Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (18 page)

Many biologists today, writing the above, would drop “as they deserve” because Haeckel is regarded by his critics as an unscrupulous forger who played no small role in the horrible events that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s.

The well-documented influence of Darwinism on the Holocaust has been greatly downplayed by the mass media. Many current writers gloss over, totally ignore or even distort the close connection between Darwinism and Nazi racism and the policies it produced. But, as Stein admonishes, little doubt exists that the

history of ethnocentrism, racism, nationalism, and xenophobia has been also a history of the use of science and the actions of scientists in support of these ideas and social movements. In many cases it is clear that science was used merely as raw material or evidence by ideologically interested political actors as proof of preconceived notions.
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He adds that there is also little doubt that this self-protecting attitude is based on a willful misreading of history. He concludes that support for ethnocentrism and racism included many well-respected scientists who were very “active in using their own authority as scientists to advance and support racist and xenophobic political and social doctrines in the name of science.”
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He adds that the scientists of the day could not deny that they used science to advance racism, and it is historical whitewash to attempt to claim that the past abuse of science was not respected science but merely pseudoscience.

THE CLAIM THAT CHARLES DARWIN WAS JUST REFLECTING HIS CULTURE

Significantly, Charles Darwin was not just responding to his culture: “we have all heard, time and time again, that the reason Darwin’s theory was so…sexist, and racist is that Darwin’s society exhibited these same characteristics.” Professor David Hull answers this charge by noting that Darwin was not “so callow that he simply read the characteristics of his society into nature.”
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Clearly, Darwin played a major role in creating the society that scientists today claim was at fault for adversely influencing Darwin, excusing him for his contribution.

Relatively few scientific studies exist that directly deal with Darwinism and Nazism, partly because many evolutionists avoid the subject for the reason that evolution is inescapably selectionist. One of the most well-documented studies supporting this, using primary sources, is that of historian Richard Weikart.
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One of the best reviews of Darwinian and Nazi documents concludes the Nazis felt confident that their extermination programmes were firmly based on science.
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Recently, a number of popular articles have published surprisingly candid accounts of this topic.
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The source of the worst of Nazism was Darwinism, and we must first understand history to prevent its repetition because “those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.”
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After an extensive study of the “natural selection” homicides committed in German institutions, Dr. Frederic Wertham concluded that the psychiatric and medical professions were among the most enthusiastic supporters of Nazi race programmes.
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They not only willingly implemented Nazi policy, but often went well beyond what the law required. He relates the activities of numerous eminent psychiatrists and physicians from leading German universities. Many of these scientists who not only supported the Nazi policy of “artificial evolution” but eagerly implemented these policies and are still quoted today in the literature as experts.
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Highly respected scientific works published in Nazi Germany and elsewhere openly advocated elimination of those judged, not only a “foreign body in human [meaning Aryan] society” but people who were “below the level of beasts.”

Although the justification for extermination programmes included a desire to eliminate “hereditary diseases” that were a “drain on the German people,” most of those murdered did not have hereditary conditions.
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Nazism believed the state had a duty to provide “redemption from evil” in the form of a quick and painless drug to eliminate useless eaters.
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LACK OF OPPOSITION TO NAZI RACISM

Even though Germany had been the leader in the Protestant Reformation, the so-called Enlightenment and Darwinian ideas rapidly replaced the Christian worldview. German society rapidly adopted a thoroughly secular worldview that relied on science and materialistic philosophy for values and morals. Nazis rationalized that forcing Jews and other “inferior races” into concentration camps was not cruel or even punishment, but similar to quarantining the sick to prevent them from spreading their disease to the healthy. Conditions in the camps later deteriorated but, certain Nazis claimed, the main concern at first was to quarantine inferior races so as to prevent race contamination of the Aryan gene pool. Actually, the largest number of Jews were exterminated before camp conditions had deteriorated.

These ideas were not opposed by most scientists then, but rather “most members of the scientific and academic communities” not only “did very little to oppose the rise of Hitler and national socialism” but in many cases they

