1. Introduction
The association of Friedrich Nietzsche with National Socialism is a question of interpretation rather than influence. Although Nietzsche died in 1900, long before the Nazi takeover of government, his rhetoric of the Übermensch, rank, struggle, and will to power was subsequently adopted by the Nazis as a philosophical backing for their new ideology. It was firmly entrenched in the culture of the Third Reich: Thus Spoke Zarathustra was displayed alongside Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century at the Tannenberg Memorial (Aschheim 1992, pp. 232-40). However, the mere presence of Nietzsche’s ideas in Nazi interpretation does not mean that they were interpreted in the same vein. After all, one can quote one’s predecessor correctly while completely reinterpreting their idea, shifting the context, and changing the subject. Therefore, the question should be whether their conception of superiority has a common ground with Nietzsche’s own teachings and the basic structure of the Übermensch.
“National Socialist interpretation” in this essay primarily implies Alfred Bäumler’s Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker (1931). Bäumler was a German philosopher and pedagogue who joined the NSDAP in 1933, served as a professor of philosophy and political education at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, and was the head of the Office of Science in Alfred Rosenberg’s Rosenberg Office (Whyte 2008, pp. 171-94; Aschheim 1992, pp. 232-54). Therefore, Bäumler’s competence in Nazi policy and education gives him credence as a philosopher who speaks not only for himself but also for the Third Reich’s political and ideological elite. According to Bäumler, Nietzsche’s germanische Grundhaltung (“Germanic fundamental attitude”) involves the will to power and equality, race and Volk, leadership and the future German state (Bäumler 2024, pp. 129-55; cf. Bäumler 1931). Rosenberg provides the framework for racial hierarchy, while the present paper focuses on Zarathustra and National Socialist interpretations of Nietzsche’s will to power, specifically the will to power as the driving force behind the Übermensch. Mein Kampf is relevant only as background to the Nazi doctrines of inherited racial hierarchy and struggle, so it will not be treated as an authority on Nietzsche.
The primary text is Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z), supported by Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) and On the Genealogy of Morality (GM). The latter two works were written later and systematized many of Nietzsche’s ideas, presenting a different take on the Übermensch, or rather the concept of “higher types”. However, they should not be confused with the Übermensch; Nietzsche speaks of “higher types” as an example of people who pursue excellence, while master morality is the product of their will to power. The will to power, in turn, is one of several interpretations of life-affirming instincts in GM. To identify the extent of the associations, this essay examines the following five aspects: the basis of superiority, its subject, the source of values, the role of state and nation, and the place and role of power. After all, verbal parallels are not always significant for establishing essential connections, while the concepts’ common ground and the extent of their mutual inclusion are more important. The following thesis will be advanced through the analysis of passages: Nietzsche’s and National Socialism’s ideas of rank, order, and struggle contain substantial similarities, but they differ fundamentally in other aspects, such as the source of values, the subject of superiority, and the role of the state. In particular, while Nietzsche’s Übermensch philosophy promotes individualism, National Socialism’s Aryan supremacy is collectively oriented. The relationship between the two concepts is thus complex and should be understood within the context of partial influence and reinterpretation.
2. Nietzsche’s Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
2.1 The death of God and the meaning of overcoming
The Übermensch first responds to an axiological crisis, not a biological question. By his famous quote the “death of God,” Nietzsche tried to convey, beyond the death of superstition, that the Christian-metaphysical axiom no longer has credibility as a justification for European values, even as its behavioral consequences remain ingrained (Anderson 2024). If the objective order is no longer what it was, then nihilism prevails to the extent that one’s ancestral axiology can no longer validate one’s life. Zarathustra declares, “Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll”, (“the human is something to be overcome”) and calls the Übermensch “the meaning of the earth” (Z, Prologue §§3-4). “Earth” opposes the vertical transcendence to which one used to measure oneself, and “überwunden” indicates that superiority is a matter of conquest, not given. The nihilistic “last man” is not lacking in ancestral qualities; he just wants security, sameness, and satisfaction, so his tamed life is not a deficiency but an anti-creation (Z, Prologue §5). Thus, the logical connection is that the loss of transcendent values makes room for immanent ones, and the Übermensch points to the possibility of fulfilling that need. There is nothing explicitly racial about this version of Nietzsche’s teaching, and replacing God with the Aryan would actually give Nietzsche’s solution a new problem: an external, objective order better than anything else.
