heidegger’s formidable system of thought in its current position of widespread admiration must entail more than shrill accusations of covert Nazi sympathy in academia today.

I previously called Sherratt’s outlook right-wing. It might come as a surprise to readers, that someone who had written a book on Adorno and who lectures in social sciences could have views that could be labelled as being right-wing. Of course, there are those in the socials sciences who are right-wing, and Sherratt appears to be one of these. The strongest evidence for Sherratt’s right-wing sympathies lies in her admiring comments about the neoliberal ideological prophet, Karl Popper:

There are many interesting tales to be told of Austrian Jewish thinkers ... Here we concentrate specifically on German-Jewish thinkers. Note that Karl Popper left Vienna in 1937 fleeing Nazism. While interned as an enemy alien ..., he wrote The Open Society and its Enemies, a book which can plausibly be read both as having been written in opposition to Nazism and addressing the fundamental question about the relationship between various mainstream political philosophical thinkers (Plato, Hegel, Marx) and totalitarianism. 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

This certainly helps to explain Sherratt’s slavish reiteration of Popper’s attempts to demonise Plato, Hegel and Marx with self-serving polemical accusations of proto-Nazism, and characterisation of fascist leadership as being a modernisation of Plato’s idea of the philosopher-king. It further explains Sherratt’s wilful characterisation of Hitler as the supreme historic fulfilment of the Platonic ideal of the “philosopher-leader”, along with her equally Popperian polemic against Hegel and Marx for being alleged “enemies of the open society”—enemies, that is, of Sherratt’s Thatcherite neoliberalism.

This crucial issue of political orientation can be further traced through the developmental history of post-Marxist thought itself. To this end, a deliberately oversimplified analysis (also largely downplaying the crucial Weberian and Durkheimian aspects of the historiographical structural-functionalist paradigm) of the structuralist vs. intentionalist debate of the 1970’s in post-Marxist terms proves highly illuminating. I preferentially use the term “structuralism”, rather than the commoner term of “functionalism” here to purposely accentuate the relation of structural-functionalism to the classical “Marxian” infrastructure-superstructure paradigm—although readers from semiotics-linguistic and postmodernist backgrounds may find it confusing since the Holocaust historian’s “structuralism” here is only a distant relation of the semiotic structuralism of the likes of Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

In many ways the structural-functionalist paradigm for the origin of the Final Solution, such as those exemplified by the writings of Hans Mommsen, can be approached rather oversimplistically, though illuminatingly so, from a post-Marxian perspective, as a development of the analysis of historical events in terms of their precipitation by events originating in socio-economic infrastructure. Such an analysis emphasises how World War II and the Holocaust were caused by the burden of reparation payments from the Treaty of Versailles, leading to hyperinflation, and then catastrophically exacerbated by the Great Depression. It was the great Cambridge economist, John Maynard Keynes who predicted after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and its predictably crippling economic impact on Germany, that:

If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.  

John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Chapter VII)

The stab-in-the-back myth engendered through the structural calamities of World War I and the German Revolution of 1918, the Great Depression followed by along the systematic defeats on the Eastern Front, as well as the political power structure within the Dritte Reich are further emphasised in a structural-functionalist paradigm as propelling the cumulative radicalisation of the Final Solution. Admittedly, much of this elimination of the purposiveness implicit to intentionalism goes beyond the limits of Marxian analysis of infrastructural determinants of history alone, evoking Weberian and Durkheimian theoretical elements. Despite this, structural-functionalism remains a paradigm that de-emphasises human volition, and hence intention, as a driving factor in history, in favour of an emphasis on global structural determinants transcending individual intention. It is, consequently, a view that de-emphasises the role of purposive ideology in driving history, in favour of more systemic and infrastructural events transcending the ideas held by individuals with their own personal ideational volition.

On the other hand, the intentionalist paradigm for the origins of the Final Solution places its central emphasis on purposeful individual intention, ideology, and premeditated volitional activity as the core driving force of history. Socio-economic, and hence structural precipitating factors, are de-emphasised, or even eliminated, as being a plausible basis for an understanding of history in favour of the central role of Ideas. The end result preferentially emphasises the role of purposive planning and premeditation towards the implementation of the ideology of the Final Solution.

