Palantir CEO Karp Says He Sought Out Ex-Nazis in Rural Germany

The remark came late in a new interview with biographer Walter Isaacson, released Tuesday on The Builders, a podcast from iHeartPodcasts and Kaleidoscope. The conversation was taped on August 6.

Isaacson had just asked, “Did you learn that in Germany?” after the Palantir chief executive said fascist movements were “very somehow very charismatic,” and that what he called the “regressionary left” and the “regressionary right” could appear inverted.

“I spent a lot of time with Nazis, ex-Nazis, when I was in Germany because I wanted to understand,” Karp said. “Like, real ex. You had to go to the countryside to meet them, because in the city there were no ex-Nazis.”

“Everybody was like, we hated Hitler,” he said of city residents, while “in the country people were honest about it.”

Karp said antisemitism was a motivation, but added, “I’m honestly, for the record, I think a lot of the motivation was the charisma of Hitler to them and the abuse of a national mandate, which is justified, and abuse of patriotism, which is necessary to humans.”

A Philosophy Thesis and Years in Germany

Karp, who has described his father as shaped by a German Jewish mother, studied philosophy in Germany and wrote a graduate-school critique of Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who became an ardent supporter of Hitler.

Isaacson noted in his introduction that Karp “wasn’t an engineer,” had studied philosophy in Germany, and that “his politics lean left.” Karp has called himself “an unhappy Democrat.”

The Palantir chief has become a more public political figure as the company’s government work has expanded.

Palantir’s Government Footprint

In the same interview, Karp defended the firm’s work for intelligence and law-enforcement agencies as surveillance under a legal mandate, and said weakening the military in the name of peace was a “fantasy.”

Palantir has reported a sharp rise in U.S. government revenue as its software has spread across American military programs. In Europe, the company has also sought to reassure allies that customers retain control of its platforms, saying NATO’s Maven system “has no kill switch.”

Clash Report posted a clip of the countryside remarks on Tuesday.