Nazi propaganda didn’t hesitate to usurp ancient Greece’s history and classical past to legitimize both their cultural and racial supremacist views.
We can see signs of this phenomenon everywhere we look at nazi Germany. From the “neo-Grec” nudes of Arno Breker and Josef Thorak, to the neo-Doric architecture of Paul Troost. We can also see it in the neo-Roman buildings of Albert Speer. They were presenting a rather startling image of Mediterranean antiquity as well as in academic studies published under the Third Reich.
To understand how this usurpation was made possible, we must look into both Germany’s history and the ideological foundations of German Nazism that led them to this point.
Germany as the heir of the Roman Empire
To understand Nazi Germany’s connection to ancient Greece, we must first comprehend how they saw their connections with Rome. The Western Roman Empire fell to the Germans in 476 AD, with an army led by the barbarian Odoacer. The Germanic tribes had defeated an empire whose people had already claimed supremacy over the rest of mankind.
Since that time, Western Europe would be ruled primarily by Germanic tribes for centuries. The conquerors of Rome did not view themselves as bringing destruction to the empire. Rather, they believed they were inheriting the legacy of Rome. As Professor G. Plakotos mentions, “Rome” as a name had gained a rather ecumenical religious significance rather than an ethnic one. During the Middle Ages, being an inheritor of Rome also meant inheriting the title of the successor of the Church of Saint Peter.
During the time of Charlemagne, all the German kingdoms, united under his rule, claimed to be inheritors of Rome, stripping the Byzantine Empire of that title. The Roman Catholic Church also contributed to this shift. In the 10th century, Otto I gave his empire the name “Holy Roman Empire” (also known as the First Reich), and in 1474, they added the title “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” The empire sought to unify Western Christianity to such an extent that the name of the country itself in the German language, “Deutschland,” literally translates to “the land of God.”
With the abolition of the empire by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806, it fragmented into many small kingdoms. However, with the rise of the German Empire in 1871 (also known as the Second Reich), German imperial nationalism, inspired by Protestant ideals, surged. Social Darwinism and racialism began to dominate German nationalist themes after 1871, based on the concepts of a people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft).
Nazi Germany’s racialism
Inspired by the dominant scientific views of their time, particularly eugenics and Darwinism, Nazi Germany adopted a nationalism grounded in a very strong current of “volkism” (“Völkische Bewegung”). This ideology became a refuge for Germans of the interwar period, who were seeking an escape from their national, social and economic humiliation after their defeat in World War I. “Volkism” referred to a “Völkstum,” a popular identity that, however, was rooted primarily in race: the “Volk” of volkism defined their identity through the concept of race. A race that formed a dynamic collective consciousness through its biological identity, not its political awareness or ethnicity. As Hitler himself would later say, “the conscience of the Völkstum is not based on words, but on blood.”
Racialism is the idea that race defines not only an individual’s physical functions and genes but also their thoughts, emotions, collective consciousness, culture and even the achievements of a nation. Based on this, the Nazis formulated a racial hierarchy. In this hierarchy, some races have “stronger” genes than others. They also believed that, according to natural law, the destiny of the “stronger races” was to dominate or even eliminate “inferior ones.”
The Nazi racial hierarchy and Aryan race supremacy
According to the Nazi racial hierarchy, the dominant race in the world was the Aryan/white race. The central focus of imperialist ideology was the protection of the Aryan race and the extermination of the “inferior.” Proponents of this idea believed in a division between superior races (whites) and inferior ones (Blacks, Semitic peoples, gypsies). However, even within the white race, there was further division. The lighter the skin, the higher they ranked a person in the racial hierarchy.
At the top of this hierarchy were the Nordics, particularly Scandinavians, who were blond and blue-eyed. After them came the Alpines and other European peoples. The darker-skinned Mediterranean people were seen as inferior and they believed them to have mixed with Black people. Notably, the Russians and other Slavs, although predominantly white, were generally seen by Nazi ideology as “Mongols.”
Nazi German appropriation of ancient Greece and Rome
Based on this ideology, Nazi Germany viewed itself not only as inheritor of Rome but also of ancient Greece. This belief stemmed from the idea that, without the cultural influence of Greece, Rome would not have achieved so many of its cultural accomplishments. However, their admiration for ancient Greece was more about cultural appropriation than genuine understanding.
