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Book: The Cause of Hitler's Germany
Quotes of Book: The Cause of Hitler's Germany
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  1. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    During the twenties, Germany's youngsters {both rightist and leftist} were in the vanguard of the growing rebellion against the Weimar Republic. The youngsters were rebelling against the establishment in the name of every fundamental idea which they had been taught by every influential spokesman of that establishment
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  2. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    Both sides in Germany's cultural battle elevated feeling above reason. And both sides experienced the same basic kind of feeling. The left called it alienation or the angst of nothingness. The right called it götterdämmerung or the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The common denominator is the conviction of doom.
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  3. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    The final product of the camps, one which the Nazis carefully shaped, was death. What the SS shaped was mass death without a murmur of protest; death accepted placidly by victims and killers alike; death carried out not as any kind of exception, not as an act of purposeful vengeance or hatred, but as casual, smiling, even homey routine, often against a background of colorful flower beds and to the accompaniment of lilting operetta music. It was to be death as a confirmation of all that had preceded it, death as a last demonstration of absolute power and absolute unreason, death as the final triumph of Nazism over man and over the human spirit.
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  4. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    German socialism had to overcome this "private," that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community.7 Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property-so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property. If "ownership" means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed, a contentless deed, which conferred no rights on its holder.
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  5. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it-or its representative, the state-deems this desirable. Fascism, said one of its leading spokesmen, Alfredo Rocco, stresses the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, in behalf of society. . . . For Liberalism {i.e., individualism}, the individual is the end and society the means; nor is it conceivable that the individual, considered in the dignity of an ultimate finality, be lowered to mere instrumentality. For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.5
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  6. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    The sneer is expressed by philosophic movements which boastfully offer no message, by educators who deliberately teach no subject matter, by artists whose work eliminates recognizable content, by psychologists who hold that ideas are mere rationalizations, by novelists such as Thomas Mann, and by all the alleged valuers in all these groups, which purport to love Mankind as a whole, a love whose reality may be gauged by a single fact: the same groups extol Mankind, while vilifying men-and man.
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  7. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach. In essence, the spokesmen of these earlier times did not know what reason is, or, therefore, what it makes possible in human life.
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  8. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    The Nazi} death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s."10 What had those Ph.D.'s been taught to think in their schools and universities-and where did such ideas come from?
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  9. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?
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  10. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for centuries had no access to most of this knowledge. The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach.
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  11. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    The worker," said August Bebel {a revered prewar party leader}, "has little interest in a state in which political liberty is merely the goal. . . . What good is mere political liberty to him if he is hungry?
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  12. Leonard Peikoff _ The Cause of Hitler's Germany

    Observe in this connection that the Nazis, correctly, regarded the power of propaganda as an indispensable tool.
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