

Background: The Frauen Warte was the Nazi Party’s bi-weekly illustrated magazine for women. This is an article from the 1st June issue, 1940. It encourages German women to have children even in the midst of war. It is also an example of the relentless Nazi drive for an optimistic outlook on life. Friedrich Würzbach was a Nietzsche scholar who managed a career under the Nazis, despite having a Jewish mother (he claimed she was not his natural mother). This is a remarkable example of convoluted Nazi philosophy, and I am not sure what the average woman reading it thought of it. I would be surprised if it made much sense to her. The source: Friedrich Würzbach, “Vom Geist der Rasse,” NS Frauen Warte, (6), #20 (1938), p. 625. The Spirit of Race Every woman has probably had to listen to the complaint that she does not think logically. A husband makes the judgment, and to him illogical thinking means a defect in thinking and intellectual ability. Many a real woman has probably thought to herself after hearing such a statement by her husband: it may be that my thinking is not logical, but I do get results, and sometimes my conclusion was better suited to life than that of my husband. As Nietzsche rightly said: “The degree and nature of a person’s sexuality reaches into every last corner of his being.” Nietzsche recognized the dependence of the spirit on sex and blood, and he was the first who spoke of the spirit of a race, and that a German sees and solves problems that a Latin cannot see, and vice versa. For them Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer were not only German philosophers, but also philosophical Germans, people who did philosophy from their race, from their blood, not from their spirits. But there was an era that thought differently; it was irrelevant where a truth was discovered or a problem solved by a European, a Negro, a Jew, a Chinese, or an Indian. If something was right, it was true for all people, even for non-humans. angels, and gods, for all eternity, as the Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl arrogantly proclaimed a decade ago. The influence of race and blood, he thought, could only confuse and mislead the intellect; pure intellect freed itself from the prejudices of a particular people. Only it could discover eternal, universal truths. There was a so-called aristocracy of the spirit, which viewed with contempt German, Italian, or French philosophizing. Nietzsche also had sharp words against the larva of such chatterers, revealing their true nature. There is a passage in his unpublished writings: “There is only the nobility of blood. Those who speak of an aristocracy of the spirit generally are trying to conceal something; as is well known, it is a favorite phrase used by ambitious Jews. The spirit alone does not ennoble; there must first be something than ennobles the spirit. — And what is that? Blood.” Thus it is blood, race, that ennobles the spirit; spirit is the flowering of our blood, and if blood is weak and impure, so also is the spirit. Spirit along means nothing, and this abstract and “pure” spirit is what we we call intellect, represented in the intellectuals. When our movement fought the intellectuals, many thought that we were against the spirit and spirituality. No, what we fought and still fight is an unfruitful spirit without blood and race, a colorless “pure” spirit, that “superior artistry of the spirit,” which requires nothing, because it lacks a connection to blood and race. When European humanity discovered intellectual thinking two and a half millennia ago, it was at first like a divine trance. One believed that step by step, from one logical step to another, the world’s riddles could be solved and all of humanity’s mistakes and errors would gradually bow to divine logic. Socrates and Plato were the beginning, Kant the end. Humanity needed more than two millennia to learn logical thinking, for blood and race were strong and always colored “pure” reason. Then Kant came along and wrote the critique of pure reason, showing its limits and proved for all time that such pure reason was all too human, and dangerous and contrary to nature when applied to real life. Blood and race lead people to the power of nature, the spirit that flows from these sources, and which cannot mislead. What matured over two and a half thousand years cannot be eliminated overnight. It will take a long educational process to raise spiritual people from the uncorrupted layers of our people, particularly from the peasantry. The delicate and sensitive, but also valuable, plant of the spirit must again find its natural soil: a healthy body, rootedness in race and homeland, and particularly the protection and guidance of the youth. This is the highest and most difficult task of the Ordensburgen [Nazi residential schools for the future party elite]. “All spirit becomes visible over time in the body,” Nietzsche was convinced. It is thus no accident that pure intellectuals are ugly. “I see people who lack all but one thing — I call them cripples.” The intellectual is a cripple; his spirit is a sick growth that contrasts with his weak physicality; a pale, ugly growth, bloodless and pale as a rootless sprout in a cellar, and therefore full of hatred against the rooted greenness and closeness to the soil of genuine spirituality. About twelve years ago, the Freiburg students invited me to give a lecture. The Jewish professor Edmund Husserl had founded a large and influential school at the University of Freiburg. I spoke against him, against his insolent and arrogant intellectuality, against this cripple that hated the sound thinking and feeling of his students, who wanted to miseducate and cripple them. Nietzsche’s phrase found its proof there: “the young person has lost his home and doubts all morality and ideas.” Since the cowardly opponents were unwilling to discuss, I attempted to make the then minister of education aware of this danger for our youth. I was laughed at, and told it was not that bad. I was desperate, for I did not know then that we were preparing something that would in time be victorious, and the later thanks of some of my listeners who had learned from my words and joined the movement justified this desperate period of struggle. I knew nothing then about National Socialism. Nietzsche was my leader. He, however, represented what we today stand for: A great improvement in spirit and body, and a hatred of those intellectual cripples who betray life, and who, themselves sinking, want to drag us with them. The spirit of race is also the spirit of nature. Kant proclaimed the highest model of humanity to be the “favorite of nature,” who speaks to us “as nature.” We once again hear his voice. [Page copyright © 2010 by Randall Bytwerk. No unauthorized reproduction. My e-mail address is available on the FAQ page.] Frauen Warte Page. Go to thePage. Go to the 1933-1945 Page. Go to the German Propaganda Home Page.