lent their considerable prestige as scientists to the support of the ideas of the national socialist movement [The Nazis]. It is simply true historically that German academics and scientists did, in fact, contribute to the development and eventually success of national socialism, both directly through their efforts as scientists and indirectly through the popularization or vulgarization of their scientific work.
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Dr. Wertham, himself a German psychiatrist, notes that psychiatrists became so carried away with their Darwinism that they later actually reached into the outside community looking for victims for their death camps! They first convinced the parents or guardian that “such people [should] be placed under [their] guardianship and sent to an institution” and from there “they were quickly put into the gas chambers.”
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Wertham concluded that the whole procedure of determining those deemed “unfit” for mating (and even living) was characterized by an almost complete absence of compassion, mercy or pity for the victims. He judged that the most reliable estimate of the number of “psychiatric” and other patients killed in German institutions as part of the euthanasia programme was at least 275,000.
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One institution alone, Hadamar, celebrated in 1941 the “cremation of the ten thousandth mental patient…[p]sychiatrists, nurses, attendants, and secretaries all participated. Everybody received a bottle of beer for the occasion.”
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Dr. Wertham even claimed that the entire population of every institution in German-controlled territory would likely have been eliminated if the Allies had not defeated Germany. In many cases, the total population of many institutions—even large ones—was eradicated, and the institutions closed.
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Because certain church leaders and humanitarians protested these eugenic killings, Hitler himself finally intervened. While on leave, many soldiers learned that a mentally ill brother, grandparent, aged relative or a friend injured in the war had “disappeared.”
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The knowledge that their countrymen at home were being murdered by the hundreds of thousands was demoralizing. Wertham claims that the Nazi government realized that many soldiers became fearful that they may well end up in the gas chambers if they were wounded in the war.
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Hitler recognized that the expansion of the race “purification” programme to those who were not “economically able to contribute,” such as the war injured, hindered Germans’ motivation to fight for their fatherland. Wertham concluded that this latest expansion of killing “officially stopped” but in reality continued, though less blatantly and more hidden than before.

Nazism is often used as a example of the danger of “religious” zeal, yet only occasionally does popular literature mention the key role of the eugenics of Francis Galton, whose theories were based on the theory of natural selection espoused by his cousin, Charles Darwin. Firmly convinced that Darwinian evolution was true, Hitler saw himself as a benefactor of all humankind. By breeding a superior race, he thought he would, in the end, gain the world’s admiration as the man who pulled humanity up to a higher level of evolutionary development. What Hitler attempted to do must be ranked alongside the most heinous crimes of history, and Darwin as the father of one of the most destructive philosophies in history.

SUMMARY

The writings of leading Nazis and early twentieth-century German biologists reveal that Darwin’s theory had a major influence on Nazi race policies. Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to how farmers breed for superior cattle. In formulating its racial policies, Hitler’s government relied heavily on Darwinism, especially the elaborations by biologist Ernst Haeckel.

As a result, a central policy of Hitler’s administration was the development and implementation of policies designed to produce a “superior race.” This required, at the very least, preventing the “inferior races” from mixing with those judged superior in order to reduce contamination of the latter’s gene pool.
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The “superior race” belief was based on the theory of racial inequality, a major presumption and requirement of Darwin’s original survival of the fittest theory. This philosophy culminated in the Final Solution, the extermination of approximately 6 million Jews and over 5 million other people who belonged to what German scientists judged were “inferior races.”
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1
Adolf Hitler,
Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944
, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens; intro. H.R. Trevor-Roper (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953).

2
William Bell Riley,
Hitlerism or the Philosophy of Evolution in Action
(Minneapolis: Irene Woods, 1941); W. Rowan, “Charles Darwin” in
Architects of Modern Thought
(Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1955); Richard Weikart,
From Darwin to Hitler
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Richard Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism on Anti-Semitic Ideology in Germany and Austria, 1860–1945” in Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, eds.,
Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Richard Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).

3
Allan Chase,
The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980).

4
Ernst Haeckel,
The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes
(New York: Appleton, 1876); Ernst Haeckel,
The Riddle of the Universe
(New York: Harper, 1900); Ernst Haeckel,
The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy
(New York: Harper, 1905); Ernst Haeckel,
Eternity: World War Thoughts on Life and Death, Religion, and the Theory of Evolution
(New York: Truth Seeker, 1916); Ernst Haeckel,
The Evolution of Man
(New York: Appleton, 1920).

5
“The economic cost of the war is estimated at US$1500 billion” [Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann, eds.,
The Penguin Atlas of World History,
trans. Ernest A. Menze (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003)]. In 2012 US dollars, $1.5 trillion converts to $18.75 trillion.

6
Pierre Aycoberry,
The Nazi Question: An Essay on the Interpretations of National Socialism, 1922–1975
(New York: Pantheon, 1981); Alan D. Beyerchen,
Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); George Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,”
American Scientist
76, No. 1 (Jan–Feb 1988): 50–58.

7
Ethel Tobach, John Gianusos, Howard R. Topoff and Charles G. Gross,
The Four Horsemen: Racism, Sexism, Militarism, and Social Darwinism
(New York: Behavioral Publications, 1974).

8
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism.”

9
Marc Lappe, “Eugenics,” in Kenneth Ludmerer, ed.,
The Encyclopedia of Bioethics
(New York: Free Press, 1978), 457.

10
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism.”

11
Arthur Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), 230.