By the 1930s, the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche had been effectively coopted by the German far-right, largely through the mediation of his sister (who belonged to a proto-Nazi group) and his younger cousins (outright Nazis), who were responsible for inserting racist and anti-Semitic ideas into his posthumously published work. While Nietzsche was a critic of both Judeo-Christian morality and modern liberalism, he was hardly what Hitler’s admirers made him out to be. Hugh Drochon gives credit for the rejection of this view of Nietzsche to the scholar Walter Kaufmann:
Kaufmann . . . arrived in the U.S. in 1939; after graduating from Williams College he interrupted his doctoral studies at Harvard to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Force and served as an interrogator for military intelligence during the war. In Berlin he chanced upon an edition of Nietzsche’s collected works and was immediately—like so many before and after him—captivated. Having discharged his duty, he returned to Harvard resolved to write his PhD on Nietzsche.
One point of disagreement [with his subject concerned] religion. While the “death of God” is still one of Nietzsche’s most famous pronouncements, in 1961 Kaufmann wrote Faith of a Heretic. Born in Freiburg in 1921, Kaufmann had been raised a Lutheran, but realizing he didn’t understand the Holy Ghost and that all his grandparents were Jewish (his father had converted, but not his mother), he abjured Christianity and set off to study under the Reform rabbi Leo Baeck at the Berlin Institute for Judaic Studies in 1938. Those studies were cut short by emigration, but the interest in religion would continue.
Read more on Times Literary Supplement: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/walter-kaufmann-stanley-corngold-review-hugo-drochon/