Nazism: an Antirational and Anti-Enlightenment Stance

 It is impossible to understand so destructive a policy without recognizing that Nazi ideology was, for the most part, not only irrational-but antirational. It cherished the pagan, pre-Christian past of the German nation, adapted romantic ideas of a return to nature and a more "organic" existence, and nurtured an apocalyptic expectation of an end of days, whence the eternal struggle between the races would be resolved... The contempt for rationalism and its association with the despised Enlightenment stood at the core of Nazi thought; the movement's ideologues emphasized the contradiction between weltanschauung ("worldview"), the natural and direct experience of the world, and -welt-an-denken ("thinking about the world"), the "destructive" intellectual activity that breaks reality down through conceptualization, calculation, and theorization. Against the "degenerate" liberal bourgeois' worship of reason, the Nazis championed the idea of a vital, spontaneous life, unhindered and undimmed by compromises of dilemmas. 

Rationality and Holocaust, Yaki Menschenfreund, 2010