“The Three Metamorphoses” shows us how this transformation might take place. Nietzsche depicts three fictional symbols: the camel accumulates and bends under the weight of burdens; the lion fights the dragon, whose scales glimmer with the old commands; the child, having overcome, creates (Z I, “The Three Metamorphoses”). Thus, the creation of values is now a process that begins with obedience, not freedom, and Nietzsche’s freedom is not the freedom from but the ability to organize one’s desires. Imagine there are two revolutionaries, who both reject the prevailing moral code, but one establishes a definite form of life that no longer depends on the previous order, while the other only expresses contingent preferences. The second one is still within the confines of immediacy, and only the first one is the creator of a new value system that can command obedience. It is this kind of revolution that the Nazi party program represented, but another revolution in Nietzschean terms is also possible. Note that the will to power is not only the ability to subordinate one’s affects to higher principles but also the ability to master external obstacles (Kaufmann 1974, pp. 178-210). Kaufmann translates “das Wollen des Willens zum Leben” as “the striving for selfovercoming,” but the original text also contains the idea of commanding and overcoming. Therefore, Nietzsche’s Übermensch may have the opportunity for self-mastery that constitutes individuality, but he cannot have it by default. His naturalism does not recognize the freedom of the subject to create values ex nihilo.
2.2 Value-creation, herd morality, and the state
Nietzsche’s assumptions about the herd are also essential to understanding why the Übermensch does not create values in a liberal sense. “Herd morality” is a dominant value system that universalizes traits useful to the many and treats deviation as morally suspect. In GM, ressentiment is the feeling of inferiority, which invests the object of desire with the value of “evil” and one’s own capabilities with the value of “good” (GM I §§10-13). In Z, tarantulas deceive themselves, believing that their equalization of all is a revenge, and the last men strive to eradicate everything that distinguishes (Z II, “The Tarantulas”; Prologue §5). Nietzsche did not think that differences in individual power were an obvious reason to criticize democracy; rather, he believed that democracy was an expression of the ideal of equality as the condition for achieving universal peace. The text gives a Nazi plenty of ammunition for claiming that no one is universal, but the problem is that Nietzsche wanted to destroy democracy’s capacity to create value as specifically as the state does. Not equality itself, but its imposition as a meta-norm is what overflows the Nazi’s axiology. Both the “last man” and the Nazi seek to eliminate all distinctions, but Nietzsche is interested in preserving the ability to impose distinctions and, thus, to value. Creating values is a process that presupposes not individualism but collectivism.
The collectivism, however, is one of the options available to the individual. In “The Thousand and One Goals,” Nietzsche notes that different peoples have developed their own tables of values , each of which lists what they found to be the most difficult to avoid (Z I, “The Thousand and One Goals”). Bäumler’s interpretation of Nietzsche is entirely consistent with this formulation; it is collectivism that gives the individual the opportunity to develop his potential through his ethnic group’s culture. However, the same speech also says that humanity still lacks one goal, and “The Way of the Creators” asks whether the solitary individual has the resources to become free in the sense of Nietzsche’s freedom (Z I, “The Way of the Creator”). Humanity’s cultural inheritance makes room for the individual, but it does not give him the right to claim that his Volk’s values are universally valid. Even the ability to revolutionize, to become a creator of a new value system, is a product of one’s ethnicity, since Nietzsche speaks of the necessity of overcoming the dragon of “Thou shalt.” Thus, Nietzsche’s teaching is not entirely collectivist because a self-consciously creative individual is required to realize his potential separately from his ethnic group. His naturalism allows for this because no one is born with a particular value system; everyone acquires it on the basis of their abilities and inclinations. The collectivist premise in Nietzsche’s teaching is necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of the Übermensch. In principle, a certain social group can ensure the emergence of creators of a new value system within its ranks. However, it cannot claim to possess such a system a priori, for then its opponents would have the right to take on the role of creators vis-à-vis it.
