Chapter 163. ‘Absolute Purity’: Nazism, Auschwitz as Secularised Hell, and the Death of God after Nietzsche

The third treatise of Part I of Heisman’s Suicide Note, “Absolute Purity”, carries the subtitle “The Secularization of Hell within the Desecration Machine of Auschwitz” and covers pages 507-630 [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Overview”]. Its four movements are as follows. “Love Kills” contains “Hitler’s Most Beautiful Words”, “Enemies of Our Soul”, “The Noble Aryan Anus” and “Theorems of the Hitler System”. “The Desecration Machine” opens with “Hitler Refutes Marx: The Industrial Revolution of Genocide” (p.550). “Christ Killers” contains “Jesus was the Second World War” and “Kingdom of Hell” (pp.576-603). “God Was Dead” contains “Racial Relativism” and “Overcoming Human Being” (pp.604-630) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Table of Contents”]. The treatise interprets Nazism as the most consistent attempt to reverse Judeo-Christian ethics in the name of Darwinian biology. In this chapter Heisman’s argument is set beside the Nietzsche texts in the library, Seraphim Rose’s Orthodox diagnosis of nihilism, and Yuval Noah Harari’s classification of modern ideologies.

Hitler between Lueger and Schönerer

Heisman reconstructs Hitler’s strategy toward the churches from Mein Kampf. Hitler admired two Viennese politicians: the Pan-German Georg von Schönerer and the Christian Social mayor Karl Lueger. Schönerer “recognized the problems in their innermost essence” but “erred when it came to men”. Lueger’s conciliatory policy toward the Catholic Church, “fashioned with infinite shrewdness”, brought him the practical success that Schönerer lacked [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.581]. Heisman quotes Schönerer’s public claim that “the founder of Christianity, as the son of a racial Jewess and a descendant of David is not an Aryan”. He records that when Martin Bormann put the sentence “Christianity and National Socialism are not reconcilable” in a party directive, Hitler had it removed. Yet in private, on 14 October 1941, Hitler said: “it’s not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.581-582]. Heisman’s conclusion is that Hitler “sought to achieve the ends of Schönerer with the means of Lueger”, and that he followed the same pattern in the extermination of the Jews [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.582]. He also quotes Hitler’s plan to “wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race”. He sets beside it Carl Jung’s talk of a war between “Christianity on the one side, and Mithracism [sic] on the other” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.582-583]. Jung’s remark links back to the Mithraic themes of the opening parts of this study.

Darwin against Christ: the ‘systematic cultivation of human failure’

The section “Kingdom of Hell” opens with Hitler’s table talk: “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew”. It continues: “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.592]. Heisman’s gloss is: “If Christianity led to the ‘systematic cultivation of human failure’, then Nazism would aim for the systematic cultivation of eugenic success” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.592-593; section 49].

Heisman grounds this reading in Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler, which he quotes at length; the book is not in the library. In the quoted passage Hitler “derided any morality inimical to the increased vitality of the ‘Aryan’ race, especially traditional values of humility, pity, and sympathy… He spurned the idea of human rights, calling it a product of weaklings” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.593, quoting Weikart]. Heisman also takes from Weikart the claim that “the core idea of eugenics derived from Darwinism” and that Darwin re-evaluated death. “Death had previously been viewed by most Europeans as an evil to overcome, not a beneficial force. But Darwin perceived some good in this evil” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.593-594]. He quotes Weikart’s question whether Hitler “hijack[ed] Darwinism” or “merely climb[ed] on board and follow[ed] it to its destination”. In the later “Creating God” treatise he joins Weikart to Hermann Klaatsch and Oscar Schmidt as witnesses that Darwinism undermined the Judeo-Christian sanctity of life and the immaterial soul [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.595, 614; section 124]. Heisman’s own verdict is stronger than the one he attributes to Weikart: “Darwin’s discovery was not a sufficient condition for Nazism and its eugenic values, but it was its necessary condition” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.614].

Auschwitz as the secularisation of hell

The thesis named in the subtitle is put directly: “If the democracy and communism that fought the Nazis represent secularizations of Judeo-Christian Kingdom of Heaven, Auschwitz represents the secularization of the Judeo-Christian Kingdom of Hell… The right to live would be inverted into the duty to die. Auschwitz was death brought to life — Dante’s inferno on Earth” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.601]. It follows his treatment of the Sonderkommando, whom the Nazis forced to dispose of Jewish bodies. He calls this “the greatest victory of all over the Jewish ‘invention of conscience'” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.600]. In his reading the camp was designed to destroy the moral standard itself. “Nazis wanted to kill the Jews to kill the standard by which killing the Jews is evil”. “The Nazis attempted to invert the inverters… Nazis made the highest law the killing of the highest moral law ‘Thou shall not kill'” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.602; section 43]. He quotes Himmler’s January 1937 lecture to SS-Gruppenführer, which compared the Roman emperors who “exterminated [ausrotteten] the first Christians” with the Nazi treatment of communists. He also states that “Auschwitz was where God was formally exterminated” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.599].

