Was the Third Reich Civic Nationalist?

A Defense of Propositionality as the Basis of Civic Nationalism

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Was the Third Reich civic nationalist?

Of course not, and any concept of civic nationalism that says it is, must be discarded. But according to the article Imperium Press Misunderstands Civic Nationalism, our conception of civic nationalism does just this, where in our last article we said that you are a civic nationalist if your identity is a proposition—if who you are fundamentally is just what you believe.

The author says that the Third Reich was propositional, therefore by our reckoning, civic nationalist. We will show how the National Socialist idea of the nation is unintelligible under propositionality.

First, I appreciate the response—the radical right in the 21st century needs to work out its doctrine and this article is a contribution to that. Part of the problem is not the author’s fault. National Socialist primary sources are, even today, still largely untranslated and often unreliable, and so we will translate some below for the first time. This is a good opportunity to show how, even in our circles, civic nationalism is constantly threatening to reimpose itself on our thinking.

Let us examine the main points of the article:

Point 1: Civic nationalism is non-ethnonationalism

The author cites Wikipedia in defining civic nationalism:

…a form of nationalism identified by political philosophers who believe in an inclusive form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, individual rights and has no ethnocentrism.

Point 2: Culture is upstream of ethnos

He then goes on to state that NS orthodoxy held that Poles could be acculturated into being Germans:

Contrast the Third Reich with Imperium Press’ understanding of civic nationalism. Hitler’s Reich was pan-German, and sought to make Polish people into Germans by removing Polish culture and replacing it; was this an instance of civic nationalism coming to the Polish?

Not at all. Yet the Polish were given the requirement to get out of their foundational identity / given domain: the identity of being Polish. Their ethnocentrism was to become German at the time of the German invasion of Poland.

In contrast to the original IP article, he then quotes Hitler as being spiritually Greek:

A skull is found somewhere and the whole world says: That’s what our ancestors look like! Who knows if the Neanderthal wasn’t an ape? In any case, that’s not where our ancestors sat in those days! Our country was a wasteland through which they passed at best. When people ask us about our ancestors, we always have to point to the Greeks!

He then cites that even some NSDAP top brass such as Alfred Rosenberg were Russian as proof that peoples could be argued out of their identity and into a new one. He also cites a pan-Germanist movement within Russia as further evidence of this claim.

Point 3: Civic nationalism is specifically affirming liberal propositions

At the end the author claims that propositionality is not the problem, but only one kind of propositionality is—liberalism:

It is worth mentioning that the author of this response article does not like civic nationalism either, and is, in fact, an ethno-nationalist. It just happens to be worth noting that civic nationalism does not come from just any variant of propositionality. It comes from a proposition that is specifically tailored towards protecting “liberal freedoms” and “human rights.”

Counterpoint 1: Civic nationalism is more than non-ethnonationalism

The whole burden of the IP article was to ask where civic nationalism comes from, so citing the common definition is beside the point. Our account (that civic nationalism arises from identity as belief) not only distinguishes between civic- and ethnonationalism, but it does more—it explains where civic nationalism comes from. The real objection here is that our view doesn’t exclude enough—National Socialism, for example. But is the National Socialist concept of the nation really propositional?

Counterpoint 2: Ethnos is upstream of culture

No National Socialist thought that being German was a matter of belief. The Germans did not aim to make Poles German by mere cultural assimilation. The aim was a) to eliminate racially unassimilable elements and b) to promote elements within the Polish folk who were the most racially suitable (Nordic). Then a process of Aufnordung (Nordicisation) would occur, directed by the SS, preparing the rest of Europe for racial assimilation over time. The Nordic race was considered to be the Kernrasse (core race) of the German folk, that which gave it its essential character and orientation. Let us quote the official SS document setting out racial policy:

Physical characteristics and mental traits of a race are passed on unchanged from generation to generation according to the laws of heredity as hereditary material, so that the members of a race always resemble each other in their physical appearance, instincts, feelings and desires in the course of thousands of years. The same bloodstream unites innumerable generations of the Nordic race and is expressed, for example, in the physical appearance of the Germanic warrior, whose image has been preserved for us by Roman artists, in the German knight of the Middle Ages as well as in the German soldier of the World War and of today. The songs of the Edda, the epic of the Nibelungen and the heroic poems of contemporary Germany were created out of the same Nordic blood heritage. A bond of immediate understanding therefore embraces the members of one race over the longest periods of time, while on the other hand a Nordic person of our time can basically never understand the thinking and will of a Negro or a Jew.¹

Nor did National Socialists think that being German was a matter of culture. Quite the reverse:

The Nordic race determines the character of the German folk, as it constitutes the largest component of the same (50-60%). Almost every German is a bearer of Nordic blood, which has flowed into his ancestral line at some time and somewhere. The Nordic blood heritage is the unifying bond that has made us a folk community, that shapes the body of the German man and that has created German culture in its decisive features.²

