I think a good question is “Should we expect the beliefs of all self-identifying Nazis to converge?” Sure, the government was a dictatorship and there was a lot of propaganda produced by a central authority, so we might expect Nazi beliefs to be more homogeneous than those of other cultures. But I remember reading a LW comment once about surveys conducted by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages/Renaissance on Catholics in semi-remote locations, and they found that each community had idiosyncratic variations of Catholicism, incorporating everything from polytheism to animism.
A good proxy might be the beliefs of Adolf Hitler, which are more well-known, although not entirely known. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia article on Nazi eugenics indicates that he idealized the Greek city-state Sparta and heralded it as a historical example of a state with pro-eugenics policies. I suppose that how good of a proxy Hitler’s beliefs are would depend on how much and how well he expressed them in public.
On the other hand, the German term ‘Tausendjähriges’ (‘Thousand-year Reich’) was also popular at the time, which might indicate an idealization of the future rather than the past.
Another thing is that those are the only things I’ve seen that seem to indicate that Nazi beliefs were even particularly timeful. Discussion of the past often seems to be related to relating modern people of various ethnicities to the geographical locations of their ancestors. I see talk about which ethnicities supposedly have the best hereditary characteristics, but nothing about breeding modern people into some approximation of individuals in their genetic past, or harking back to some past Golden Age.
I think a good question is “Should we expect the beliefs of all self-identifying Nazis to converge?” Sure, the government was a dictatorship and there was a lot of propaganda produced by a central authority, so we might expect Nazi beliefs to be more homogeneous than those of other cultures. But I remember reading a LW comment once about surveys conducted by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages/Renaissance on Catholics in semi-remote locations, and they found that each community had idiosyncratic variations of Catholicism, incorporating everything from polytheism to animism.
A good proxy might be the beliefs of Adolf Hitler, which are more well-known, although not entirely known. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia article on Nazi eugenics indicates that he idealized the Greek city-state Sparta and heralded it as a historical example of a state with pro-eugenics policies. I suppose that how good of a proxy Hitler’s beliefs are would depend on how much and how well he expressed them in public.
On the other hand, the German term ‘Tausendjähriges’ (‘Thousand-year Reich’) was also popular at the time, which might indicate an idealization of the future rather than the past.
Another thing is that those are the only things I’ve seen that seem to indicate that Nazi beliefs were even particularly timeful. Discussion of the past often seems to be related to relating modern people of various ethnicities to the geographical locations of their ancestors. I see talk about which ethnicities supposedly have the best hereditary characteristics, but nothing about breeding modern people into some approximation of individuals in their genetic past, or harking back to some past Golden Age.