cognizant of National Socialism’s ideological program and political goals, which were unambiguously predicated on the Rassenprinzip. As the German legal historian Bernd Rüthers has written, “There was nothing the least ambiguous about National Socialism’s political aims. They were readily discernible to anyone who could read.”130
The race thinking that animated the Nazi Weltanschauung was on display at every party rally. It pervaded nearly every speech that Hitler delivered. Point 4 of the 1920 NSDAP Program proclaimed, “None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the Volk: No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the Volk.”131 As the Heidegger biographer Hugo Ott has remarked, “Anyone capable of exalting Hitler’s rule as licensed by the ‘writ of Being’ necessarily partook of his lethal anti- Semitism.”132
Nazi anti-Semitism was denuded of any and every semblance of moderation. Instead, it assumed the characteristics and traits of a political religion: of an all-encompassing, salvific worldview. Consequently, racial anti-Semitism was suffused with an eschatological dimension that contrasted sharply with more moderate and traditional religious criticisms of Judaism, in which “conversion” offered an option of last resort.
In light of the various interpretive mystifications that have arisen with respect to Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism, it is worth stressing that Heidegger never raised any principled objections to Nazi race doctrine. Instead, he consistently sought to reconcile race thinking with the tenets of his own fundamental ontology. To do so required no great intellectual adjustment on Heidegger’s part, since, from the very beginning, his Denken was profoundly indebted to the dogmas of German particularism—a standpoint that was indebted to the tenets of race thinking.
Well attuned to the Zeitgeist, Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte consciously fused fundamental ontology with a völkisch understanding of history. Geschicht-lichkeit, in its Heideggerian iteration, furnished an ontologicalhistorical warrant for Deutschtum’s providential self-understanding qua Herrenrasse. Heidegger never sought to mask his conviction that “only someone who is German [der Deutsche] is capable of poetically articulating Being in an originary way.”133