Saul Friedländer summarises things well:

The major issue which separates the [structural-functionalist and intentionalist] approaches is that of the actual order to implement the extermination. For those historians who believe there was planning and premeditation, Hitler must have given an order to exterminate the Jews of Europe, one way or another, sometime in the spring or early summer of 1941. For the functionalists, such an order may have been given much later on in the course of events, but in all probability was never issued at all. 

Friedländer: From Anti-Semitism to Extermination

However, he also adds that:

... functionalism, which stresses the dynamics of a system rather than the central role of a leader, in many ways fits better within the mainstream of modern historiography.  

Friedländer: From Anti-Semitism to Extermination

Theodor Adorno started off as a classical Marxist, but, with the rise of National Socialism, started to articulate views that are in many ways antithetical, even heretical, from the standpoint of the classical interpretation of Marx. In particular, Adorno felt that National Socialism must be understood in terms of its use of technologically modern media as a tool of mass manipulation. Media is something that would traditionally have been relegated to a mere epiphenomenon of socio-political infrastructure, something belonging to the inconsequential superstructure, and largely irrelevant as a driving force of history. Yet in Adorno’s analysis of society, the fourth estate becomes a key driver of socio-political events in history. Adorno’s thought is often described as cultural Marxism, in that he permitted the reintroduction of the analysis of socio-cultural influences as an elemental driving factor engendering historical development, rather than it being dismissed as an ephemera.

Amongst historians there remains a strong preference towards understanding history in terms of structural factors that are quantifiable and extrinsically verifiable, for example in the manner of Thomas Picketty in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Adorno’s approach to analysis is something that is uncommonly seen applied within academic historiographic circles, and he is read more often in literary criticism and sociology circles. Historians’ preference for a more “scientific” approach owes much to Marx and his idea of “scientific” historicism. It is much more easy to understand history in terms of defined structural events that are amenable to quantifiable analysis such as hyperinflation and the Great Depression and their measurable socio-economic impact. The end result is that cultural historiography relating history to the abstraction of Ideas, much more freely open to interpretation, has always been the realm of right-wing historians. For example right-wing historian, Peter Viereck dismissed the idea that the Great Depression had even the slightest bit of relevance to an understanding of the rise of fascism, calling such explanations a Marxist conspiracy theory based on what he called the “the Protocols of the Elders of Wall Street”. The problem is that cultural historicism is more prone to bias, and right-wing revisionist historians of the likes of Viereck tended to—perhaps entirely predictably—quite conveniently “discover” the ideological origins of National Socialism in German left-wing thinkers or in Charles Darwin.

Most modern historians, it must be mentioned, simply do not cling dogmatically to the insistence that Ideas, human motivations, or psychology play no role in driving history, nor do they generally favour Marxian economic determinism. Sir Richard Evans puts it rather well:

... while ideas do have a power of their own, that power is always conditioned, however indirectly, by social and political circumstances

Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich

This is why Hans Mommsen said in an interview that:

I belong to the representatives of that school [of structural-functionalism], but this fact is no longer too important since recently there has been an intermingling of the various schools of thought. This was, in a way, propelled by the controversy about Daniel Goldhagen, who, in some respects, appeared to be as a superintentionalist. In former years, my methodological position differed strongly from that of Christopher Browning or from Raul Hilberg. But today these differences are withering away, and the traditional distinction between the intentionalist and the functionalist [‘structuralist’] schools lost much of its relevance. Instead, there emerges a divergence between the younger generation and the generation to which I belong, which makes itself felt in the realm of Holocaust research, while the conflict between the functionalists and the intentionalists is vanishing. 

Mommsen: An Interview With Prof. Hans Mommsen. Yad Vashem, 1997

By comparison, Sherratt takes on an approach to the historiography of the Dritte Reich that unconditionally accepts the hyperintentionalist paradigm of the likes of Daniel Goldhagen, in which the postmodernist “linguistic turns” makes the earth turn around the word of the Great Man, as ideology returns to centre stage as the central driving force of world history. Following Thomas Carlyle, Sherratt thus places exaggerated emphasis on the romanticized figure of the Great Man as the ideological shaper of history. Thus for example she quotes from Hermann Rauschmann:

“[Hitler] loves solitary walks. The mountain forests intoxicate him. These walks are his divine service, his prayers” [quote taken from Hermann Rauschmann: Hitler Speaks].

