Volkstod or Rassenselbstmord

This chapter considers the downfall of civilization within the National Socialist discourse. Their recurrent references to antiquity to explain the various causes of Volkstod—the “death of a people”—attest to the degree of world-historical importance that they attached to the disappearance of the great and powerful Indo-Germanic civilizations. Rassenselbstmord, or “racial suicide,” is also discussed here in the context of antiquity. The lessons of the past constituted an unmistakable warning in bold print: complacence, miscegenation, fratricidal war, and neglect of the superiority of Nordic blood had all cost the Indo-Germanic race dearly, leading to the deaths of Greece and Rome, its two finest and most beautiful expressions before National Socialist Germany.

From Stone to Flesh

This chapter examines the body of the Third Reich's new man—a body first and foremost, and one which could only be achieved through recourse to an antiquity that the Nazis held up as the archetype and canon of racial beauty. The Greeks and Romans were Indo-Germanic populations, their bodies fulfillments of the Nordic type, which was vital to maintain or restore in the racial present. The Greek and Roman body was preserved in ancient statuary, which Hitler put forward as the standard for emulation by the German people. The sublime, fully realized archetype of the Aryan body would, by saturating the public with its image and continually proclaiming its perfection, nourish the same standard of beauty among its contemporary cousins.

The Choreography of the End

This chapter details how the Nazis had envisioned their end and sought to fashion it for the generations to come. While it was certainly preferable to emerge victorious, should it prove impossible they determined to shift focus, to envisage and even to welcome absolute defeat, and to actively contribute to that defeat. For this deliberate welcoming of death, this surrender by suicide, to possess real meaning, the Nazis' end would have to be so spectacular that it would resound for all eternity, giving birth to a heroic myth comparable to those left behind by their glorious Indo-Germanic ancestors. The chapter thus shows how the Nazis' relationship to time betrayed a profound anxiety about the end, an anxiety that could be assuaged only by the certainty of being able to master the image and the memory they would leave for future generations.

History as Racial Struggle

This chapter illustrates the National Socialist vision of history, in which the class conflict of material determinism was replaced by the racial conflict of biological determinism. Here, social Darwinism and racism converged in an unending binary dynamic of two peoples locked in mortal combat. The chapter reveals that the ideological training materials of the National Socialist party and its various organs described six thousand years of race war and three thousand years of Jewish hatred for the Indo-Germanic master race. The strong, harrowing drama of this rewriting of ancient history, particularly that of Rome, this chapter demonstrates, was perfect for the construction of the racial enemy as a monstrous terror.

Introduction

This introductory chapter examines the scope of the relationship between National Socialism and antiquity, a topic that historians appear to neglect despite the fact that there have been precedents as to the political use of history—appealing to the past to justify political power in the present—which is a frequent phenomenon, all the more so in totalitarian regimes that seek to anchor their revolutionary political intentions in the depths of historical precedent. The possibilities afforded by the past appear, moreover, to have held great significance for National Socialism. Nazi Germany had coveted and revered the past as a sacred place of origin.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes the previous chapters in order to reconstruct the Nazi myth—a myth of death that was nevertheless intended to impregnate others, to awaken the future race and urge new generations of Aryans to rise up once more, out of sacred respect for their ancestors. From the beginning, the leaders of the Third Reich abandoned the realm of history to live in the realm of myth, where everything was sign or symbol and where all chance was perceived as being of necessity. Hitler and his associates responsible for the regime were haunted by myths, obsessed with imitating the acts of their predecessors, possessed by visions of reliving the great ancient epics. From here, the chapter turns to the historian's role to snuff out the myth, and thus to overturn the Nazis' manipulation of time and history.

From Empire to Reich

This chapter examines Rome as a source of political, military, and even architectural inspiration for Nazism. A source of infinite lessons and precise instructions, the history of Rome showed not only how to build empires but also the tangible symbols of that empire. National Socialism would thus have to pursue its imperial pretensions by imitating and eclipsing the shadows of the ancients in the granite of Nuremberg, where once the living, breathing mass of the Volksgemeinschaft met and rallied in congress, now only a desolate wasteland haunted by the devastation of the Nazi Walpurgisnacht. This chapter describes an organic link between the monuments of modern Germany, the distant history of the race, and its imperial future.

The Racial State and Totalitarian Society

This chapter discusses the reading of Plato offered by Nazism and consequently by a large part of the German academy in the 1930s and 1940s, which understood Plato as the philosopher of dictatorship and the racial state. Here, Plato and his theory of the three races, the tripartite state of philosopher-kings, soldiers, and producers, had become the Helleno-Nordic precursor to National Socialist racism and its conception of society. Moreover, between 1933 and 1945, Plato remained strongly linked to Sparta. A racist, eugenicist, military state, Sparta received Hitler's seal of approval for its biological selectionism as the first truly racist and Nordic state, a legitimate precursor to the Third Reich.

Mens sana

This chapter details the National Socialist movement's educational reforms. Nazi anti-intellectualism, which rejected the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, disdained abstract thought in favor of decisive action. In addition, modern individualism was cast aside in favor of a holistic view of man: not a fully autonomous, self-sufficient atom but an inseparable member of a group, without which the individual would wither and die. This two-pronged revolution was backed, with consummate political opportunism—and perhaps occasionally genuine conviction—by respected scholars of the ancient world, professors of classics and history, who sought to promote the study of antiquity as a paradigm of proper values for the youth of the new Germany. Their self-appointed mission in the new Reich was nothing less than to save the humanities.

A Nordic Mediterranean

This chapter illustrates the drawing of Greece and Rome into the orbit of the Nordic race and its civilization—upon which the reimagining of the new rhetoric on racial origins was founded. The Nordicism of the Greeks and Romans was confirmed by historians and racial scientists and publicized in a number of ways, not all of them scholarly. This rhetoric was also adopted by the regime's political leaders, to a surprising degree. Yet this issue assumed a singular importance for the Nazi leadership, because it allowed them to define and promote their vision of the Nordic race, including its proprietary claims on Europe's most prestigious cultural and historical heritage, as a prelude to their other plans for territorial conquest.