Friedrich Nietzsche: Prophetic Philosopher God with a Hammer

Biased but informative excerpt From wiki: It has been observed that In 1932, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche received a rose bouquet from Adolf Hitler during a German premier of Benito Mussolini's 100 Days; in 1934 Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg visited her again, presenting her with a wreath for Nietzsche's grave with the words "To A Great Fighter"; in the same year the Führer posed for a photo gazing into the eyes of a white marble bust of Nietzsche, and was presented by Elisabeth with Nietzsche's favorite walking stick.[26] There can be no doubt that Italian and German fascist regimes were eager to lay claim to Nietzsche's ideas, and to position themselves as inspired by them. In Heinrich Hoffmann's best-selling Hitler as Nobody Knows Him (which sold nearly a half-million copies by 1938) the caption of the photo of Hitler with the bust of Nietzsche read, "The Führer before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilized two great popular movements: the National Socialist of Germany and the Fascist of Italy."[27]

Nietzsche was no less popular among French fascists. As Robert S. Wistrich has pointed out The "fascist" Nietzsche was above all considered to be a heroic irrationalist and vitalist who had glorified war and violence, inspiring the anti-Marxist revolutions of the interwar period. According to the French fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, it was the Nietzschean emphasis on the Will that inspired the voluntarism and political activism of his comrades. Such one-dimensional readings were vehemently rejected by another French writer, the anarchist Georges Bataille, who in the 1930s sought to establish the "radical incompatibility" between Nietzsche (as a thinker who abhorred mass politics) and "the Fascist reactionaries." He argued that nothing was more alien to Nietzsche than the pan-Germanism, racism, militarism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis, into whose service the German philosopher had been pressed.[28]

The German philosopher Heidegger, who was (with great harm to his subsequent reputation) an active member of the Nazi Party, himself noted that everyone in his day was either 'for' or 'against' Nietzsche while claiming that this thinker heard a "command to reflect on the essence of a planetary domination." Alan D. Schrift cites this passage and writes, "That Heidegger sees Nietzsche heeding a command to reflect and prepare for earthly domination is of less interest to me than his noting that everyone thinks in terms of a position for or against Nietzsche. In particular, the gesture of setting up "Nietzsche" as a battlefield on which to take one's stand against or to enter into competition with the ideas of one's intellectual predecessors or rivals has happened quite frequently in the twentieth century."[29]

Despite the protests of Bataille and others,[30] the Nazi movement found much affinity with Nietzsche's ideas, including: his attacks against democracy, Christianity, and parliamentary governments; his preaching in The Will to Power wherein he proclaimed the coming of a ruling race that would become the "lords of the earth"; and his (sometimes highly ambiguous) praise of war and warriors. The Nazis also linked what they felt to be Nietzsche's clearly expressed views on women (e.g. "Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior, any thing else is folly.") to their own social program for women, "They belong in the kitchen and their chief role in life is to beget children for German warriors."[31]

During the interbellum years, certain Nazis had employed a highly selective reading of Nietzsche's work to advance their ideology, notably Alfred Baeumler in his reading of The Will to Power. The era of Nazi rule (1933--1945) saw Nietzsche's writings widely studied in German (and, after 1938, Austrian) schools and universities. Despite the fact that Nietzsche expressed his disgust with anti-Semitism and German nationalism in the most forthright terms possible (e.g. he resolved "to have nothing to do with anyone involved in the perfidious race-fraud"), phrases like "the will to power" became common in Nazi circles. The wide popularity of Nietzsche among Nazis stemmed in part from the endeavors of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the editor of Nietzsche's work after his 1889 breakdown, and an eventual Nazi sympathizer. Mazzino Montinari, while editing Nietzsche's posthumous works in the 1960s, found that Förster-Nietzsche, while editing the posthumous fragments making up The Will to Power, had cut extracts, changed their order, added titles of her own invention, included passages of others authors copied by Nietzsche as if they had been written by Nietzsche himself, etc.