"The Nazi metaphysics and epistemology preach mind-sacrifice, thereby removing facts and thought (reality and reason) from the Führer’s path. The Nazi ethics completes the job: by preaching self-sacrifice, it removes morality from his path. The result is the destruction on every level of the possibility of individual self-assertion. The graduate of the Nazi epistemology asks: “Who am I to know?” His counterpart in ethics asks: “Who am I to know what is right?” Both give the same answer, the one absolute of their anti-absolutist mentality: “No man is an island. The Volk, or the Führer, knows best.
SS Captain Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, was asked at the Nuremberg trials what his feelings were on a certain day in August 1943, when he had personally stripped and then gassed eighty women at the Natzweiler camp. He replied: “I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you. That, by the way, was the way I was trained.”43
If one fully understands this answer of Josef Kramer, in a manner that Kramer himself perhaps did not, if one understands “the way he was trained”—trained on the deepest of all levels, at the core of his person, i.e., trained philosophically —one need look no further for the explanation of Nazism. What other practical result could anyone expect from a man or a culture shaped to the roots by every imaginable variant of the soul-killing ideas of a century of mind-killing, ego-killing philosophy?"
In Leonard Peikoff, "The ominous parallels" 1982
