"Of all the misplaced and unwarranted prejudices to envelop Nietzsche, surely the most baleful is his association in the popular mind with the extremist politics of national socialism." ( - Allison, Pg. 1)
"One of the greatest stupidities you [Elisabeth] have committed - for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy.... It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal regarding anti-Semitism, namely opposed, as I am in my writings. I have been persecuted in recent times with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence sheets; my disgust with the party (which would like all too well the advantage of my name!) is as outspoken as possible, but the relation to Forster, as well as the after-effect of my former anti-Semitic publisher Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must after all belong to them.... Above all it arouses mistrust against my character, as if I publicly condemned something which I favored secretly - and that I am unable to do anything against it, that in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence sheet the name Zarathustra is used has already made me almost sick several times."
- Friedrich Nietzche, in a letter to his sister.
"The situation has changed, and I have broken radically with my sister: for heaven's sake, don't think of mediation or reconciliation - between a vengeful anti-Semitic goose and me there is no reconciliation."
- Friedrich Nietzche, in a letter to Malwilda von Meysenbug.
"Nietzsche's sister had mocked her brother's claims to fame, but then, switching to his cause after her husband's suicide, she took private lessons in Nietzsche's philosophy from Rudolf Steiner, a Gothe scholar who later became famous as the founder of anthroposophy. Soon Steiner gave her up as simply incapable of understanding Nietzsche. Meanwhile she became her brother's official exegate and biographer, tampered with his letters - and was taken seriously by almost everyone."
Editor's Introduction - 2
From - Ecce Homo (Behold The Man)
- Friedrich Nietzsche - ed. Walter Kaufmann
"What is important here is merely that Nietzsche's views are quite unequivocally opposed to those of the Nazis - more so than those of almost any other prominent German of his own time or before him - and that these views are not temperamental antitheses but corollaries of his philosophy. Nietzsche was no more ambiguous in this respect than is the statement that the Nazis' way of citing him represents one of the darkest pages in the history of literary unscrupulousness."
From - Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist - Pg. 303-304
- Walter Kaufmann
"Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, is the manipulative presence behind the Nietzsche-Nazi myth. She was indeed sympathetic to the growing fascist cause and married to a notorious anti-Semite of whom Nietzsche thoroughly disapproved. It was she, years after her brother's death, who invited Hitler for his 'photo-op' at the Nietzsche Archive. Elisabeth took over Nietzsche's literary estate after his incapacitation, and she even published apocryphal books and 'editions' of Nietzsche's notes under his by-then famous name.
Unfortunately, Elisabeth's political views became firmly attached to Nietzsche's name, and the association survived even the expose' of her forgeries and misappropriation of Nietzsche's works. Yet we can say with confidence, that Nietzsche was no Nazi and that he shared virtually none of the Nazis' vicious ideas about the 'Thousand Year Reich' and the superiority of the German race. Indeed, Nietzsche famously declared himself 'a good European' and lamented the fact that his native language was German. He spent virtually his entire adult life, from his professorship in Switzerland through his voluntary exile in and around the Alps, until his last moments of sanity in northern Italy, outside of Germany."
From - What Nietzsche Really Said - Pg. 10-11
- Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins
But the damage had been done...
"One of the greatest stupidities you [Elisabeth] have committed - for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy.... It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal regarding anti-Semitism, namely opposed, as I am in my writings. I have been persecuted in recent times with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence sheets; my disgust with the party (which would like all too well the advantage of my name!) is as outspoken as possible, but the relation to Forster, as well as the after-effect of my former anti-Semitic publisher Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must after all belong to them.... Above all it arouses mistrust against my character, as if I publicly condemned something which I favored secretly - and that I am unable to do anything against it, that in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence sheet the name Zarathustra is used has already made me almost sick several times."
- Friedrich Nietzche, in a letter to his sister.
"The situation has changed, and I have broken radically with my sister: for heaven's sake, don't think of mediation or reconciliation - between a vengeful anti-Semitic goose and me there is no reconciliation."
- Friedrich Nietzche, in a letter to Malwilda von Meysenbug.
"Nietzsche's sister had mocked her brother's claims to fame, but then, switching to his cause after her husband's suicide, she took private lessons in Nietzsche's philosophy from Rudolf Steiner, a Gothe scholar who later became famous as the founder of anthroposophy. Soon Steiner gave her up as simply incapable of understanding Nietzsche. Meanwhile she became her brother's official exegate and biographer, tampered with his letters - and was taken seriously by almost everyone."
Editor's Introduction - 2
From - Ecce Homo (Behold The Man)
- Friedrich Nietzsche - ed. Walter Kaufmann
"What is important here is merely that Nietzsche's views are quite unequivocally opposed to those of the Nazis - more so than those of almost any other prominent German of his own time or before him - and that these views are not temperamental antitheses but corollaries of his philosophy. Nietzsche was no more ambiguous in this respect than is the statement that the Nazis' way of citing him represents one of the darkest pages in the history of literary unscrupulousness."
From - Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist - Pg. 303-304
- Walter Kaufmann
"Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, is the manipulative presence behind the Nietzsche-Nazi myth. She was indeed sympathetic to the growing fascist cause and married to a notorious anti-Semite of whom Nietzsche thoroughly disapproved. It was she, years after her brother's death, who invited Hitler for his 'photo-op' at the Nietzsche Archive. Elisabeth took over Nietzsche's literary estate after his incapacitation, and she even published apocryphal books and 'editions' of Nietzsche's notes under his by-then famous name.
Unfortunately, Elisabeth's political views became firmly attached to Nietzsche's name, and the association survived even the expose' of her forgeries and misappropriation of Nietzsche's works. Yet we can say with confidence, that Nietzsche was no Nazi and that he shared virtually none of the Nazis' vicious ideas about the 'Thousand Year Reich' and the superiority of the German race. Indeed, Nietzsche famously declared himself 'a good European' and lamented the fact that his native language was German. He spent virtually his entire adult life, from his professorship in Switzerland through his voluntary exile in and around the Alps, until his last moments of sanity in northern Italy, outside of Germany."
From - What Nietzsche Really Said - Pg. 10-11
- Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins
But the damage had been done...
"Only with the aftermath of the Second World War was it finally established that Nietzsche's thought had been distorted beyond recognition to serve the personal, financial, and political interests of his sister and to lend intellectual 'support' to the desperate aims of a totalitarian government. But by then, almost fifty years after Nietzsche's death, the damage had been done. A large part of two generations of educated Europeans would come to regard Nietzsche as the prophet of an unspeakable tyranny."
From - Reading the New Nietzsche - Pg. 3
- David B. Allison
From - Reading the New Nietzsche - Pg. 3
- David B. Allison
After Elisabeth's death in 1935, and the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, scholars were finally able to gain access to Nietzsche's original works, which had been prior held from public view by his sister. Through a process of examination and comparison, they uncovered the alterations and forgeries she had committed, along with a collection of letters and notes. With her no longer in sole control of the publication of Nietzsche's writings, and the true source material now available, new versions of his work were able to be published in a reedited form that took them back to what he had intended. In keeping with earlier printings, and the original manuscripts which had been uncovered, these corrected volumes caused a renewed analysis of Nietzsche's work and proceeded to have a profound and lasting impact on the intellectual world.
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http://www.philosophicalanthropology.net/2013/04/nietzsche-against-nazis.html
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