Saturday, December 27, 2014

The Catholic Philosopher Who Took on Hitler



By John Henry Crosby

Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Oskar Schindler—these names come readily to mind when we think of heroes of conscience. But few of us would recognize the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand, a German philosopher-turned-outspoken Nazi antagonist.

Despite having been described by the Nazi ambassador in Vienna as “the worst obstacle to German National Socialism in Austria,” Hildebrand remains virtually unknown today, even to historians of the period. This makes the recent publication of his memoirs and writings against Nazism—entitled My Battle Against Hitler—all the more momentous. It is not often that we discover a “new” hero destined to count among the greatest figures in the previous century’s fearful struggles against tyranny and genocide.

Dietrich von Hildebrand was born 1889 in Florence. The only son of the renowned German sculptor, Adolf von Hildebrand, he grew up in one of Munich’s great artistic families. As a teenager he fell in love with philosophy, which he went on to study under some of Germany’s leading minds, notably the philosophers Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl, who remarked that he had “inherited his father’s artistic genius as a philosophical genius.”

One would be hard-pressed to find an earlier opponent of the Nazis than Dietrich von Hildebrand. Already in 1921—12 years before Hitler came to power—his public denunciations of German nationalism and militarism led the nascent Nazi Party to blacklist him. The risk to his life was great enough that he had to flee Munich when Hitler attempted to seize power in November 1923.

Read the rest here.


1 comment:

  1. Hildebrand was a "hero of conscience" as were many others but to suggest: "he gives us hope that even the most brutal and terrifying forms of evil can be overcome by the moral witness of those who have the courage to stand up to it." is to ignore the facts. He fled Europe to escape the Nazi's because he was unable to overcome them. And while the current leaders both in Europe and the U.S. are not called "Nazis" they are all socialists and just as brutal. The lesson is that Hildebrand/s strategy failed.

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