Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler

Wolfgang accuses me of not knowing much about Nietzsche or Hitler. Perhaps not, but I know a little, and I can google. In particular, he thinks I misunderstand the Nietzschean superman. Let's review a bit of what he said in Zarathustra:

The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape, and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student's rag.... When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a "Master," when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him?...

"The Blond Beast" was another Nietzschean epithet idolized by him and borrowed by Hitler. The "Lords of the Earth" was an FN expression that occurs frequently in Mein Kampf. Nietzsche also prefigured Hitler's "final solution." From The Will to Power:

A doctrine is needed powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world weary. The annihilation of the decaying races. Decay of Europe.-The annihilation of slavish evaluations.-Dominion over the earth as a means of producing a higher type.-The annihilation of the tartuffery called 'morality.' The annihilation of suffrage universel; i.e. the system through which the lowest natures prescribe themselves as laws for the higher.-The annihilation of mediocrity and its acceptance (The one sided, individuals – peoples;

Hitler went to the Nietzsche museum and posed for a picture with the bust of the philosopher, but his biggest intellectual inspiration was not Nietzsche, but his friend Richard Wagner. Wagner and Nietzsche shared a hatred of the Christian and Jewish religions, and a profound misanthropy, but Nietzsche did not go along with the full virulence of Wagner's antisemitism, and he broke with Wagner partly over that. After his insanity, though, his pro Wagner and violently anti-semitic sister Elizabeth became his literary executor, thereby contaminating some of his work.

From Wikipedia:

It has been observed that In 1932, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche received a rose bouquet from Adolf Hitler during a German premier of Benito Mussolini's 100 Days; in 1934 Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg visited her again, presenting her with a wreath for Nietzsche's grave with the words "To A Great Fighter"; in the same year the Führer posed for a photo gazing into the eyes of a white marble bust of Nietzsche, and was presented by Elisabeth with Nietzsche's favorite walking stick.[26] There can be no doubt that Italian and German fascist regimes were eager to lay claim to Nietzsche's ideas, and to position themselves as inspired by them. In Heinrich Hoffmann's best-selling Hitler as Nobody Knows Him (which sold nearly a half-million copies by 1938) the caption of the photo of Hitler with the bust of Nietzsche read, "The Führer before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilized two great popular movements: the National Socialist of Germany and the Fascist of Italy."[27]

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