Habermas:

Since 1945, Heidegger's fascism has been discussed from various points of view. At the center of this discussion has been, for the most part, the rectoral address of 1933, in which Heidegger celebrates "the transformation of German existence." [...] What is worthy of consideration is rather the question of how the author of Sein und Zeit (the most significant philosophical event since Hegel's Phaenomenologie), how, that is, a thinker of this rank could fall into so obvious a primitivism as manifests itself, to a sober observer, in the hectic tastelessness of that call for the self-assertion of the German university. [...]

That National Socialism was not a necessary developmental consequence of the German tradition is certainly beyond question. But it does not follow from that that all attempts are false and reprehensible that seek, in the sense of Thomas Mann's Faustus novel, to probe the rootedness of fascist motives in the core of the German tradition and to uncover the dispositions that in a period of decline could lead to fascism. The problem of the fascist intelligentsia presents itself as the problem of the prehistory of fascism.

p.191

It is well known that, for Heidegger, the fate of the present is forgetfulness of Being [Seinsvergessenheit]. [...] Europe lies in a great pair of pincers between Russia and America, which are, in their essence, the same: "the same hopeless frenzy of technology unbound and the unparalleled organization of the normalized man," for whom time means nothing more than speed. From both sides there is spreading over Europe the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the massification of man, and hatred, suspicion toward all that is creative and free. [... Heidegger] is calling for a heroic existence in opposition to the insipid, deteriorated condition of ordinary life.

p.192

It is "strength" that elevates the aristocratic individual above the ordinary Many. The noble individual, who chooses fame, will be ennobled by the rank and mastery that belong to Being itself, while the Many-- who, according to Heraclitus, whom Heidegger approvingly cites, are like well-fed cattle--the Many are the dogs and the asses. What is worthy of rank is that which is stronger, for which reason Being eludes whoever is concerned about evening out, reducing tension, leveling off: "The true is not for everyone, but only for the strong." Moreover, it is "spirit" ["Geist"] that distinguishes the thinker vis- a-vis the intellectual. Intelligent calculation is oriented towards objects and places them at man's disposal. Its leveling grasp brings all things down to one level: extension and number are its predominant dimensions. For this thinking, "ability" no longer means extravagant expenditure out of lofty abundance, but the sweaty performance of a routine. This thinking, which follows the laws of traditional logic, cannot understand the question about Being [nach dem Sein], let alone develop it, because logic is itself grounded in an answer to the question about what it is [nach dem Seienden], an answer that closes off Being from the very outset. [...] The degeneration of thinking to intelligence can only be overcome by thinking that is more primordial.

Finally, "courage" must be added to strength and spirit, an ambiguous form of courage that does not even shrink back from violence and error. Appearance, deception, illusion, errancy are all powers that are appropriated by Being itself; it is only everyday reason [Verstand] that no longer experiences their numinous force and degrades them to mere error. The courageous individual repeats the beginning, in pre- Platonic Greece, of our intellectual-historical existence, saying Yes to all the disconcerting strangeness, the darkness, {p. 193} the uncertainty and insecurity of the true beginning. In the final analysis, the heroic individual develops his full essence [Wesen] as one who dares: he is the violent individual, the creative individual, who masters Being by placing the unsaid under the spell of his speech, the unseen under the spell of his gaze, and the unoccurred [das Ungeschehene] under the spell of his deed. In this context, violence is not to be taken to mean the banality of a "brute, arbitrary act." On the other hand, it is the faint- hearted man who is concerned with agreement, compromise, and mutual care and who is accordingly only able to experience violence as a disturbance of his life. "Thus the violence-doer [der Gewalt-Taetige] does not know kindness and appeasement (in the ordinary sense), nor is he soothed and quieted as a result of his successes or prestige." He despises the appearance of completion. [...] The violent man is the towering individual, the towering solitary; he is, in the final analysis, the man with no way out, for whom non-existence represents the highest victory over Being, whose existence finds its tragic fulfillment "in the most profound and far-reaching Yes to his own destruction," who, in willing what is extraordinary, casts aside all help.

We ask of Heidegger's lecture the question what the object of its appeal is, what it calls upon its audience to do, and against what it takes its stand. [... Heidegger] plays off the strong Chosen One against the bourgeois; primordial thinking against commonsense; and against the ordinariness of a life free of danger, the courage unto death of the extraordinary individual.

pp. 193-4 [...]

The physiognomy of a [political] statement changes situations directly; it is the focus of the infection. For style is lived stance or attitude; it is the spark that causes certain behavior to form spontaneously; it is the perennial birth of existential motives; it causes the appeal [Appell] to catch fire. It is characteristic of the self-conscious historicity of Heidegger's philosophy that the appeal changes, while the structures of meaning preserve their continuity over the decades of his development. [...] ... in 1935, the violent deed was called for, while only eight years before Heidegger praised the quasi-religious decision to lead a private, isolated existence as the final act of autonomy within the nothingness of a world without gods. The appeal changed colors at least twice, according to the political situation, while the conceptual pattern of the summons to authenticity and of the polemic against decline remained stable. The lecture of 1935 merely unmasks the fascist coloring of that time.

p.195

When Christianity, with its reinforcement of the view that there are two worlds, is categorized as a mere stage in the degeneration of the West, then the idea of the equality of all before God and the freedom of each individual--an idea that was still central for Hegel--can no longer offer an effective counterweight: neither the counterweight of individualistic egalitarianism against the notion of the natural privilege of the stronger, nor the counterweight of cosmopolitanism against the motif of the German people as history's chosen people. And secondly, when it is not acknowledged that Descartes, alongside the line of thinking that calculates and makes disposable, there runs the other line of the interpretive apprehension of meaning [des sinnverstehenden Vernehmenden], then the dialectical plasticity of modern development does not emerge clearly; it is this dialectic that gives creative legitimacy to that form of thinking which aims at mastery through objectification and thus preserves it from being one- sidedly identified with ordinary opinion [Meinen]. This, from this side is lacking the corrective of pragmatic rationalism.

The nurturing of anti-Christian and anti-Western effects alone would have sufficed to promote the psychosis of irrationalism... [...] Added to this, however, is an elementary self-deception on Heidegger's part. He presented his insights, which were supposed to lead to the encounter between planetary technology and modern man... [...]

In any event, there are still two questions that remain in the end: in what is this, even if only apparent, convergence grounded? Does fascism perhaps have more to do with the German tradition than one would ordinarily like to admit? And secondly: why is Heidegger publishing his lecture today, in 1953, without {p. 196} qualification? That is consistent, to be sure, only for a stance [... that] remains stuck in repetition. That is consistent for an assessment that seeks to explain in terms of the history of Being not only its own error but, in the place of moral clarification, also the "error" of the National Socialist leadership. [...]

[The publication of that lecture in this fashion poses the] question: can the planned murder of millions of human beings, which we all know about today, also be made understandable in terms of the history of Being as a fateful going astray? Is this murder not the actual crime of those who, with full accountability, committed it? Have we not had eight years then to take the risk of confronting what was, what we were? Is it not the foremost duty of thoughtful people to clarify the accountable deeds of the past and keep the knowledge of them awake? [...] Heidegger publishes his words, in the meantime eighteen years old, about the greatness and inner truth of National Socialism, words that have become too old and that certainly do not belong to those whose understanding still awaits us....

                                      End of excerpts from Habermas on Martin Heidegger