Kelley Ross has written a review of it, Nietzsche and the Nazis, with some strong arguments against Dr. Stephen Hicks' "personal view," which inspired me to get the DVD and view it for myself.
Here's Ross' conclusion:
Hicks is confused enough about morality that he agrees with Nietzsche on the "slave revolt," and this serves to vindicate the influence, which he mentions himself, that Nietzsche had on Ayn Rand. This merely serves to illuminate the failings and oversights of Randite ethics. Nietzsche and the Nazis would be much better if Hicks were not carrying water for the peculiarities of Ayn Rand's own defense of liberalism and capitalism. By apparently agreeing with Nietzsche's denigration of Jewish and Christian compassion and charity, Hicks in truth burdens his case for freedom, democracy, liberalism, and capitalism with a weakness that the enemies of all these, today principally on the Left (but also in Islamic Fascism), have never hesitated to exploit. Politically, leftist rhetoric is still, even in America, much more pervasive and effective than any defense of the free market or private property.
Nevertheless, despite these tendentious weaknesses, and the peculiarity of its structure, Nietzsche and the Nazis is a valuable and, on the whole, impressive work. That Nietzsche was not an individualist and that the Nazis were socialists are points that seriously need arguing against other admirers of Nietzsche, on the former point, and against those who, on the latter point, promote the leftist interpretation of fascism as a form of capitalism. Hicks does this all effectively, even as he performs the valuable historical service of preserving and expounding what the ideology of the Nazi regime actually was, and the reasons why a great many Germans really supported it. We should not forget that the eugenics movement in the United States was not completely discredited until it was obvious what the Nazis had done, faithfully, with such ideas. At the same time, the attraction of Nietzsche for Stephen Hicks himself is evidence for the thesis that intellectually serious people, whether Nazis or not, can believe this stuff.
Emphases and links are in the original.
I must say, I didn't find the Randian touches particularly disagreeable, but, then, I've been tempering my Objectivism with Ross's insights for a number of years now. I won't feel very qualified to argue against Dr. Ross until I finally get around to finishing one of Kant's books - or, rather, several. The impression I got of Kant from my college course on him (called Romanticism and Alienation, and it wasn't exclusively about Kant, we also surveyed Fichte, Hegel, Schilling and some other German Idealists - my paper was, more or less, "Fichte and the Nazis"; I think I got a B- on it)...
Oops! Digression!
Anyway, my impression of Kant from that class was that he deserved both barrels of what Ayn Rand fired at him. It is Ross who got me to reconsider. The trouble is, I'd rather read Ross than Kant or Schopenhauer.
I know that the points Ross goes on about in his review, even with his forewarning, aren't ones in which I feel much of a personal stake, so I found it difficult to get as worked up over them as he did when I watched the movie (the first time, without the football games). I've read four books on Hitler, including Mein Kampf and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and thirty or fourty on World War II, visited Dachau, stayed for two and a half weeks with a former SS soldier and been otherwise inundated with information about that epoch... You'd think I'd be tough to impress on that subject... But I was impressed with Hicks' presentation of the similarities and differences between Naziism and Nietzsheanism.
And, of course, I am interested in the comparison of Hicks' achievement with my own.
Update: Aha! Now I see a bit more clearly.
