Exploring the Background Ideology of An Evil Regime

 There has perhaps been more attention given to the various aspects of the Third Reich over the past 80 or so years since World War II, and much research has focused upon military history, the Holocaust, and the personage of Adolf Hitler.  However, one of the lacking areas of research for this period of history is the background of how the National Socialist Party (Nazis) came into existence.  And that raises many questions worthy of research.  For one, what things did influence the evolution of National Socialism?  Secondly, how did those concepts converge to construct a new ideology, and to what degree did the Nazis fully identify with earlier movements?  Finally, when studying the Third Reich, one notices that Hitler and the Nazis actually ended up persecuting people they shared views with - why was that?   These are the questions warranting a need to tackle, and now they will be the focus of this Ph.D. dissertation. 

As with anything else, the important foundational fact in researching this or any other topic is that things do not appear suddenly out of a vacuum - somewhere along the way, there are factors that shape, influence, and contribute to the overall final product.  While some historians have indeed specialized in this aspect of the research - two that come to mind are Richard Weikart and Benjamin Wiker - for the most part it is often shrugged off by academia as being too broad of a topic with the impossibility of narrowing down. This is a problem that is evident at the university level in dealing with faculty.  One faces challenges with this whole thing due to the fact that there are serious barriers to research - one, surprisingly, is the academic institution itself.  This is a major reason why this topic has not been indulged from a more scholarly perspective, although tons of popular literature on topics such as Nazism and the occult are widely available, and the recourse is to often use these sources as a resource to find primary source material, as surprisingly these more "conspiratorial" works so easily dismissed by academics do have a wealth of primary source leads for more in-depth research.  And, in the case of Nazism, it is also important to know German as well, which I do have extensive language study in.  One thing to remember though is to "stay the course" despite garnering opposition, and in time the research will compensate itself. 

In conducting research on these ideological sources, it is admittedly a challenge to sort things out, but in doing so research has been narrowed to four primary areas - occultism, political movements that arose at the end of the 19th century in Germany and Austria, the impact of social Darwinism and also the issue of homosexuality in early Nazi circles, and finally the philosophical views of Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Martin Heidegger.  The approach is to treat each of these areas individually, and then see how they converge and intersect in creating what became the National Socialist movement.  The oft-overlooked question, however, would be how the Nazis cherrypicked ideas and then discarded the sources of those ideas when they were no longer convenient.  The jailing, for instance, of Karl Haushofer, the geopolitical professor who more or less gave Hitler the idea of Lebensraum, and the falling from grace of Rudolf von Sebottendorf, the early German occultist who founded the Thule Society, an occultic sect that birthed the National Socialist Party as a political arm.  For a lot of this type of material, German-language sources in the form of correspondence and official government documents is crucial, as the Nazis had a public face that often belied their origins and seemed to contradict them.  Aside from identifying the ideological sources themselves, this is one of the more important factors that merits further examination outside of "conspiratorial" literature as was popular on these topics during the 1970s and 1980s.  

Much scholarship in this area - including some well-meaning professors at the particular university where this dissertation will be submitted - casually dismiss the possibility of an organized National Socialist ideology.  While it is understandable where they are coming from (it is agreed that the Nazis were one of the evilest movements to ever exist), caution must be exercised to avoid being too dismissive of this.  In order for a movement to have success - both good and evil movements - having an organized platform of ideas is crucial.  And, while the Nazis tended to be somewhat utilitarian and opportunistic, they did still manage to craft a very plain ideology that merits some examination, as it also sheds light on the background of the Holocaust and World War II in general.  Therefore, the focus of this research is primarily in the decades prior to the Third Reich - from approximately the 1890s to the 1920s - and focuses on ideological and social history primarily, with some examination of the overarching themes present in the time period as a whole (the conflict between Enlightenment-era rationalism and the rise of interest in alternative religious expressions during the Victorian period in America and Europe, etc.).  In understanding the overarching influences and factors that provided the fertile ground for cultivating a certain ideology, it brings a fuller understanding of what the ideology actually is. 

Therefore, in conclusion, this is a project that entails ideological background, and at times sources will need to be used that fall out of the academic spectrum - meaning popular or "conspiratorial" literature - because this area has honestly been largely ignored until recent years by conventional scholarship. Many of these undiscovered sources conceal a wealth of primary source material (including much in the original language of the culture the topic addresses) that would aid in this study, and therefore cannot be casually dismissed.  Some of these sources may actually contain material that is agreeable to the researcher, but agreement must not supersede empirical evidence.  That is perhaps the most prominent historiographical issue for this specific topic.  However, it must be restated that understanding the background of an ideology of any sort will provide a backdrop for other topics within the same historical context.