Cultured and educated Nazis

Mike,

From an engineering standpoint, your sampling (the one camp commander) is too small to generalize from.  Although I would disagree with that because the camp commander at Dachau played a grand piano and knew the best German music he was not a thug.  Anyone who engaged in the activities that occurred at Dachau and like places was, in my view, a thug. 

However, I take your point.  Germany was indeed extremely cultured and well educated (compared to all other nations).  And many of those cultured and well-educated people did go along with the Nazis in a number of ways.  But the Nazi leaders themselves were not terribly well-educated or cultured.  Goering collected art objects and Hitler loved to paint but that doesn't count for much on the scale of education and culture.  Goebbels was well educated and Speer was "cultured," at least in regard to architecture, but they were all thugs.  Here is an interesting site called "WWII: Nazi Thugs and Thinkers": http://www.life.com/image/50690561/in-gallery/23127/wwii-nazi-thugs-and-thinkers

In the case of Germany it isn't as though all well-educated and culture people gave their support to the Nazi party.  Many fled for other countries.  The U.S. got many of Germany's finest minds during the Nazi period of power.  We think here on Lit-Ideas mostly of philosophers and what they did during the Nazi period, but Theologians have the same sort of discussion.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a very famous Lutheran theologian and pastor who was in the U.S. in 1939 but felt a need to return to Germany and do his part there -- which included speaking and writing views opposed to the Nazis, secretly writing books that are very famous today on a variety of subjects, being involved in plot to kill Hitler and being executed as an enemy of the state in April of 1945. Many German Theologians who fled to other countries had to measure themselves against Bonhoeffer.  As did many who stayed in Germany but didn't speak out against Hitler and his Nazis.

As to your "class definition" of all cultures ("As with all cultures, there's an elite core that defines it, a middle merchant class that drives its economic engine and the mass who do the labor, fight the wars, live and die for reasons of their own."), I don't think who does what in a culture comprises a "class."  How can we even say "class" without thinking of Marx and of how he was in such terrible error that millions were killed as a result of his incompetence?  The German intellectuals who fled to America during the Nazi periods and those who fled to America from behind the "Iron Curtain" during the Cold War didn't believe the U.S. had a "Class Definition" like "all cultures."  They thought they would be free here, and so they were -- and if they haven't died of old age (as opposed to hanging) so they still are.

Lawrence

From:  Mike Geary

Lawrence,

When I wrote that post I was thinking of an essay I had read in high school by a woman journalist who shortly after the liberation of Dachau wrote an essay that I remember as "The Lesson Of Dachau".  I tried to Goggle it up, but to no avail.  In the essay the author concentrates on the level of cultural sophistication of the camp commander, his grand piano, the sheet music of the world's greatest composers, his library of classic literature.  Hardly the "thug" she had expected.  The lesson that I took away was that culture and education do not insure basic human decency.

In addition to that essay (is anyone out there familiar with it?), I've always been astonished that Germany at that time was surely the most accomplished of European cultures, intellectually and artistically -- a long way from the Hun beginnings.

As with all cultures, there's an elite core that defines it, a middle merchant class that drives its economic engine and the mass who do the labor, fight the wars, live and die for reasons of their own.

Mike Geary
Memphis

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:52 PM, Lawrence Helm wrote:

Mike,

I know that Goebbels was highly educated, but I can't think of anyone else that was.  The Third Reich was commonly thought to be peopled by "thugs."  Heidegger was highly disappointed in the educational level of the Fascist leaders.  Those who did study on their own, it seems to me, were more likely to study some pseudoscience, or something bizarre like anthroposophy than anything we in civilized places like Memphis might study. 

But I could be wrong.  Give me some examples of highly educated Nazis besides Goebbels.

Lawrence

From: Mike Geary

Veronica, remember that much if not most of the leadership of the Third Reich were highly educated and cultured.  Apparently education,  intelligence and the dictates of morality have little influence on human behavior.  I suspect it's something much more fundamental in our psyches that dictate whether we'll be willing executioner or not.  Don't know what that fundamental factor might be, I suspect it's a profound understanding that one's self is inviolable.  But what do I know?

Mike Geary
Memphis