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 25). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Notwithstanding the fact that Hitler usually went on walks with his dog, Wolf or later, Blondi, Sherratt adds:

This image of the great man wandering alone in the mountains could have been taken from a Caspar David Friedrich painting.

Sherratt, Yvonne. Hitler's Philosophers (p. 25). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

In Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, the wanderer, alas, has no dog.

This woeful attempt at the romantic glorification of Hitler as a Great Man, albeit in negative form, is entirely propaganda of Sherratt’s own making, as no examples of the use of this image from the National Socialist era that likened Hitler to a romantic figure in a Caspar David Friedrich painting are known.

Concerning the influence of Daniel Goldhagen, and his widely condemned hyperintentionalist thinking, on Sherratt, Evans says that:

Hitler’s Philosophers claims to expose the shameful story of German philosophy’s collaboration with Nazism, and it is not surprising that it relies on books by authors such as Daniel Gasman, Daniel Goldhagen, Victor Farías and others who have composed their one-sided tracts more as retrospective prosecutors than as conscientious historians. 

Evans: Times Higher Education 

The proof that Sherratt has lapsed into a discredited one-sided hyperintentionalist paradigm inadmissible to “conscientious historians” can be found in the following passage:

On 30 January 1939 before the Nazi Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of his coming to power, Hitler proclaimed to the German Parliament his intention to exterminate all European Jews:

In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. [Emphasis is Sherratt’s own]

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 89). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Sherratt also describes Hitler with the words “the man with the apocalyptic vision was thirty-five years of age”, implying that at the age of thirty-five he already had a fully formed, clear and simple intentionalist “vision” to enact the apocalypse of World War II and the Final Solution on the world’s stage, a vision inspired by the aestheticization of the joys of murdering Jews allegedly found in Wagner’s operas. Sherratt produces not a scrap of evidence to support the uncritical acceptance of this ridiculously extreme intentionalist position.

Compare this with what most modern historians think about the oft repeated quote from the 1939 Reichstag address:

They present it as “proof” of Hitler’s “intentions”, in advance of the start of the World War, to annihilate the Jews. But is it?  That evening Hitler spoke for hours but devoted only a brief few minutes to the Jews. We certainly would neither deny nor downplay Hitler’s amply demonstrated will for taking ruthless actions, for striking sudden blows intended to totally crush his enemies, and for his lust for blood.  But was the Holocaust clearly present in Hitler’s mind prior to 1941 and before the surprising German military victories and the stunning Allied defeats suddenly put his armies in positions of power and of control that no one could have predicted beforehand?   

Elly Dlin: Was the Holocaust Planned and Premeditated?

Dlin reminds us that prior to the Final Solution, there was first a policy of forced emigration, forced ghettoisation, then of systematic relocation to Madagascar, and only in the face of sequential defeats against the Allies was there a cumulative radicalisation towards the Final Solution. Simplistic intentionalist paradigms fail to account for these facts, as well as what Himmler wrote:

“I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration of all Jews to a colony in Africa or elsewhere... However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible”. 

Next to this section of the report Hitler added the hand-written notation: “very good and correct”. 

Himmler and Hitler quoted in Elly Dlin: Was the Holocaust Planned and Premeditated?

Sherratt’s fundamental starting point of locating the intentionalist origins of the Final Solution in German cultural roots dating back to Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Wagner, and Marx puts her firmly at the farthest end of the hyperintentionalist camp, drawing simplistic straight lines drawn from its implicit assumption of a teleological lineage of development leading from eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophies directly to those of the National Socialists and the Final Solution. Unfortunately, Sherratt evinces not the slightest of awareness about the history behind the structuralist vs. intentionalist debate. Sherratt begs the question by assuming a priori that the grand simplicities of the extreme intentionalist paradigm and its bold straight lines of development can be taken for granted without ever once having to justify such an extremist position.

It must be appreciated that the a priori acceptance of such a hyperintentionalist paradigm remains prerequisite to interpreting history from within the framework of a propagandist anti-Hun outlook:

The intentionalist school was fed by the solid tradition of fervent anti-Hun propaganda that emerged from both of the two World Wars in the 20th century Europe...  

Elly Dlin: Was the Holocaust Planned and Premeditated?

