The finding is the reverse of the cliché, and it is well documented.
What the National Socialists thought of Hegel
Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, the most widely circulated ideological book of the movement, condemns Hegel twice and devotes separate chapters to Schopenhauer and Plato. In the schools Plato was the author who was read, in editions specially prepared with suitably selected passages. Hegel did not belong to the canon.
The sharpest witness is Carl Schmitt. In Staat, Bewegung, Volk he writes in 1933 that with Hitler’s chancellorship on 30 January one may say: „Hegel is dead.“ The civil-service state for which Hegel stood had been superseded by the movement. Schmitt was no Hegelian and had no reason to be gentle – he is describing what happened.
What happened nonetheless
German legal philosophy in the 1920s had turned to Hegel in order to set something against a statutory positivism felt to be empty: Julius Binder, his pupil Karl Larenz, Walther Schönfeld. After 1933 they equated the actuality they found with the concept. The „concrete universal“ became the Volksgemeinschaft, ethical life became the racial order, the person became the Volksgenosse. In 1935 Larenz wrote the sentence in which what was happening becomes visible: only he who is a member of the people is a subject of rights.
With that Hegel’s foundation was expressly annulled. His command of right runs „be a person and respect others as persons“ (§ 36) and knows no condition; and § 209 says that the human being counts because he is a human being. Neo-Hegelianism turned both into their opposite.
How to place the case
It is not enough to say that this was abuse. It is the realisation of a risk that lies in Hegel’s procedure: if philosophy is to recognise reason in what is actual, everything depends on the examination of whether the shape one finds really corresponds to its concept. Whoever skips that examination still has Hegel’s sentences in hand and says the opposite with them. Hegel’s only defence against this is his own concept of actuality: that what merely exists is not thereby actual.
Sources. Walter Kaufmann, „The Hegel Myth and Its Method“, 1959 · Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk, 1933 · Karl Larenz, Rechtsperson und subjektives Recht, 1935 · Bernd Rüthers, Die unbegrenzte Auslegung, 1968 · Oliver Lepsius, Die gegensatzaufhebende Begriffsbildung, 1994. – In detail on this website: Hegel and German legal scholarship.