This distinction between collectivism and individualism is crucial for understanding Nietzsche’s views on the state. In “The New Idol,” the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters” because it mistakes itself for the embodiment of the people and speaks of “good” and “evil” in the name of this delusion (Z I, “The New Idol”). The state is an idol that appropriates the speech act of the creator of values and thereby devalues all other spheres by presenting them as merely instrumental. However, that Nietzsche did not oppose the state because he was inherently anti-hierarchical. On the contrary, BGE §§257-58 speaks of the state as a possibility for the development of exceptional individuals of the future. What the state does wrong is to impose its own value criteria on citizens, which makes it a destroyer of value, not a creator. Nietzsche’s social philosophy does not recognize the right of any external authority to predetermine the goals of life; therefore, when the state attempts to do this, it commits the kind of ontological error described in GM II, §6. A naturalist would have to object to the state’s imposition of its values on individuals as well as to their acceptance. Thus, the state’s destruction of the creative individual is another way in which it offends against axiology. The Nazi party program, as an example of National Socialism, contains both an anti-individualist component, which finds a response in Nietzsche’s teaching on the three metamorphoses, and an anticollectivist component, which can be countered by a naturalist interpretation of the Übermensch. However, neither of these two solutions solves the problem completely: National Socialism has its own concept of the state as the highest value, which is, as we have seen, incompatible with Nietzsche’s views.
3. The National Socialist Interpretation of Human Superiority
Nazi superiority was racial, essentialist, and collective: “essentialist” here meaning that morally and politically decisive traits are treated as intrinsic properties of racial membership rather than malleable achievements. Nazi ideology posits humanity as consisting of alleged distinct races, one (the “Aryans”) of which was paramount, and treats alleged racial traits as transmissible intergenerationally (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2025). Rosenberg posits blood as the source of cultural personality, interprets history as a conflict of racial souls, and subordinates institutions in his later accounts to preservation of the Volk (Rosenberg 1930, pp. 32–36, 106–18, 366–83). The doctrine is therefore not merely elitist: it is a combination of a criterion of birth with a collective subject which authorizes the state to preserve an imaginary biological order. An individual belonging to another race may therefore remain inferior, by definition, while an uncreative conformist of the right race remains presumptively racially superior: this counterexample reveals the doctrine’s ground.
Bäumler’s interpretation is more philosophically sophisticated: he defines Nietzsche as philosopher of “heroic realism,” a world of becoming and contest unified by will to power, then claims that Nietzsche’s anti-state statements are expressions of an older Germanic liberty (Bäumler 2024, pp. 109–30). In his epilogue he refers to Nietzschean individualism as a legend. For since Nietzsche treats the body as a hierarchy of commanding drives and history as that of peoples, races, and estates, Bäumler infers that it is through assuming the tasks of a concrete Volk that the individual may become strong. This is to assume, but without a further premise, that relations among agents are analogous to those within one. The state may then reappear as a Herrschaftsgebilde, structure of domination aimed at far-reaching goals (pp. 153–55): this is the main National Socialist interpretation for the essay, which collects that the creator is collectivized, inner hierarchy is politicized, and overcoming is a German historical task.
The method therefore renders Bäumler simultaneously valuable and unreliable: he announces that Nietzsche/s published contradictions are foregrounds or masks, whereas the hidden unity is revealed through unpublished notebooks, permitting counterevidence to confirm his thesis, while claiming that one might infer, on the basis of an organized body, relations of rule among citizens, which is a composition fallacy. The Nietzsche Archive and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche facilitated a nationalist public image, but they cannot bear all responsibility: Holub shows that blaming Elisabeth only obscures troubling material already present in Nietzsche’s texts (2002, pp. 215–32), while Aschheim documents both Nazi adoption and critics who found Nietzsche too individualist, anti-nationalist, hostile to racial thought (1992, pp. 249–54). The reception was therefore selective because the source contained both usable affinities and resistant commitments.
4. Points of Alignment
4.1 Anti-egalitarianism and hierarchy
The strongest alignment is formal anti-egalitarianism. Nietzsche denies that one moral code benefits all types of human and values “a pathos of distance” between higher and ordinary modes of life (BGE §§202–03, 257–60). He even finds that sustained obedience and constraint are conditions for the emergence of cultural freedom (BGE §188). National Socialism rejects universal equality too, organizing humanity hierarchically. These positions are not mere verbal echoes: both deny the liberal claim that equal personhood should be a basic limit for ranking. Nietzsche’s hierarchy is socially consequential too; BGE §258 says society encourages the production of exceptional beings. That would be an evasion to make Nietzsche’s elitism purely private or aesthetic. Bäumler is right that Nietzsche offers resources for an anti-democratic politics.