The Nazi theoretician and intellectual, Alfred Rosenberg, in his book “The Myth of the 20th Century”, claims that the German blood present in Italy caused the Renaissance. The German blood came from Germanic populations who had colonized the region. According to him, this infusion of German blood transformed the Italians into geniuses.
Aryan mythology in Ancient Greece and Rosenberg’s racial theories
For Rosenberg and the nazi ideology, before the rise of Aryan/Nordic peoples in ancient Greece, the Mediterranean region was polluted by races of Pelasgian and Semitic origins. They dominated Greece with an Amazon-like matriarchy that had destroyed the patriarchal Apollonian order that existed previously. Rosenberg saw Heracles and Jason as representations of the ideal Aryan Nordic masculine type, as they restored this patriarchal order. Heracles achieved this by defeating the Amazons, while Jason did so by standing against the women of Lemnos. According to Rosenberg, a woman’s true nature is realized only through marriage. As a wife and mother in a household where the man is the master she can find her true nature.
In Rosenberg’s view, the gods of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Germans and other peoples were mere superstitions of the mind. However, they represented the Aryan white ideal of their race. Apollo, for example, symbolized pure thought and rationality. Dionysus, in his non-Aryan form, was merely a primitive, chthonic god, full of emotion and spontaneity. These traits did not suit the Aryan man. Female goddesses and Dionysian worship, according to Rosenberg, originated in pre-Hellenic Pelasgian Greece. The Pelasgians, he claimed, were of Phoenician and Semitic descent. The true Greeks were the Achaeans and Dorians. These, according to Rosenberg, were of Nordic-Germanic descent and were the ones who created the magnificent Greek culture.
Over time, Rosenberg adds, adopting the theory of Fallmerayer, every true “Hellenic Aryan element” disappeared from Greece and the local population became mixed with Slavic and other Eastern elements.
The Nazi ideology appropriation of Plato to legitimize eugenics
The Nazis began to read Plato again in a new political light during the 1930s and 1940s. The National Socialists were more concerned with the political Plato rather than Plato as “the exponent of the famous theory of Ideas.”
They even elevated him as an ideal philosopher, and there were important reasons for this.
Unlike, for example, Socrates, they admired Plato for his athleticism and for living a prudent life well into old age. He was also known to be of aristocratic descent. All of these traits, according to the tribalist Gunther, placed him in the tribe of the Nordics. Gunther even remarked somewhere that Plato was “a pure-blooded aspect of the northern blood of primitive Hellenism.”
Based on these characteristics, they promoted Plato as the philosopher whose lessons and example they should teach in German schools. Specifically, his confrontations with the sophists, who they saw as symbols of moral collapse. They considered the sophists to be part of the decline of the Greek world. They saw them as laying the foundation for the shift to individualism and the relativization of truth.
Distorting Plato’s philosophy to fit Nazi ideology
In this context, they promoted an ahistorical reading of Plato’s philosophy. They presented him as a philosopher of racism, and as the great forerunner and prophet of the Führer. This interpretation relied on a distorted reading of Plato’s theory about the need for philosophers to rule a state. A concept that was entirely different in Plato’s time than it is today.
Thus began a massive production of texts by organic intellectuals. Individuals close to the Führer, who established a word-for-word parallel between Plato and Hitler, as well as his “State” and Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf.” In fact, they viewed Plato as one of the last beacons of hope to save the Athenian state from total collapse.
Plato as a symbol of racialism and eugenics
Friedrich Hildebrandt, for example, stated: “Plato is a teacher for our time. Modern biology could hardly propose laws for the selection of the elite more suitable than Plato’s laws.” His ideal state became a model for a society organized hierarchically based on a strict racial criterion. Allegedly that racial criterion was supposedly similar to that favored by National Socialism.
Some even went so far as to ascribe a racist tone to Plato’s thoughts, connecting them to eugenics. They argued that the inclination toward philosophy was solely a matter of race. Therefore, they saw Plato as one of the most important exponents of racist ideas. Of course, this interpretation has no basis, as it is clear that Plato spoke in terms of abilities, not race.
The way the Nazis treated this great philosopher of ancient Greece is indicative of how interpretations of his work can change according to the era, often becoming distorted, as happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
