Most Evil Women in History: Satan's Daughter Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, (born July 10, 1846, Röcken, near Lützen, Prussia [Germany]—died Nov. 8, 1935, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach [Germany]), sister of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who became his guardian and literary executor.

An early believer in the superiority of the Teutonic races, she married an anti-Semitic agitator, Bernhard Förster. In the 1880s they went to Paraguay and founded Nueva Germania, a supposedly pure Aryan colony, but the enterprise failed, and Förster committed suicide. Amid a major financial scandal, Elisabeth failed to make a national hero of her husband or to salvage the colony as an island of Teutonic Christianity.

She next served as Nietzsche’s guardian at Weimar after his mental breakdown in 1889. On his death (1900) she secured the rights to his manuscripts and renamed her family home the Nietzsche-Archiv. Refusing public access to her brother’s works, she edited them without scruple or understanding.

While Elisabeth gained a wide audience for her misinterpretations, she withheld Nietzsche’s self-interpretation, Ecce Homo, until 1908. Meanwhile, she collected some of his notes under the title Der Wille zur Macht (“The Will to Power”) and presented this work, first as part of her three-volume biography (1895–1904), then in a one-volume edition (1901), and finally in a completely remodeled two-volume edition (1906) that was widely considered Nietzsche’s magnum opus.

Her distortions of Nietzsche’s ideas in this work and others were in large measure responsible for the subsequent misperception of Nietzsche as an early philosopher of fascism. Elisabeth was a supporter of the Nazi Party; her funeral in 1935 was attended by Adolf Hitler and other Nazi dignitaries. After her death scholars reedited Nietzsche’s writings and found some of Elisabeth’s versions distorted and spurious: she forged nearly 30 letters and often rewrote passages. The discovery of her forgeries and of the original texts profoundly influenced later interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Ricky Gervais - Politics (Hitler interprets Nietzsche)

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/214027/Elisabeth-Forster-Nietzsche

Nietzsche in Nuremberg

M. FRANCOIS DE MENTHON (Chief Prosecutor for the French Republic)
17 Jan. 46 

The natural sciences and the sciences of the mind give birth to absolute relativism; to a deep scepticism regarding the lasting quality of values on which Western humanism has been nurtured for centuries. A vulgar Darwinism prevails, bewilders, and befuddles the brain. The Germans cease to see in human groups and races anything but isolated nuclei in perpetual struggle with one another. 

It is in the name of decadence that the German spirit condemns humanism. It sees in the value of humanism and in the elements that derive from it only "maladies," which it attributes to an excess of intellectualism and abstraction of everything that restrains men's passions by subjecting them to common norms. From this point on, classic antiquity is no longer considered in its aspects of ordered reason or of radiant beauty. In it one sees only civilizations violently enamored of struggles and rivalries, linked especially to Germany through their so-called Germanic origin.

Sacerdotal Judaism and Christianity in all its forms are condemned as religions of honor and brotherhood, calculated to kill the virtues of brutal force in man.

A cry is raised against the democratic idealism of the modem era, and then against all the international

Over a people in this state of spiritual crisis and of negations of traditional values the culminating philosophy of Nietzsche was to exercise a dominant influence. In taking the will to power as a point of departure, Nietzsche preached, certainly not inhumanity but superhumanity. If there is no final cause in the universe, man, whose body is matter which is at once feeling and thinking, may mould the world to his desire, choosing as his guide a militant biology. If the supreme end of humanity is a feeling of victorious fullness which is both material and spiritual, all that remains is to insure the selection of physical specimens, who become the new aristocracy of masters.

For Nietzsche the industrial evolution necessarily entails the rule of the masses, the automatism and the shaping of the working multitudes. The 'state endures only by virtue of an elite of vigorous personalities who, by the methods so admirably defined by Machiavelli, which alone are in accord with the laws of life, will lead men by force and by ruse simultaneously, for men are and remain wicked and perverse.

We see the modem barbarian arise. Superior by his intelligence and his wilful energy, freed of all conventional ethics, he can enforce upon the masses obedience and loyalty by making them believe in the dignity and beauty of labor and by providing them with that mediocre well-being with which they are so easily content. An identical force will, therefore, be manifest in the leaders, by the harmony between their elementary passions and the lucidity of their organizing reason, and in the masses, whose dark or violent instincts will be balanced by a reasoned activity imposed with implacable discipline.

Without doubt, the late philosophy of Nietzsche cannot be identified with the brutal simplicity of National Socialism. Nevertheless, National Socialism was wont to glorify Nietzsche as one of its ancestors. And justly so, for he was the first to formulate in a coherent manner criticism of the traditional values of humanism; and also, because his conception of the government of the masses by masters knowing no restraint is a preview of the Nazi regime. Besides, Nietzsche believed in the sovereign race and attributed primacy to Germany, whom he considered endowed with a youthful soul and unquenchable resources.

The myth of racial community which had arisen from the depths of the German soul, unbalanced by the moral and spiritual crises endured by modem humanity, allied itself with the traditional theses of Pan-Germanism.

Already Fichte's speeches to the German nation exalting Germanism clearly reveal one of the main ideas of Pan-Germanism, namely, that Germany visualizes and organizes the world as it should be visualized and organized. 

The apology for war is equally ancient. It dates back to Fichte and Hegel, who had affirmed that war, through its classifying of peoples, alone establishes justice among nations. For Hegel, in Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechtes, Page 433, states: "The moral health of nations is maintained thanks to war, just as the passing breeze saves the sea from stagnation."

The living-space theory appears right at the beginning of the 19th century. It is a well-known geographical and historical demonstration which such people as Ratzel, Arthur Dix, and Lamprecht will take up later on, comparing conflicts between peoples to a savage fight between conceptions and realizations of space and declaring that all history is moving towards German hegemony.

State totalitarianism also has ancient roots in Germany. The absorption of individuals by the State was hoped for by Hegel, who wrote:

"Individuals disappear in the presence of the universal substance" - that is the people or state idea-"and this substance itself shapes the individuals in accordance with its own ends."

Therefore, National Socialism appears in present-day Germany neither as a spontaneous formation which might be due to the consequence of the defeat in 1918, nor as a mere invention of a group of men determined upon seizing power. National Socialism is the ultimate result of a long evolution of doctrines; the exploitation by a group of men of one of the most profound and most tragic aspects of the German soul. But the crime committed.