In the fall of 1939, Martin Heidegger and his young Freiburg student and friend Günther Anders were walking along the river when they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the English had accused the German government of instigating a recent attempt to assassinate Churchill. When Heidegger remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Anders retorted that it was impossible because "the Germans were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and such an act was incompatible with the German 'national character'." Heidegger was furious. Some five years later after the war, he wrote to Anders:

"Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important, you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends."

(Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany)