Hitler firmly believed that the force of "will" was decisive in determining the political course for a nation and rationalized his actions accordingly. Given that Hitler was appointed "leader of the German Reich for life", he "embodied the supreme power of the state and, as the delegate of the German people", it was his role to determine the "outward form and structure of the Reich". To that end, Hitler's political motivation consisted of an ideology that combined traditional German and Austrian antisemitism with an intellectualized racial doctrine resting on an admixture of bits and pieces of social Darwinism and the ideas—mostly obtained second-hand and only partially understood—of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de Gobineau and Alfred Rosenberg as well as Paul de Lagarde, Georges Sorel, Alfred Ploetz and others.