Título original: Hitler and the Germans
Edited by José M. Carabante

Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that Eric Voegelin is the author of the best extant account of racial thought. Voegelin, in turn, praised Arendt Eichmann's essay in Jerusalem in these lectures on Hitler and the Germans. Both thinkers are united by the desire to understand the ultimate causes of National Socialism and the idea that the Nazi regime would not have triumphed or been able to sustain itself without the collaboration of many ordinary Germans, or if they had resisted Nazism.

When in 1964, back in Germany after his exile in the United States, Voegelin decided to publicly address these issues, the dominant opinion considered that the guilt had been expiated with the defeat and occupation. Faced with the lukewarmness of the authorities towards the avowed supporters of Nazism, many preferred to be forgotten. Faced with this situation of moral degradation, Voegelin not only opposed the possibility of overcoming the past, but also denounced the subtle and persistent complicity of his contemporaries with National Socialism.

Apart from his sharp analyses of the "descent into the abyss" of the Churches or the judiciary during Nazism, these lectures constitute a kind of therapy. Voegelin applies central notions of his thought to Western Gnosticism, "spiritual illiteracy" or the order of a human community open to transcendence. In their tone and content, their speeches are reminiscent of Max Weber's famous lectures on the politician and scientist, to whose greatness they pay tribute.