Nietzsche's Influence on Nazis

Regardless of the ways humanity has evolved towards intellectual perfection, the conflicts of history will continue to be analyzed and examined for the everlasting cause of conflict. Most of these historical events tend to resemble a progressive movement in philosophical thinking. Perhaps the most controversial conflict of history came with the anti-Semitist views of Adolph Hitler and the Nazism that was brought forth as the direct cause of World War II. The mass hysteria of …

…anarchists and anti-Semites--where it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violet, though with a different odor.” For Nietzsche, anti-Semitism's odor is distinct—it “stinks of ressentiment” , as he might argue, did the German Nazi regime. Nietzsche is no friend of National Socialism, and though he was appropriated by the Nazis and blamed for Nazi thinking, his works indict the kind of nationalist, socialist, mass-movement that swept through Germany in the early twentieth century.