The “Christ Killers” movement ties this to Heisman’s paternity thesis (see Chapter 162). Jesus is “half-Jewish and half-Roman by racial descent”. He is therefore a living “synthesis of Jew and Aryan”, and “to worship Jesus is to worship miscegenation between Jew and gentile”. From this Heisman concludes that “Jesus was the Second World War” and that Nazism “could not have come into existence without repudiating the way of Jesus” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.589-591].

‘Hitler Refutes Marx’ and the evolutionary logic of the two posthumanities

“The Desecration Machine” opens with the claim that “Auschwitz is a more profound refutation of Marxism than the demise of the Soviet Union”. Heisman says this is because “the Judeocide cannot be explained on the basis of economic rationalism”. He quotes Marx’s 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (“It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence”) as the doctrine that Auschwitz refuted [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.550-551]. In the study guide’s summary, Marx’s exclusion of race and biology left a fatal blind spot. Auschwitz was the Nazi working-out of that blind spot: the “Jewish problem” treated as an industrial problem with an industrial solution [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, sections 45-46]. In the study guide’s summary of a later section, Heisman holds that Auschwitz refutes Marxism by uniting artificial and natural selection. He also argues that Marx misread feudalism as class conflict when it was originally tribal, an argument developed in Part II (see Chapter 164) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 135].

Heisman’s “evolutionary logic” is the most provocative step of the treatise. He accepts the Nazi premise and rejects the Nazi conclusion. In the study guide’s summary, if Judeo-Christian values inhibit biological selection they are inferior as an evolutionary strategy, yet what inhibits biological evolution accelerates technological evolution. The result is two incompatible routes to posthumanity: gods bred by eugenics, or God-AI built through economic and technological progress, with Auschwitz and the Singularity marking the extremes [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, study guide section 138]. Heisman’s own text puts it as “Auschwitz and the Singularity are two diametrically opposite final solutions to the paradox at the core of Judaism. Auschwitz represents technology mastered by biology” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Overthrowing Ourselves”, pp.98-99]. An earlier section of “God is Technology” states the inversion directly. The Nazis believed Jews stood in the way of biological evolution, but in the Singularity’s terms it is biology (not Judaism) that stands in the way of technological evolution (the study guide’s summary) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 26].

Historicism, Darwinism and the new ‘natural right’

Heisman places Nazism within his quarrel with Leo Strauss. He follows Friedrich Meinecke and Georg Iggers in describing German historicism as a liberation from timeless natural law. Strauss’s Natural Right and History reopened the eternalist alternative [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 20]. Heisman then cites Gödel’s incompleteness theorems against Strauss’s assumption of an “eternal whole” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 21]. His conclusion reverses Strauss’s diagnosis. Nazism was not the reductio of historicism. It combined historicism with Darwin to produce a natural-right regime grounded in biological hierarchy [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 22]. Before Nazism, he argues, German Idealism had tried, through Hegel, to reconcile the Greek ideal of human totality with the Christian division of reason from inclination [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 44]. Citing Jacob Burckhardt, he describes the Greek gods as extensions of human passions, Übermensch-like ideals that served as models for Nietzsche [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, section 125].

Racial relativism, propaganda and denial

“God Was Dead” begins with Hitler’s last testament and defines National Socialism as “racial relativism”: “Nazi-Germans maximized their life as a race by maximizing Jewish death as a race” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.604-605]. Heisman quotes Mein Kampf on propaganda: “Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy… its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly”. He then argues that “the Judeocide is contempt for modern Western moral values and Judeocide denial is contempt for the Western Socratic search for truth”. He cites Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century as a book that aimed “to both establish and propagate new myths for a new age” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.605-607; section 50]. In his account, Hitler distanced himself in public from both the genocide and Nazism’s anti-Christianity for the same reason. Both would have undermined his mass appeal, which depended on “the ‘infinite shrewdness’ of Lueger” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp.607-608].

