"The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism."

[Prairie Gates]

33. Agreed

Bashing Arendt for her affair with Heidegger is very silly business.

That said, I wouldn't exactly say that he showed no Nazi signs in the 1920s. There's a good case to be made that much of his philosophy was proto-Nazi and certainly right wing all throughout that period.

Heidegger's writings on Jews are much better understood after the release of the so-called black notebooks. They are pretty bad. The major rub for Heidegger scholars is that he absolutely refused to apologize for any of it, even when begged to do so (by Arendt, among others!). Of course, he was barred from teaching after the war as part of the de-Nazification programs. One Heidegger scholar, on writing about the postwar period and the black notebooks, concludes simply that Heidegger was prideful and had a "hard heart" (see Krell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe: From Being and Time to the Black Notebooks). It seems an insufficient judgment.

In any case, I agree with the gist of what you're saying here, and the attempt to discredit Arendt's point on empathy by pointing to her relationship with Heidegger is...not great.