But the compatibility at this level is underdetermined. From “human beings are unequal in capacities and flourishing conditions,” it does not follow that races have fixed, rankable essences; from “exceptional excellence deserves priority,” it does not follow that all members of one ancestry out-rank all members of another. Nazi racial hierarchy adds premises about heredity, group homogeneity, and political entitlement. Consider two people who are classified by Nazi law to be within the same preferred race: one passively repeats the official values and the other displays discipline, independence, and creative excellence. The racial doctrine gives them the same inherited basis for superiority, but Nietzsche’s rankorder differentiates them strongly. Conversely, a creator excluded by Nazi classification can still instantiate Nietzschean excellence. Anti-egalitarianism is a shared logical form with incompatible membership conditions. The congruence is real but insufficient.
4.2 Pity, struggle, and will to power
A second affinity concerns Nietzsche’s critique of pity and weakness. Nietzsche asks for a genealogy of compassion rather than accepting it as intrinsically good; pity may preserve dependency, impose an outsider’s judgment on another’s difficulty, or obstruct the development of excellence (GM, Preface §§5–6; Anderson 2024). Nazi discourse could detach this critique from its diagnostic context and turn “hardness” into permission to exclude vulnerable groups. The detachment is possible because Nietzsche’s own rhetoric is often severe, and GM I §13 presents strength as something expressed in action rather than a neutral capacity that may simply remain unused. A defender cannot therefore say that Nazi readers invented every association with hardness.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche evaluates pity by its effect on agency, while Nazi racial ideology evaluates persons by category. A teacher who removes every difficulty may hinder a student’s self-development; that example illustrates Nietzsche’s concern without implying contempt for the student. The relevant question is whether assistance expands or diminishes the recipient’s power to shape a life. Nazi policy instead converted alleged weakness into an essential status and empowered the state to decide whose existence benefited the collective. One argument is developmental and context-sensitive; the other is classificatory and political. Their negative vocabulary overlaps, but their objects and inferences differ.
Will to power creates the deepest and most ambiguous affinity. In “Self-Overcoming,” living activity includes command, obedience, resistance, risk, and the continual overcoming of achieved form (Z II, “SelfOvercoming”). BGE §259 extends appropriation and dominance beyond inward psychology, so reducing power to harmless creativity would be textually selective. Bäumler’s agonistic reading therefore identifies a genuine feature: Nietzsche does not define power as liberal non-interference, and his martial metaphors can dignify struggle. At the same time, will to power is not a political instruction with one object. It can be expressed through inquiry, artistic formation, self-discipline, or command of others; scholarship remains divided over whether it is psychological, evaluative, or metaphysical (Anderson 2024). Nazi interpretation selects external domination, assigns it to a racial collective, and supplies state goals that Nietzsche’s concept does not entail. The alignment is moderate at the abstract level of agonistic agency but weak at the level of political conclusion.
Together, these affinities explain why appropriation was plausible, but neither of the points supply the racial and statist premises needed to complete the Nazi ideology.
5. Fundamental Contradictions
5.1 Achieved overcoming versus inherited race
The most fundamental contradiction concerns the basis and subject of superiority. For Nietzsche’s Übermensch, superiority is the outcome of overcoming, while for the Nazi concept, it is the outcome of descent. One’s values and power are placed on the first place in Nietzsche, while in the Nazi ideology, the question of race is placed there. It is true, though, that Nietzsche’s naturalism rarely goes further than suggesting the possibility of a given nature for a given development of drives. The “given” is denied in the matter of man’s stamping on the beast, and there is no room for an a priori human individuality of the type of “race” and “breeding.” This naturalism does not allow one to declare that any given man has the ability to turn into the Übermensch. But the difference is also because the causal condition for Nietzsche’s anthropology is not the same as the Nazi’s one. For the philosopher, drives can make the subject to a certain degree, but no one can become the creator of his life by nature, while the Nazi believes one can.
A thought experiment can show whether one could consider these concepts similar. Suppose two children had their identities switched at birth and grew up in different households. Nevertheless, they grew up to be two great men with identical abilities and the forms of self-overcoming. According to the Nazi ideology, one of them would still be superior because of his nationality. But according to Nietzsche, the other would have been no worse in terms of the value of his organization of life and would have been no less worthy of imitating. The criterion of self-overcoming would have been the same for both, but the criterion of nationality would have been different. Unless, according to Bäumler, the Nietzschean “type” should be interpreted as Volk or Race. For Nietzsche, type usually means the specific arrangement of drives and values; he rarely goes further than distributing people into groups within the limits of natural differences. The Nazi concept of race is different from the Nietzschean type, and the superiority claimed for the Aryan race is no longer seen as a striving but as something given. Both the ground and subject of the superiority are changed – from the becoming of the individual to its nature.