Regarding Hitler’s veneration of the Greeks, we must bear in mind that official NSDAP doctrine was that the Greeks were made great by Nordic elements who were racially different from the population they conquered. Also, the source quoted, Hitler’s Table Talk, is of dubious authenticity—it is reliable in the spirit of what was said, but not always in the wording. For the Nazi view of the Greeks, we can turn to James B. Whisker’s introduction to his translation of Rosenberg’s The Myth of the 20th Century:

The Nordic type predominated in most European civilisations, and even on some near east and eastern cultures. The Varangian overlords developed Kievian civilisation in the Ukraine until subdued by the Mongols. Then the race was absorbed by that and other alien blood. The Nordic man appeared as the leaders of pre Socratic Greece, but subsequent race mixing with Alpine, Mediterranean and Asiatic types ended their rule, and Greece declined. The Nordic type also developed true Roman civilisation, but was absorbed by the near eastern Jewish Etruscan races. Rome then fell, but the Nordic blood was so dissipated that it made little difference. The die was cast once Rome granted citizenship to non Nordics, said Rosenberg.³

The article states that “even the NSDAP’s Hitler Youth literature, on the subject of race, referenced Hegel, who stated that race was the ability to think in a certain way.” Hellmuth Stellrecht, author of Faith and Action (where this is pulled from) did not think that—a way of thinking is only one aspect of race and not the whole of it. From the official SS racial policy document:

The SS is an association of Nordic men selected according to special criteria. The physical ideal of the Nordic race determines selection. Every selection must start from the body, because the living body is the manifestation of the soul, is the carrier of the heredity. There is no Nordic soul, no Nordic spirit and no Nordic character without the Nordic body. The increase of the Nordic blood portion can only take place from the physical. That is why the selection order of the SS must extend to those German men who bear the best Nordic imprint in their physical appearance.⁴

The article cites Alfred Rosenberg as a Russian, but he was a Baltic German born in Estonia, and his German descent made him German in Hitler’s eyes. Not all Russians could become Germans—the pan-Germanist Russians cited in the article were raised in Russian culture, but critically, were racially suitable for assimilation. This is not a refutation, but a confirmation that Germanness was considered in anti-propositional, i.e. non-civic-nationalist terms. The Nazi attempt to assimilate Austrian, Prussian, and other related nationalists was because, in the eyes of the NSDAP, these were false identities incompatible with their biological essence. They were not made into Germans, they were freed of an illusion.

Culture and biology influence each other, but not equally. Changing the ideology of the nation doesn’t make it a different nation, except on the propositional view. The Third Reich agreed, thus cannot be considered propositional:

As great as the importance of the “environment” is for the life of a folk, for its position in the world and for the development of its creative powers, we must not overlook the fact that in the final analysis it is the preservation of the race and the hereditary factors alone that determine its existence. The cultural world itself owes its origin to the race; as long as the race exists, it can build its culture anew again and again, but if the race has perished, then the culture is also irretrievably gone.⁵

Counterpoint 3: Propositionality can only conclude in liberalism

So it’s clear that National Socialist identity was not propositional and so, by our account, not civic nationalist. But is our account still too broad? The author claims that only liberal propositionality is civic nationalism—that you are a civic nationalist because you specifically affirm freedom, tolerance, equality, individual rights etc. The problem with this claim is that it is not possible to affirm anything else, at least not coherently, if your core identity is just what you believe.

A Telegram chat full of fascists is not a nation. When you say “who I am at the most basic level is a fascist”, you’re saying that anyone else who holds that belief is your brother. This cannot possibly exclude other ethnicities, so it cannot be the basis for ethnonationalism. It’s one thing to say, as the Nazis did, that the belief grows out of the folk—it’s one thing to say “I’m native Italian and therefore fascist”, but to say “I’m fascist first” is incoherent, because you were not born a fascist, and to freely choose what you are is to be liberal. To choose your identity is to decide as an individual what you are, to affirm the freedom to choose, it is to tolerate your neighbour’s human right to do so, even if you want nothing to do with him. This can have nothing to do with illiberalism, and any national identity based on it is civic nationalism in embryo.

To reject freedom, tolerance, equality, or individual rights alone is to reject civic nationalism only incompletely. To be rid of these completely, we must be rid of the source—core identity as a belief. Only once this goes will tolerance, individualism, and the rest go with it.

1. SS-Hauptamt, Rassenpolitik, 1943. Tr. Victor Van Brandt.

2. Ibid.

3. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the 20th Century, 1930. Tr. James B. Whisker.

4. SS-Hauptamt, Rassenpolitik, 1943. Tr. Victor Van Brandt.

5. Ibid.