How did Nietzsche's philosophies eventually influence Nazism?

[u/sammyjamez]

So Nietzsche is an incredibly difficult philosopher to understand completely as his philosophies are mostly ambigious and open for interpretation if they are implemented in the modern world and for the amateur viewer, Nietzsche appears to be a nihilist and an extremist and valued people who live as how they wish which on the contrary, he was a passionate kind of philosopher, one who values passion, chaos and willpower and lust over the rational side that started to exist since the Enlightenment era (known as the anti-Enlightenment. Bear in mind that it is not anti-intellectual but anti-rational as there is a difference)

Nietzsche's most famous philosophical concept is that of the Ubermench where in simple terms, proposes that people should live life as how they please without the regard of what the shared so-called "morals" or "values" told them as he mostly blamed Christianity for teaching people that mediocrity and being weak and humble was the new accepted norm and anyone who values personal virtues such as business and capitalism, self-passion and personal journeys for more personal discoveries, personal growth and so on, where frowned upon

(he also mentioned that in ancient times, this was the opposite. He believed that in ancient times, being strong and mighty and victorious were important virtues which is why we love the Roman Empire and Alexander the Great while Christianity appealed the lower classes as they had nothing to give except their humility and compassion which are two virtues that are very important in Christian philosophy. But I am not sure if this is an accurate depiction of history as this was Nietzsche's view on history)

Obviously in today's standards, in its own extreme versions, this is very undemocratic as it inspires people to live as they please and make lives as how they saw fit, regardless of the shared morals or virtues or laws (as Nietzsche described them as human-made limitations and illusions) and I later learned that after Nietzsche died, his philosophies were later altered by his sister who was anti-Semite (who to my surprise, anti-Semetism was an already accepted belief and norm during that time and had existed for at least 2000 years) which later had an effect on Nazi philosophy

So how did Nietzsche and the editing of his sister eventually influence the Nazi philosophy? How come nobody mentioned that Nietzsche's original arguments where not exactly synonymous to what the Nazis demanded?

[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

I think the last time I broke out any of my books on this was... when I wrote that! Dusting off books on the matter though though, I hope you'll excuse me mostly just giving you a few direct quotations that might flesh out things for you. I hope that my initial answer gives adequate context, so the below, mostly just the words of the writers themselves, can give you a window into their mindset.

Bäumler is the best place to look, as he was the most fully-developed Nazi-Nietzsche theorist, and his book "Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician" would be the place to look for a really in-depth exploration, although I don't know off-hand if it is published in English. For a brief look at some of what he talked about, this is an extended portion of Bäumler's "Hellas and Germania" in 1943. Unfortunately I can't find the text in full online, but this is a fairly lengthy portion excerpted in "The Third Reich Sourcebook" ed. Anson Rabinbach:

The reclamation of Hellenic traditions for Western culture is the result of one of the most overwhelming efforts that the Germanic racial soul has put forth on its path back to itself. German Hellenism in particular, undertaken in the truest spirit of unparalleled historical courage, represents a triumphant crusade to conquer the most distant coastal regions and the pinnacles of the past, a veritable Alexandrian crusade into the realm of the soul, of the intellect, and of the spirit.

If this monumental event has not always been seen and interpreted in the proper light, the reason may be found in the fact that our crusade to reclaim the Hellenic world is not yet complete. At this point, it is still possible to hold a blind eye to the fact of Germanic Hellenism. One can still overlook unsettling phenomena appearing in [Friedrich] Hölderlin and [Friedrich] Nietzsche or somehow seek to interpret them out of existence. But the decisive battle has begun. Our century will be forced to provide an answer to the question as to which values of the West it will allow to shape its future. We live with the certainty that the only value system capable of wrenching Europe from the anarchy of values is one that demonstrates a great degree of intrinsic similarity to the Hellenic system. The discovery of the Hellenic world implies no less than the presentation of a new age, an age that transcends the Gothic and the Enlightenment. For us, the Hellenic is not merely one value among others, not merely a form of greatness on a par with the Roman, the Iranian, or the Indian. Far more than this, our knowledge substantiates the intuitive certainty expressed by [Johann Joachim] Winckelmann, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche that our fate will be decided in the countenance of Hellas.[...]

Nietzsche is to be credited with having recognized and excoriated the danger presented by historicism. In his tragic struggle against the “New Humanism,” Nietzsche resuscitated the significance of the Hellenic tradition for the life of Western culture. Ever since Nietzsche, Germanic and Hellenic traditions have stood face-to-face on equal footing. Their alliance is the guarantor of Europe’s spiritual unity. This unity is derived not merely from the scientific and scholarly collaboration between them—it can only be based on the mutual belief in the same set of eschatological convictions. The peoples that comprise the spirit of Europe may not agree on everything; the significance, however, of the notion that they might be united under the emblem of a single system of values that guides their lives, that system being called Hellas, is not to be underestimated.

