Was German philosophy really dangerous?

Again, quoting Watson's The German Genius:

As the German theologian Paul Tillich was to write later, “It is not without some justification that the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger are connected with the anti-moral movements of fascism and national socialism.” I would like to add Spengler in that list. His The Decline of the West is surprisingly social-darwinist. And there was even an "official" nazi philosopher/jurist Carl Schmitt.

Should we blame German philosophy for the rise of national socialism? Influential thinkers can put forward ideas that are readily adopted by others. These ideas may promote contempt to rationality (Nietzsche, according to some interpretations), or embrace Volk (German people) as sacred (some texts by Heidegger), or see violent conflicts between nations natural and desirable.

However, this sounds a bit too easy. There were radical social darwinists and nationalist philosophers/authors (de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Lothrop Stoddard) in other countries. They may have become famous had their ideology won.

Moreover, German philosophy was/is in general well-known, as is nazism, so some people will want to make a connection between them.

But it is interesting how the German intelligentsia accepted the nazi ideology so readily. Though Watson has good comments about it, the heavyweight is prof Kunnas with his book The Allure of Fascism, 674 pages in small print. More about it later, I'm only on page 43.

An interesting analysis of Nazi economics can be found in Ferguson's Civilization. There he states "In 1938 the output of the American economy was still more than 6 per cent below the pre-crisis peak of 1929; German output was 23 per cent higher [and Soviet output even higher]". This, and full employment certainly made nazism appealing to middle and lower classes. But it came with a cost: "People worked and got paid, but because there was steadily less and less to buy in the shops, they had little option but to put the money in savings accounts, where it was recycled into funding the government. [..] As rearmament was stepped up from 1934, textile production stagnated and imports declined." Since raw materials could no longer be imported, there needed to be another way to obtain them -- war.