5.2 Value-creation versus ideological obedience
The second contradiction concerns moral authority. Nietzsche’s child posits after encountering the “thou shalts” of its ancestors, and its “yes” signifies the ability to create values independent of a transcendent or universal order. Nazi ethics, however, presupposes race, the people’s destiny, and the Führer as ontological foundations. Its prototype thinker does not question if the official value-table enhances the singular project; he/she must identify with it as a constituent part. The contradiction consists in the fact that Nietzsche’s free creator affirms herself via imposing forms and laws on her drives while the Aryan thinker follows the commands of an external, collectively sanctioned order.
In other words, a citizen who honestly revalued should have denied his racial command. If he remained faithful to his creative potential, the racial state would brand him a traitor; if he obeyed the orders, he had ceased to create values. What particular value he rejected is irrelevant to the conflict’s nature: it is enough that some value was created through this act of refusal. Bäumler attempts to resolve the contradiction by stating that the individual transforms into the absolute through the people’s historical task, which presupposes no extra-organic foundations. This attempt, however, contains two weaknesses. First, it stipulates the identical role of the creator and the vassal, thus, confusing their functions. Second, it makes the interpretation of the individual’s actions relative: one can always assert that one’s refusal was a manifestation of decadence while one’s following the Führer was a new creation. One can observe such a turnaround in Nazi ethics: it officially promotes innovation but simultaneously forbids transgressing racial norms. Therefore, the Nazi creator is not permitted to cross the fixed racial boundaries, thus, his activity is circumscribed by the racist orders. One should add that the Third Reich’s ideology reinterpreted Nietzsche’s overman to the Führer and incorporated the child within the Volk’s destiny. Thus, its official ethics did not liberate the drives but chained them to the race, national interests, and the Führer’s orders.
5.3 Culture’s higher person versus the total racial state
The third contradiction concerns political purpose. Bäumler correctly notes that Nietzsche is not a liberal individualist, and his early works and BGE allow interpreting his teaching in the context of organicist politics. Subsequently, in “The New Idol,” Nietzsche differentiates the leveling egalitarian state from the heroic Germanic state that organically necessitates command and obedience. This reading is partially convincing since it harmonizes Nietzsche’s emphasis on the value of rank, discipline, and culture with the political sphere. It also prevents premature conclusions about Nietzsche’s anti-statism, as his words can be juxtaposed to the Führer-state’s principles. However, Bäumler’s conjecture remains incorrect because Zarathustra’s criticism concerns the state’s usage of the people’s semantic categories of good and evil. The Führer-state, which formally proclaims the Aryan race’s mission, is even more egregious in its exploitation of the people’s spiritual potential.
Moreover, while BGE §258 depicts society as a condition for the highest men’s appearance, Bäumler’s state serves the Volk’s people’s exceptional individuals, thus, reversing the relationship. If the Nietzschean hierarchy of values follows the organicist philosophy of cultivation, the Nazi canons make the individual’s life dependent on his role in the racial state. Finally, the German thinker’s wording Herrschaftsgebilde, which Bäumler cites to support his view, is vague: it can mean both a holistic system requiring obedience and a political structure. One cannot say the same about the Third Reich’s concept of the state since it presupposes the individual’s complete devotion to the race and the Führer. In a nutshell, Nietzsche’s organicist politics can intersect with the Nazi ideology but cannot reside within the Führer-state’s framework because it presupposes the individual’s absolute dependence on the state.
