A year later, in April , he resigned the Rectorship and stopped taking part in Nazi Party meetings, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until its dismantling at the end of World War II. The denazification hearings immediately after World War II led to Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg, banning him from teaching. Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, his attitude towards Jews and his near-total silence about the Holocaust in his writing and teaching after are highly controversial.
The Black Notebooks , written between and , contain several anti-semitic statements, [ 3 ] although they also contain statements where Heidegger appears extremely critical of racial antisemitism. Whether there is a relation between Heidegger's political affiliation and his philosophy is another matter of controversy. Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, He joined the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" ten days later, on May 1 significantly the international day of workers' solidarity: Heidegger said after the war he supported the social more than the national [ 13 ].
He co-signed a public telegram sent by Nazi rectors to Hitler on May 20, He wasn't alone to be mystified.
Toynbee too after an audience in noted about Hitler: "he has beautiful hands". In Germany, the atmosphere of those days has been described by Sebastian Haffner , who experienced it himself, as "a widespread feeling of deliverance, of liberation from democracy.
This sense of relief at the demise of democracy was shared not only by the enemies of the republic. Most of its supporters, too, no longer credited it with the strength to master the crisis.