It is only by surreptitiously begging the question through the a priori assumption of the givenness of the absolute veracity of the grand simplicities of the extreme intentionalism paradigm that Sherratt can make sweeping black-and-white statements that override every possibility of nuanced discussion. One reviewer noted that:

Rather than Grey-Acceptable and Grey-Unacceptable, Sherratt gives us Black-and-White-Unsupportable. 

Stuart Kelly in The Scotsmans

What the review failed to elucidate was what the origins of such Black-and-White oracle-like grand pronouncements are actually based on: the unconditional assumption of the absolute validity of simplistic extreme intentionalism.

The unfortunate thing for Sherratt is that not even Adorno would have approved of such an extreme swing from a post-Marxist, post-Weberian and post-Durkheimian structuralist approach to history, towards such extreme intentionalist methodological paradigms with its claim to the absolute centrality of philosophy and the ideas of the Great Man in propelling the development of history, to the point where structural socio-economic and socio-political determinants are systematically ignored in favour of an emphasis on intentionalist ideology alone as the dominant driving force of history. To do so is to take Adorno’s cultural post-Marxist thinking to such an extreme as to lapse into reactionary right-wing revisionist history of the likes of Peter Viereck.

It is telling too that Evans further says about Goldhagen that:

In this sense, the debate over [Goldhagen’s] book has opened up yet again the gulf between academic and popular history. The most popular general history of Nazi Germany is still William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), which takes a similar line to that of Goldhagen, and repeats wartime propaganda about the pervasiveness of antisemitism, racism, militarism and authoritarianism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German culture. For all its academic trappings, its political-science jargon and its modish postmodernist insistence on the primacy of ideas and beliefs in history, Goldhagen’s book ... falls very much into the same category. 

Evans: Rereading German History. My emphasis

In the view of Evans, the fad for postmodernism has allegedly lead the likes of Sherratt and Goldhagen to the misguided wholesale resuscitation of the long discredited populist and right-wing culture-centric intentionalist view of history with its “insistence on the primacy of ideas and beliefs in history”. That may be a slight exaggeration given that postmodernism precludes simplistic intentionalism just as emphatically as functional-structuralism, but the criticism by Evans of Sherratt’s implicit culture-centric hyperintentionalism nonetheless remains a valid one. The editor’s headline for the review of Sherratt’s book certainly summarises Evans well in stating that:

An effort to blame German thinkers for Nazism revives a discredited tradition, says Richard J. Evans. 

Evans: Times Higher Education 

For although Sherratt makes claims to novelty stating that “the sinister past of many German philosophers has remained concealed”, in fact every single one of her claims have already been made during the 1940’s–60’s by those seeking the origins of National Socialism in German culture rather than in socio-political and structural forces of history. This culture-centric approach tried to reinterpret just about any cultural aspect of German history for centuries before, as being teleological antecedents paving the way towards the inexorable rise and triumph of National Socialism.

In his review of Sherratt, Evans perfectly summarises the state of affairs in writing that:

The advent of social history put paid to this teleological approach to the origins of Nazism by focusing instead on political structures and class antagonisms as the key factors. But the cultural turn has made it possible to revive this tradition, which Yvonne Sherratt now attempts to do in Hitler’s Philosophers.

Evans: Times Higher Education (my emphasis)

The “cultural turn” Evans refers to here is his personal critical commentary on the postmodernist “linguistic turn”. Yet in the process of attempting to revive this “discredited tradition”, founded on the radical teleology of a culture-centric hyperintentionalism, Sherratt presents no new and convincing evidence for reopening the case for it—all she does is repeat the same old Allied anti-Kraut propagandist drumming from the 1940’s as though they were some titillating novelty.

At this point, it also becomes quite understandable why Sherratt takes such an intense dislike towards Hannah Arendt and her concept of the “banality of evil”, that it leads Sherratt to run a smear campaign against Arendt by insinuating that Arendt had her Jewish brain inseminated with Kraut-Think through sex with Kraut-Thinker-in-Chief, Martin Heidegger. Sherratt even repeatedly and condescendingly calls Arendt by her first name as “Hannah”—none of the other male philosophers in the book is referred to in this demeaning manner. For example:

Hannah was startled but soon recovered her outer poise—yet inwardly her nerves had reverted to those of an eighteen-year-old girl... 