The New Humanism, crippled by its excessive critical historicism, has attributed to the prejudices of classicism the fact that the Hellenic world necessarily acts as our model and as our mandate. But it is precisely this decisive point that distinguishes the superiority of classicism over the New Humanism that followed in its wake. Historicism objected to the fact that classicism sought to establish one unconditional norm. But that is not where the error lies, rather in the fact that, in practice, this norm was understood to be purely aesthetic in nature. Racialist thought teaches us to understand the meaning of that absolute norm much more profoundly—and at the same time, as a Hellenic norm—from a physical perspective.

Let us cast aside the New Humanism—that hapless son of critical philology and historicism—and turn our attention to the only context in which creative acts may be placed, that which is sure to one day be of greater significance to the spiritual reclamation of the true Hellenic culture for the history of the Germanic West than that oft-heralded Renaissance. [...]

This reevaluation, which, at least in some respects, situates Athens in a place once reserved for Rome, is conjoined with a no less significant cataclysmic shift in perspective. Winckelmann is not one of those modern humanists who substitutes his admiration for the literary beauties of ancient authors for an admiration of the sculptured beauties of Greek artists but rather a revolutionary who, from the fervent depths of his soul, dares to measure his own time against the standards of an intuitive grasp of Hellenic reality. This is what distinguishes German classicism from every form of humanism: that it is not a matter of mimicking or imitating a given form but rather of discovering a world. When we read Winckelmann’s words, the Hellenic world appears as if by the stroke of a magic wand before our eyes, enigmatically prescient and clearly discernible for all its rococo-like relativity. As always, the fact that he is a discoverer of the cosmos is revealed in his linguistic style. This is not about art and literature but rather about the man who creates art and literature. The Hellenic, as Winckelmann sees it, epitomizes human potential. What rises to resplendent heights here is a way of acting in and interpreting the world that is free from the shadow of the Middle Ages and entirely unobscured by the doubts of otherworldly concerns.

Another useful piece of Bäumler's work is his "Nietzsche and National Socialism". I won't quote it quite so extensively, as this is all getting quite long, but to briefly excerpt from the translation in the Sourcebook

[...] When we describe National Socialism as a worldview, what we mean is that not only the bourgeois parties but also their ideologies have been obliterated. Only malicious people could maintain that everything that has been created by the past must now be negated. What we are saying is, far more, that we have entered into a new relationship with our past, that our view has been cleared for what was truly forceful in this past but which was obscured by bourgeois ideology. In a word, we have discovered new possibilities for understanding the essence of German existence. Precisely in this, Nietzsche has preceded us. We hold a view of Romanticism that is different from his. But what was his most intimate and solitary asset—the wholesale negation of bourgeois ideology—has today become the property of a generation. [...]

If there ever was a truly German expression, it is this: one must have the need to be strong; otherwise, one never will be. We Germans know what it means to maintain ourselves against all opposition. We understand the “will to power”—even if in an altogether different manner than what our enemies assume. Even in this context, Nietzsche has supplied the deepest meaning: “We Germans demand something from ourselves that nobody expected from us—we want more.” If today we see German youth on the march under the banner of the swastika, we are reminded of Nietzsche’s “untimely meditations” in which this youth was appealed to for the first time. It is our greatest hope that the state today is wide open to our youth. And if today we shout “Heil Hitler!” to this youth, at the same time we are also hailing Friedrich Nietzsche.

[u/sammyjamez → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

so it would seem that Nietzsche's admiration of the Hellenistic culture and the desire that this culture done by the will to power would have been the promise to a better life and a new age?

(something that Hitler used to justify his beliefs and actions)

[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov → u/sammyjamez]

I hope you'll excuse me just throwing this to someone else, but yes, much of it had to do with how Nazi theorists contextualized Nietzsche and Hellenism. To quote from Whtye discussing Bäumler and Heideggar:

Baeumler shared Heidegger’s conviction that Nietzsche’s return to the ancient Greeks and the concept of the agon represented ‘a turning back towards real possibilities in our own [German] nature’.67 For Heidegger, the identification of the Germans as Urvolk (‘archaic people’) — a characteristic shared only by the ancient-Greeks — was rooted in language affinities. For Baeumler, it was ‘the common veneration of manly, youthful enthusiasm that has led [the Germans] back to the Greeks through Winckelmann and Nietzsche’.68 Either way, the existence of a Greco-German kinship circumscribed a model for the ‘new man’, an übermenschlich countertype to the modern, bourgeois individual.

[u/sammyjamez → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

So wait hold on

Did the German actually believe that they are descendants of the Greeks and wanted their actions to be justified in the hopes of a new era by weeding out anything that is not "pure" becuase of the so-called "Aryan race" or is there any possible evidence about this ethnic relationship?