From what I have read in Sarah Bakewell’s excellent book, At the Existentialist Café, Martin Heidegger had few redeeming qualities when it came to his treatment of friends and colleagues.
Having had romances with Jewish women at his university, including Hannah Arendt, he joined the Nazi Party and did little to protect his Jewish friends when Hitler came to power. Those who made contact with him after the war to try to understand his actions were met with stony silence.
There was a big difference between pre-war Heidegger when he wrote the acclaimed Being and Time, and postwar Heidegger who wrote a letter in 1947 denouncing Humanist Existentialism as advocated by Sartre in his work Being and Nothingness.
This change in his philosophy was called ‘the turn’ suggesting he had turned away from his earlier thoughts on existentialism in favour of his new philosophy of ‘Gelassenheit’ or letting things be.
odespinner 