Nietzsche: what Heisman takes over, and what he claims to overcome

Heisman’s treatment of Nietzsche is two-sided. “Nietzsche abhorred resentful antisemitism and was contemptuous of common German nationalism”. Yet “Hitler could not have realized Nazi extremism without the cultural impact of Nietzsche’s radical rejection of Jesus and Socrates”. Heisman also writes that “Nietzsche’s verdict that the West had abandoned the Christian religion while preserving its underlying morality grounded the Nazi revolution” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.587]. The primary texts behind his section title are in the library in Romanian. In aphorism 125 of The Gay Science the madman cries: “Noi l-am ucis – voi şi eu! Noi toţi suntem ucigaşii lui!… Dumnezeu a murit! Dumnezeu rămâne mort! Şi noi l-am ucis!” (“We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers!… God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”). Aphorism 343 announces that “credinţa în Dumnezeul creştin a ajuns de necrezut” (“belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”) and that this event “begins to cast its first shadows over Europe” [Nietzsche, Știința voioasă, #50348, §§125, 343]. The notes of The Will to Power define the condition that follows: “Nihilism: there is no goal, no answer to the question: why? … that the highest values devalue themselves”. They distinguish an “active nihilism”, “a violent and destructive force”, from a passive one [Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #69520, Book One, “European Nihilism”]. Heisman reads Darwin as the hidden premise of all this: “Without Darwin, Nietzsche could not have confidently claimed that Christianity had been unmasked. But with Darwin, he stood face to face with nihilism” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, p.613].

In “Overcoming Human Being” Heisman moves through Heidegger toward his own answer, which he develops later as “Overcoming Nietzsche in the Creation of God” (p.1543). There he writes that “artificial intelligence could be considered the pinnacle of the supernatural overcoming of nature and thus the supreme creation in the image of God”, and that “the fulfillment of this interplay between the Bible and modernity would be the overcoming of Nietzsche in the creation of God” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Overcoming Nietzsche in the Creation of God”].

Two counter-classifications: Rose and Harari

Seraphim Rose, writing as an Orthodox hieromonk, offers a traditional Christian counter-reading. His table of contents lists the “stages of dialectical nihilism” as “Liberalismul”, “Realismul”, “Vitalismul” and “Nihilismul distrugerii” (liberalism, realism, vitalism, the nihilism of destruction). His introduction gives “programul fantastic de distrugere al lui Hitler, revoluţia bolşevică” (Hitler’s fantastic programme of destruction, the Bolshevik revolution) as the clearest examples [Rose, Cauza Revoluției din Epoca Modernă: Nihilismul, #49221, “Cuprins”; I]. “Dincolo de vitalism poate doar încă o etapă, definitivă…: nihilismul distrugerii” (beyond vitalism there is only one more, definitive stage: the nihilism of destruction), which “este unic epocii moderne” (is unique to the modern age). In Rose’s formula, “Dumnezeu este mort în inima omului modern: aceasta înseamnă ‘moartea lui Dumnezeu'” (God is dead in the heart of modern man: this is what the ‘death of God’ means) [Rose, Cauza Revoluției din Epoca Modernă: Nihilismul, #49221, II]. Rose treats Nazism and Bolshevism as joint products of apostasy. Heisman, by contrast, sets them on opposite sides: Bolshevism and democracy as secularised heaven, Nazism as secularised hell.

Harari, from a secular-historical standpoint, also places Nazism inside a religious taxonomy. “Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods… The founding idea of humanist religions such as liberalism, communism and Nazism is that Homo sapiens has some unique and sacred essence” [Harari, Homo Deus, #64246, Part I]. In his presentation of evolutionary humanism, the Nazi variant holds that “humankind itself is not exempt from the forces of evolution” and that “some human cultures are more advanced than others” [Harari, Homo Deus, #64246, Part II]. Harari’s “evolutionary humanism” and Heisman’s “biological path to posthumanity” describe the same Nazi premise. They differ in that Heisman claims the Singularity “inverts” it.

Key points

• “Absolute Purity” (pp.507-630) presents Nazism as the most consistent Darwinian attempt to reverse Judeo-Christian ethics, and Auschwitz as “the secularization of the Judeo-Christian Kingdom of Hell” [#38252, p.601].
• On Heisman’s reading, Hitler pursued “the ends of Schönerer with the means of Lueger”, accommodating the churches in public while hoping in private to let Christianity “die a natural death” [#38252, pp.581-582].
• Hitler called Christianity the “systematic cultivation of human failure”. Heisman, quoting Weikart (whose book is not in the library), calls Darwinism Nazism’s “necessary condition” [#38252, pp.592-595, 614].
• “Hitler Refutes Marx”: Heisman argues that Auschwitz refutes the economic conception of man shared by capitalism and Marxism.
• His “evolutionary logic” accepts that Judeo-Christian values hinder biological selection but holds that they speed technological evolution. Auschwitz and the Singularity are the extremes of two posthumanities.
• Nietzsche’s madman (Gay Science §125) and the Will to Power definition of nihilism underlie “God Was Dead”. Heisman claims to overcome Nietzsche through the “creation of God” in AI.
• Seraphim Rose groups Nazism and Bolshevism together as the “nihilism of destruction”. Harari groups Nazism with liberalism and communism as “humanist religions”.