It sounds like you might be suggesting I was conflating or blaming Protestant ideals for evil Nazi actions. Instead, I am pointing out an earlier cultural influence that persisted. In a way, there’s something far more sinister about the idea that a Nazi believed there was some sort of genuine freedom to be had, as opposed to it being outright malicious.
“He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom”
“He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom”
- historian Otto Friedrich