ABSTRACT
You told me that you fully dissociated yourself from the Nazi regime as of 1934, that in your lectures you made extremely critical remarks, and that you were observed by the Gestapo. I will not doubt your word. But the fact remains that in 1933 you identified yourself so strongly with the regime that today in the eyes of many you are considered as one of its strongest intellectual proponents.2 Your own speeches, writings and treatises from this period are proof thereof. You have never publicly retracted them-not even after 1945. You have never publicly explained that you have arrived at judgments other than those which you expressed in 1933-34 and articulated in your writings. You remained in Germany after 1934, although you could have found a position abroad practically anywhere. You never publicly denounced any of the actions or ideologies of the regime. Because of these circumstances you are still today identified with the Nazi regime. Many of us have long awaited a statement from you, a statement that would clearly and finally free you from such identification, a statement that honestly expresses
never uttered such a statement-at least it has never emerged from the private sphere. I-and very many others-have admired you as a philosopher; from you we have learned an infinite amount. But we cannot make the separation between Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man, for it contradicts your own philosophy. A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot be deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews-merely because they were Jews-that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite. A regime that in every respect imaginable was the deadly caricature of the western tradition that you yourself so forcefully explicated and justified. And if that regime was not the caricature of that tradition but its actual culmination-in this case, too, there could be no deception, for then you would have to indict and disavow this entire tradition.
