Academic Nazism: "People and State in the Worldview of National Socialism"

In a recently uploaded lecture, British historian and Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson discussed the issue of legitimisation of Nazi ideology in German academia and universities during the 1920s and 1930s and through to the end of World War Two, such as the fact that some German historians produced “tendentious historical justifications for German territorial claims in Eastern Europe.” Ferguson suggests in summation that far from inoculating against Nazism in this period, a university degree made it more likely that one would embrace the ideology.

Whether or not one agrees with Ferguson’s broader conclusion or his attempts to draw a comparison with present-day Western academia (e.g. responses to the 7 October attack in Israel and the aftermath), the historical topic of ‘academic Nazism’ is itself interesting and a useful illustration of how very bad ideas can be legitimised under the guise of seemingly sophisticated, academic discourse.

The following document, which I have translated from German, was a lecture given in 1934 at the Kant Society at the University of Halle by Dr. Otto Koellreutter (1883-1972), a German jurist who joined the Nazi Party. His lecture, entitled “State and People in the Worldview of National Socialism,” is a good introductory example of ‘academic Nazism.’ The lecture is essentially an attempt to defend the validity of the Nazi conception of the state (Staat) and people (Volk), contrasting this conception not only with the theories and arguments of other German academics at the time (in particular the work of Carl Schmitt) but also the conception of the people and state in Fascism and Bolshevism.

To be sure, Koellreutter’s lecture here does not advocate for some of the more harmful specifics of Nazi ideology like the anti-Semitism that took on the form of genocide or conquest of Eastern European territory in the name of acquiring Lebensraum (‘living space’). If anything, the lecture betrays a sense of naiveté. For Koellreutter, National Socialism’s ‘völkisch’ emphasis on the German people as embodying the highest values of biological life unit/entity (biologische Lebenseinheit) and political greatness (politische Große) could be applied internally and externally, and could be copied by other governments, potentially forging a new order of peace. The term völkisch is itself difficult to translate, but it could be generally characterised as awareness of one’s ethnic identity and upholding it.

To summarise the main points of the lecture: