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November 5, 2009 (LPAC)—Authors Bernard Wasserstein, a prominent historian, and Ron Rosenbaum, an author and a columnist for Salon magazine, have shed new light on the Nazi affinities of Hannah Arendt, co-author of the theory of "The Authoritarian Personality" (1950).

It was Hannah Arendt's and Theodor Adorno's theory, which took the privileged, morally weakened offspring of the FBI security-cleared white collar elite of the 1945-57 period, and enabled them to hatch into the fascist Baby Boomers of the Mark Rudd stripe during 1964-68. Lyndon LaRouche has pointed out the critical role of Arendt's and Adorno's teaching that there is no truth,— there is only opinion, only "spin." Indeed, it is the man or woman who adheres to the criterion of truthfulness, who is the hated and feared "authoritian personality."

LaRouche has exposed that Arendt and Adorno were, in fact, themselves ideologically committed Nazis, but that their friends had had to explain to them that their Jewish origin made Nazi party careers impossible for them, and that they had to flee abroad to Britain and the U.S.

Hannah Arendt began an affair with Professor Martin Heidegger when she was 18 and he was twice her age. She continued her close friendship and support of him through the time he joined the Nazi Party, and even through his purging of the Jewish professors from Freiburg University as Rector there under the Hitler regime. After the war, when Heidegger refused to renounce his Nazi activities, and was therefore prohibited from teaching, Arendt's promotion of him helped maintain his status as an international celebrity.

Wasserstein in London's Times Literary Supplement of Oct. 9, and Rosenbaum, quoting Rosenbaum in Salon on Oct. 30, calls attention to Arendt's reliance on actually Nazi anti-Semitic writings, as authoritative on Jews and Judaism, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.

"One of her authorities on South African Jews," Wasserstein reports, is an article by Ernst Schultze, "a longstanding Nazi propagandist, that appeared in ... a German publication founded and directed by the prominent Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg." And then, "in a new preface [to The Origins of Totalitarianism] written in 1967, Arendt commends the work of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank,... whose 'contributions,'" Wasserstein quotes Arendt, "'can still be consulted with profit.'"

"Moreover," Wasserstein writes, "she internalized much of what the Nazi historians had to say about Jews, from the 'parasitism' of Jewish high finance to the 'internationalism' of [Walther] Rathenau."