After the Kristallnacht pogrom, Ritter wrote in a letter to his mother, "What we have experienced over the last two weeks all over the country is the most shameful and most dreadful thing that has happened for a long time". In 1938, Ritter delivered a series of lectures in Jena attacking Friedrich Nietzsche. The lectures were intended by Ritter to be a form of indirect protest of the Nazi regime. 1938 historicism debate with Meinecke In 1938, Ritter became involved in a major debate with Friedrich Meinecke over "historism". Meinecke argued in favor of the idea of celebrating the "valuable individual quality" of all the phenomenon of history, which was judged not by universal standards but only in regard to its own values. Ritter attacked that position by arguing that without universal notions of values of good and evil and judging all historical phenomenon by its own standards was to abandon all ideas of morality applicable to all times and places. Freiburger Kreis After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, Ritter became a founding member of the Freiburger Kreis, a discussion group whose focus was neoliberal policy for the political economy. It was composed of anti-Nazi professors which included Adolf Lampe, Constantin von Dietze, Franz Böhm and Walter Eucken. Advisor to Goerdeler Later, Ritter worked as an advisor to the German conservative politician Carl Goerdeler. Together, they considered a future constitution after the overthrow of the Nazis. Both were involved in the secret plans to take down Hitler (see below). In a Denkschrift submitted to Goerdeler in January 1943, Ritter wrote, "Hundreds of thousands of human beings have been systematically murdered solely because of their Jewish ancestry". Although urging that the Holocaust should be immediately ended, Ritter went on in the same memo to suggest that in a future post-Nazi government, the modern civil rights of Jews should be restricted. Book on Machiavelli and utopia In 1940, Ritter published Machtstaat und Utopie (National Power and Utopia). In this book, Ritter argued that democracy was a luxury that only militarily-secure states could afford. Ritter argued that because Britain is an island, that provides a degree of security that allows democracy. By contrast, Ritter argued that Germany, with its location in Central Europe needed an authoritarian government as the only way of maintaining security. Ritter also contrasted the utopianism of Sir Thomas More and the realism of Niccolò Machiavelli. Ritter declares that Germany had