The publication of some of Martin Heidegger’s “black notebooks”—unpublished writings from the Nazi era—have shown the extent of the support for Hitler given by the prominent German philosopher and the centrality of anti-Semitism to his worldview. A forthcoming volume of the notebooks contains extensive writing on the Holocaust, refuting the once widely-held assumption of his “silence” on the subject. It turns out he was certain the Jews brought it on themselves, as Donatella Di Cesare writes:
[I]t is no surprise that Heidegger should discuss the Shoah and consider it from both philosophical and political viewpoints. Selbstvernichtung—self-destruction—is the key word. [Heidegger’s] argument is that the Jews destroyed themselves, and no fingers should be pointed at anyone except the Jews themselves. . . .
Heidegger does no more than draw his conclusion from everything he has said previously. The Jews are the agents of modernity and have disseminated modernity’s evils. They have besmirched the spirit of the West, undermining it from within. Accomplices of metaphysics, the Jews have everywhere brought about the acceleration of technology. The charge could hardly be more serious. Only Germany, with her people’s iron cohesion, could stem the devastating impact of technology. This is why the global conflict was primarily a war of Germans against Jews. If the Jews were annihilated in the death camps, it was because of the mechanism that they fomented by plotting to achieve world domination. The link between technology and the Shoah should not be disregarded: it was Heidegger himself who alluded to it elsewhere. What is Auschwitz if not the industrialization of death, the “fabrication of corpses”?
Read more on Corriere della Sera: http://www.corriere.it/english/15_febbraio_09/heidegger-jews-self-destructed-47cd3930-b03b-11e4-8615-d0fd07eabd28.shtml