The Final Solution as Philosophy: How Germany Tried to Kill God by Killing the Jews

There are many reasons why Germany never developed a coherent political theory of its own. Why did enlightened absolutism reach them 200 years late, modern republicanism 300 years late, and modern nationalism and a national constitution 250 years late?

Moreover, when these ideas finally arrived east of the Rhine, they were either imported or imposed from outside never pioneering or voluntary. And when such ideas were absorbed, Germany’s adaptation to them was slow compared to the dynamism described by Emerson in his writings about Italy and England.

One central explanation offered in the study of the German Sonderweg ("special path") is geography. Unlike Britain, the German states were not isolated by water and lacked maritime trade routes. Instead, they were geographically trapped in the center of Europe, consistently late to adopt cardinal developments that matured in northwestern Europe.

Even during the Carolingian Empire, Western influence (modern day France) was stronger than that of the former Lombard and Ostrogothic lands. Whenever German speaking populations were exposed to new ideas from the south and west, the exposure was marked by a kind of "sealing" effect transforming external innovations into rigid, localized forms.

As historian Shulamit Volkov asked: "Is Germany part of the West?" Heinrich Heine mocked the idea, pointing out that Germany’s absorption of foreign economic or spiritual innovations often resulted in their containment within a non-organic local framework.

Nowhere west of Poland (except Ireland) and north of Italy did the feudal economic-religious system persist as long as in the German lands. Both the Agricultural Revolution (centered in France and England) and urbanization (Italy, Flanders, France) arrived late in Germany and were absorbed reactively within borrowed Catholic traditions.

Although the Reformation spread from Germany, earlier national versions had already appeared in 14th-century England and 15th-century Bohemia—and were suppressed by Germany. The roots of these movements were in 13th-century Italy and France. Moreover, the Lutheran Church remained structurally closest to Catholicism compared to the decentralized churches of the western Reformation.

Linguistically, Germany remained distant from Renaissance developments in England and France that revitalized Latin and Aristotle’s ideas about property and law.

This geographical, linguistic, and religious distance historically shaped Germany’s hesitant and distorted absorption of foreign ideas. As Hegel noted in the 19th century and Norbert Elias proved in his 20th-century studies, Germany was plagued by a delayed and reluctant modernization.

From Erasmus of Rotterdam to Hitler’s fall in 1945, these obstacles delayed the emergence of a native German political theory aligned with classical liberalism, natural law, or rights-based governance, as developed between northern Italy, France, Flanders, and England.

And yet, the German lands from the high Middle Ages to early modernity did produce many geniuses, reasonable urban and agricultural development, and peak resource management under Frederick II.

Germany is the West to the East and the East to the West. It is no surprise, then, that after its unification in 1871, its allies often came from Romanian, Slavic, or Turkish backgrounds. Even in the First Reich, Italy resisted German domination.

These less "politically advanced" allies shared Germany’s slow, externally imposed absorption of the three foundational ideas dividing early from late modernity:

This backdrop should be obvious to any novice historian. But the more troubling question remains: Why try to murder all the Jews in the world?

The answer lies in the secularization trajectory of German philosophy, which responded to two English philosophers and one French. A general response to Hume birthed Kant’s transcendental idealism. A political response to Locke birthed Hegel’s political idealism. A materialist reaction to Descartes and Enlightenment rationalism produced Nietzsche’s organismic philosophy.

German political structures were not original. They were built upon borrowed ideas—French socialism and nationalism, Anglo-French liberalism, English Bio-folkism, and other class theories, and social evolution from Western Europe.

Germany’s primary contributions were in the humanities, anthropology, biblical criticism, archaeology, linguistics, philology. All fields that, despite their scientific focus, also carried a dark undercurrent, as in the cases of Paul de Lagarde and Julius Wellhausen.

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, German philosophers like Schopenhauer and Fichte responded to Kant, whose ideas, as Yehuda Ati once wrote, were “crooked translations of Hume.”

Bergman described this trajectory as "the dismantling of modern Enlightenment's spiritual forms," culminating in Hegel and shifting toward Nietzschean thought—translating Kant’s idealism into Nietzsche’s embodied will.

This brings us to the state destined for the Übermensch. Whether this state exists in a French social framework is a superficial concern. As Vice President Henry Wallace noted: "To understand how Germans believed Rosenberg and Goebbels, ask how they believed Nietzsche and Schopenhauer."

After reviewing premodern German conditions and their delayed Platonic and nihilistic reactions to the Anglo-French Enlightenment, we arrive at Bismarck’s Germany a middle path culminating in a disturbing synthesis.

German nationalism, lacking internal philosophical coherence and disillusioned with both Christian conservatism and liberal democracy, turned to visceral myths: blood and soil.

After WWI, Germans realized their democracy was French, their rights British, their parliament Anglo-Latin, their law Napoleonic, their religion Roman, and their God Jewish. This bred a racial-biological-linguistic nationalism that transformed existential emptiness into a false historical necessity.

In the post-Enlightenment world, metaphysical systems couldn’t contend with colonialist liberalism or moral materialism rooted in Jewish monotheism . Jews, being fully transcendent—existing in spirit and not within the materialist or idealist philosophical structures—became the perceived obstacle to Germany’s ideological cohesion.

By 1919, the “stab in the back” myth had evolved from a historical claim into a spiritual one. Jews became the demigods of both the German right and left. Their material and philosophical overrepresentation was viewed as something that had to be purged to enable the Hegelian vision of a Nietzschean German community.

Germany had no colonies like Britain to secularize God through capitalism, nor political sophistication like France to do so through republicanism. Thus, it turned inward, to immutable elements: soil, blood, labor, and war.

Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against Catholicism was the first attempt to purge foreign "non-organic" influences and embrace a fictive national past. This middle-ground experiment collapsed after 1918.

By the 1920s, German intellectuals sought to dethrone the Jewish-Latin monotheistic myth and reclaim a native essence, stripped of external political scaffolding. They wanted to replace transcendence with immanence.

The Nazis weren’t a traditional right-wing movement. They were a synthetic one, unifying society under the Gleichschaltung and forging an organic Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) where the Nietzschean Übermensch became a political necessity.

If Germany had a rich history like France or England, this monstrous ideological creation may never have taken root. But lacking such heritage, Germans sought redemption by destroying the Jewish foundation of transcendental morality.

Thus, the Holocaust was not merely ethnic cleansing. It was a spiritual war against the very idea of a chosen people and a chosen God.

As long as Jews existed, the idea of divine election remained. Destroying the Jews meant destroying God’s metaphysical presence on earth—an attempt to replace it with an earthly German deity.

In this sense, Auschwitz was not just genocide. It was an attempt at metaphysical regicide—killing the children of God to birth a new human divinity.

This philosophical earthquake forces us to ask: What do the Jews symbolize for humanity? And what does the world’s silence at that time say about its own soul?