Alfred Baeumler was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 philosopher and pedagogue. From 1924 he taught at the Technische Universität Dresden, at first as an unsalaried lecturer Privatdozent

Privatdozent

Privatdozent or Private lecturer is a title conferred in some European university systems, especially in German-speaking countries, for someone who pursues an academic career and holds all formal qualifications to become a tenured university professor...

. Bäumler was made associate professor (Extraordinarius) in 1928 and full professor (Ordinarius) a year later. From 1933 he taught philosophy and political education in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 as the director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy.

Biography

One of the few influential philosophers in Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

, Baeumler used Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...

's philosophy to legitimize Nazism

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 — an ideologically motivated misinterpretation critiqued by post-war scholarship. German-American scholar Walter Kaufmann called Baeumler "one of the worst Nazi hacks" Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

 read Baeumler's work on Nietzsche in the early 1930s, and characterized passages of it as "Hitler prophecy" . Baeumler's 1931 book Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker states:
His books were published in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 in the late 1990s by the Edizioni di Ar, a far-right publishing house.

Works

• Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937.
• Politik und Erziehung. Reden und Aufsätze. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937. (Collected speeches and essays).
• Männerbund und Wissenschaft. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1934.
• Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker. Leipzig: Reclam, 1931.
• Nietzsches Philosophie in Selbstzegunissen. Ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Alfred Baeumler. Leipzig: Reclam, 1931.
• Die Unschuld des Werdens. Der Nachlass, ausgewählt und geordnet von Alfred Baeumler. Leipzig: Kröner, 1931. (Collection of unpublished writings by Nietzsche).
• Bachofen und Nietzsche. Zurich: Verlag der Neuen Schweizer Rundschau, 1929.
• Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft, ihre Geschichte und Systematik. 2 vols. Halle (Saale): Niemeyer, 1923.