5.4 “Good Europeans” versus racial nationalism and antisemitism
Nationalism and antisemitism provide corroborating, though not independently decisive, contradictions. They do not define the Übermensch in Z, so they cannot alone settle the research question. Yet they test whether Bäumler’s racial-Germanic reconstruction coheres with Nietzsche’s wider published work. In BGE §242, Nietzsche interprets modern Europe as moving toward a supranational type and treats nationalist feeling as a reaction within that process. His “good Europeans” are not liberal cosmopolitans, but neither are they servants of ethnic purity. Bäumler converts this European horizon into German leadership by claiming that Nietzsche’s attacks on Germany express a deeper Germanic mission. That reading is possible only if explicit criticism is subordinated to an inferred ethnic essence. Nietzsche’s relation to Jews requires equal precision. He uses troubling racial generalizations and is not a theorist of equal rights; exonerating him as a modern pluralist would be anachronistic. Nevertheless, BGE §§250–51 praises Jewish strength, criticizes contemporary anti-Jewish agitation, and imagines European assimilation rather than racial separation. Nietzsche’s hostile correspondence toward organized antisemitism further confirms the incompatibility (Kaufmann 1974, pp. 44–47), although the present argument does not depend on private intention. Nazi racial antisemitism makes Jewish ancestry an ineradicable negative status and racial separation a political imperative. Even Nazi thinkers noticed the obstacle: Aschheim records critics within the regime who argued that Nietzsche’s anti-nationalism, individualism, and opposition to racial thinking made him unsuitable (1992, pp. 252–54). Bäumler’s response—that pro-Jewish remarks are strategic masks—again protects his thesis by discounting contrary evidence. The Nazi interpretation therefore contradicts the best-supported direction of Nietzsche’s published position.
6. Final Evaluation: Influence, Affinity, and Appropriation
Three relationships have to be differentiated. Direct influence implies that one’s philosophy logically or temporally precedes another and contains ideas that are logically prior. Partial influence involves the use of concepts from a philosopher’s works to voice out independently provided ideas. Appropriation refers to choosing and adapting certain material for a different conceptual purpose. The evidence supporting direct influence is weak since Hitler does not mention Nietzsche in Mein Kampf, and symbolic connection fails philosophical analysis (Golomb and Wistrich 2002, 1-4). There is evidence of partial influence because Bäumler and Nazi ideologues genuinely adopted Nietzsche’s anti egalitarian and agonistic concepts. There is more evidence of appropriation since their construction required additional racist, nationalist, and statist assumptions.
Source criticism allows for advancing this mixed assessment. Kaufmann’s emphasis on sublimation helps explain how the self-overcoming motif informs Nazism without Nietzsche’s ugly racial and breeding metaphors. At the same time, Bäumler’s interpretation unveils the dark roots of National Socialism. Whyte points out that the very practice of interpreting Nietzsche as a Nazi thinker discounts his philosophy’s impact on other intellectuals (Whyte 2008, 171-94). Likewise, Holub prevents Elisabeth from appearing as a single driving force behind the distortion of her brother’s ideas. An equally compelling case has to be made for why Nazism is neither simply an extension of Nietzsche’s philosophy nor an entirely unrelated phenomenon that only appropriated a few concepts from him.
In terms of the five criteria, anti-egalitarianism is similar in its formulation; power is similar but only at the agonistic level; state and nation are related but only inasmuch as Nietzsche’s cultural hierarchy does not account for his own anti-statist and European particularism; the subject of superiority and source of value are both markedly opposed; and the racial essence is opposed to all of the above, most decisively. The last three bear more weight than the first two because they specify what, whose, and on what the superiority is based. Thus, the shared anti-egalitarianism does not overwhelm the opposition in the other two criteria. Nietzsche’s conceptualization has been made logically possible by the National Socialists’ engagement with his writings, but Bäumler’s reading practices transformed the grammatical logic of Nietzsche’s triad into a Nazi one.
7. Conclusion
Nietzsche’s Übermensch agrees with the Nazi interpretation of man in only a limited way. There is a genuine basis for the association: Nietzsche rejects universal equality, differentiates levels of human value, elevates discipline, and depicts life as a commanding, struggling activity. These ideas could underpin Nazism, and one cannot reject the association of Nazism with Nietzsche solely on the grounds of convenient lies by his sister or isolated mistranslations.
The differences, however, are more significant. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche speaks of overcoming as a future possibility of achieving one’s values; National Socialism enshrines existing hierarchies of races in the Reich’s laws. Bäumler tries to reconcile the two concepts by interpreting Nietzsche’s “inner command” as the State’s command and the people as a biological race whose creation is the Germanic mission. Each stage adds a new meaning that Nietzsche did not speak of and contradicts his known objections to idolizing the State, nationalism, and antisemitism. The connection between National Socialism and Nietzsche is thus inappropriate because their similarities are superficial and based on a willful but incompetent reading of Zarathustra. The two philosophies are only partially compatible since National Socialism reinterprets Ubermensch’s key concepts, transforming a philosophical ideal into an accessible political program.
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