ABSTRACT

Moral complicity in a programme such as the Holocaust comes in degrees, just as complicity of other kinds typically does. A distinction may be drawn between strong and weak complicity. The locus classicus of the received image is George L. Mosse's The Crisis of German Ideology, whose subtitle, Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, indicates its aetiological ambition. Origin in the singular might have been more suitable, for Mosse's focus is circumscribed. To reject the received image is not to deny that elements of Volkish thought, on Mosse's characterization, found their way into the Nazis' worldview. The obvious place to locate these tendencies is in the writings of Adolf Hitler. The account of Hitler's anthropology offers some confirmation of Nolte's characterization of National Socialism as resistance to transcendence. An unfortunate effect of the received image is to encourage an impression that the constellation of ideas at the root of National Socialist thought belongs to a bygone age.