Sherratt, Yvonne: Hitler's Philosophers (p. 246). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Once again, Sherratt provides us with no supportive citations to verify the speculation that Arendt had been reduced to “an eighteen-year-old girl” (sic) by her “nerves”. While Sherratt is perfectly welcome to disagree with Arendt, it is wholly unacceptable to do so by means of a “docudrama” maliciously caricaturing Arendt in such an unnecessarily vindictive and sexist way. Sherratt shows no evidence of sufficiently close personal acquaintance with Arendt as to warrant her calling her “Hannah” all the time, and she never refers to Heidegger as “Martin”, or to Hitler as “Adolf”.

Sherratt’s venomous belittlement of Arendt goes hand in hand with Sherratt’s deep need to view the “Nazis” as horned devils driven by demonic Kraut-Think that thoroughly pervaded all German thinking for centuries. For those who joined the National Socialist party to turn out to be rather banal human beings, enmeshed within a larger historical structural framework, yet all too frighteningly like the rest of us, is for Sherratt anathema. Yet, in taking such a black-and-white propagandist stance of a history shaped by devils and angels, she lapses into the exact brutally simplistic propagandistic thinking pattern indulged in by the National Socialists themselves. That is why Sir Richard J. Evans condemned Goldhagen’s extreme intentionalism as being a “craven surrender to the Nazi view of history” and a “startling failure of scholarship”. Yet much the same could be said of Sherratt’s book, which is based on a craven surrender to the propagandist line that Hitler was merely enacting the Will of the German People (der Wille des deutschen Volkes) to fulfil their Destiny to annihilate the Jews—a Will present for centuries in the German people, as expressed in the thought of German theology, philosophy, and art through the centuries.

For example, Sherratt evidently admires Theodor Adorno, who she thinks of as a Jewish thinker. By being Jewish, this supposedly relieves him of the guilt of Kraut-Think, perhaps being a thinker who exemplifies Jew-Think instead. If the National Socialist thought that Kraut-Think was Good-Think and Jew-Think was Bad-Think, then Sherratt just tips this equation upside down. Sadly, to label Adorno as a “Jewish thinker” is to sink to the level of the National Socialists themselves. For a start, defined in traditional Jewish terms, Jewishness is inherited through the maternal line. Adorno had a Jewish father, and an Italian non-Jewish mother. He was baptised into in a non-Jewish household—it was not a kosher household, no Jewish sacred days were observed, nor did he celebrate his Bar Mitzvah, or attend synagogue. Adorno had no Jewish cultural identity at all. He grew up with a German cultural identity in an increasingly secularised and assimilated world, in which he became an anti-religious Marxist steeped in the post-Kantian, post-Hegelian German philosophical tradition of liberal thought, one in which traditional ethnoreligious delineations had grown increasingly irrelevant—thus making the rise of National Socialism all the more shockingly unexpected. The only way to label Adorno’s thought as being an example of Jew-Think is to claim that his liberal way of thinking was inherited by his “blood” being tainted by his Jewish ancestry, causing his brain to spout Jew-Think instead of the Kraut-Think of a pure blooded Aryan: exactly the thinking of the National Socialists themselves.

By perpetuating a view of history based on the gross simplicities of war propaganda, Sherratt belligerently flies her upside-down Swastika, something she thinks is anti-Nazi, when, in fact, it only ends up being the same thing tipped on its head: reactionary right-wing ideology and revisionist history in the guise of a phony “socialism”.

The final nail in the coffin for Sherratt’s book comes when Evans takes her to task for gross factual error of the sort that demonstrate her vast ignorance about the history of the era about which she writes under the hollow pretence of being some sort of expert:

Amazingly, Sherratt asserts that “during the first year of Hitler’s chancellorship the terror and reprisals associated with the later years of Nazi rule had not yet begun” [Sherratt, p.68]. That would not have amused the 100,000 opponents of Nazism who were imprisoned in concentration camps between February and July 1933, nor the many hundreds who were murdered during this time.

Evans: Times Higher Education  

With it, any final vestiges of credibility crumble away, and we are left with a woeful piece of pulp-fiction in the guise of history, one with about as much credibility as a kitschy Occult Reich book—or worse still a Nazi UFO conspiracy docudrama. It will be taken by historians just as seriously and achieve about as high an academic impact factor throughout academic history circles.