Heidegger on the Holocaust: The Jews Self-Destructed

The publication of some of Martin Heidegger’s “black notebooks”—unpublished writings from the Nazi era—have shown the extent of the support for Hitler given by the prominent German philosopher and the centrality of anti-Semitism to his worldview. A forthcoming volume of the notebooks contains extensive writing on the Holocaust, refuting the once widely-held assumption of his “silence” on the subject. It turns out he was certain the Jews brought it on themselves, as Donatella Di Cesare writes: