But Hitler had struck out on a different course. Dismissing as a bourgeois obfuscation the old, "spiritual" understanding of the German nation, he defined Volk instead as "a substance of flesh and blood" requiring racial purification and Lebensraum. If this people was to have a religious outlook at all, it would be in the form of the "religion of blood" delivered in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg located the fatal flaw of Christianity in its disregard for the "law of blood": "the stream of blood-red, real life, which rushes through the veins of all true peoples and every culture" and "alone enables the creation and maintenance of values". Heidegger, too, by now dismissed Christianity as an ossified system that evaded rather than encouraged spiritual effort; but his hope was for a people trained in radical questioning and intellectual striving, not steeped in blood-and-soil nationalism.

Heidegger was neither unaware of, nor embarrassed by, this conflict with the party line, though he probably underestimated the Nazis' commitment to it. His 1933-34 notebooks are full of scorn for the "vulgar Nazism" peddled by the media and politicians, with its mix of "ethical materialism" and "dull biologism". The definition of the Volk as a biological organism, he thought, reduced it to an absurdity — "a giant squid rolling around in space, only to be washed up, when it has rolled around enough, at the edge of nothingness." What the people needed was a "spiritual-intellectual Nazism", addressing them as a community with a spiritual-intellectual calling. In his 1933 rectoral address, audaciously entitled "The Self-Assertion of the German University", Heidegger tried just that, folding the military service and labour service introduced by Hitler back into the three-tiered structure of Plato's ideal republic, administered by philosopher kings, workers and soldiers: "The three commitments — through the people to the destiny of the state in its spiritual-intellectual mission — are equally aboriginal to the German character. The three services springing from them — labour service, military service, and intellectual service — are equally important and of equal rank."

But if Heidegger hoped to use the spark of the ongoing political revolution to light the fire of a second, spiritual-intellectual one, he was disappointed. The diary entries of 1933-34 are full of frustrated complaints: his colleagues are using Mein Kampf as a template on which to churn out flimsy "re-evaluations" of old texts; the students are neglecting their studies to hang out on factory floors; and the party leadership is enforcing ineffectual institutional reforms and dismissing his ideas. Over the course of the academic year 1933-34, Heidegger increasingly felt that his rectoral duties, at which he had never been very good, were keeping him from his "true intellectual task", the reform of philosophy. In April 1934, he wrote in italics: "I stand at the end of a failed year."