Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (22 page)

ACADEMIC JOURNALS SUPPORT NAZI PROGRAMMES

German scientists took their science, which became known as “racial hygiene,” very seriously. As noted, prior to 1933, German scientists published thirteen scientific journals devoted primarily to racial hygiene and related fields, and also established over thirty institutions, many of which were connected with major universities or research centres devoted to “racial science.”
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During the Nazi era, close to 150 scientific journals, many of which still are highly respected today, covered racial hygiene and allied fields.
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Enormous data files were kept on the races, many of which were analyzed and used for research papers published in various German and other scientific journals. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was established in 1927 and is still active today under a new name—minus the word eugenics.

The various eugenic institutes also researched the “persistence” of various “primitive racial traits” in certain races in and outside of Germany. Eugenicists soon found much evidence for the “Cro-magnon racial type in certain races, and presumably also [for the] Neanderthal” type, even though they had a larger brain on the average than modern man.
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Like their American and British counterparts, the researchers at various German racial hygiene institutes and universities discovered genetic evidence for virtually every human trait from criminality to hernias, including even divorce and “loving to sail on water.” The scientists saw their work as a noble effort to continue “Darwin’s attempts to elucidate the origin of species.”
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DARWINISM INFLUENCED NAZI LEADERS

Many of Hitler’s top aides, including Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Höss,
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held similar Darwinian-based racist beliefs. Höss was raised a Catholic but renounced his Catholic membership in 1922, at the age of 22, just after completing his education and just before joining the National Socialist Party. He read extensively about racial theories, heredity and ethnology. His racial views guided his policy in the concentration camps that he administered, including Auschwitz.
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The result was that he converted this former forced-labour camp into an evolution laboratory where inmates were no longer persons but “simply goods to be processed in the gigantic death-factory he had organized.”
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Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and the architect of the Final Solution, believed (in harmony with Darwinism) that history has consisted of “a constant, merciless struggle among races for survival” and that as a result of this struggle German and Nordic races were “above all others.”
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Caring for the weak, sick, lame, old or poor ran counter to the chief driving force of evolution—the survival of the fittest and non-survival of the less fit. This meant that the weak must be eradicated for the benefit of the race as a whole. The Nazi regime did not view these policies as wrong, or even inhumane, but instead openly prided itself on its advanced scientific ideology and modern view of the world.
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Given the Nazis’ wholesale acceptance of Darwinism, their race and deterministic ideas may well have been inescapable.
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Among the leading internationally respected scientists that supported Darwinism as a means of promoting racist eugenics include professors Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer who, with Erwin Baur, wrote a major, widely circulated (even translated into English) genetics textbook.
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This textbook contained wild over-generalizations such as that a Negro lacks foresight and is

not inclined to work hard in the present in order to provide for wellbeing in a distant future…[and is] not particularly intelligent…and above all [he is] devoid of the power of mental creation, is poor in imagination, so that he has not developed any original art and has no elaborate folk sagas or folk myths.
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The Nazis reasoned that race pollution reduces the calibre of the potential leaders, and should thus be condemned. Many anthropologists, including those in America, supported this conclusion in writing. Examples include Dr. Earnest Hooton of Harvard, one of the first physical anthropologists in America. He, in turn, trained virtually every physical anthropologist in America for generations. Another was Carlton Coon, a prolific and best-selling author whose books openly advocated a polygenetic evolution, the belief that the races evolved separately.
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The polygenetic view concluded that the races are not equal, and that some are more primitive than others. Consequently, interbreeding has the potential of “mixing races” to the detriment of their offspring.
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The justification for the Nazi racist programmes, including their goal of exterminating the Jews, was based on the research conclusions of the “leading biologists and professors” not only in Germany but in America and elsewhere. According to Frederic Wertham, Dr. Karl Brandt felt that since these programmes had the support of the leading professors, the programme must be valid, and who “could there be who was better qualified [to judge it] than they?”
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Dr. Brandt headed the administration of the Nazi euthanasia programme from 1939 onward and was appointed Adolf Hitler’s personal physician in August 1934.

SUPPORT FOR DARWINISM BY MEDICAL PROFESSORS

The negative influence of Darwinism on German physicians also is well documented.
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One German doctor, from a medical family traceable back to the early seventeenth century, was interested in biology from a young age. As he grew older, he began to read

Bölsche and Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel, a towering figure in German biology and an early Darwinian, was also a racist, a believer in a mystical
Volk
, and a strong advocate of eugenics who “can be claimed as direct ancestor” of the Nazi “euthanasia” project. Wilhelm Bölsche was a literary critic who became a disciple and biographer of Haeckel and was known to have provided Hitler with “direct access to major ideas of Haeckelian social Darwinism.”
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After an extensive study of the “artificial selection” murders committed in German institutions, 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 also often went far beyond what the law required.
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Wertham also related the activities of numerous eminent psychiatrists and physicians who were teaching in leading German universities, many of which are still being quoted as experts in scientific literature today. These men not only supported the Nazi policy of “artificial evolution,” but eagerly put it into effect. Highly respected scientific works published in Nazi Germany and elsewhere openly advocated elimination of those persons judged “below the level of beasts” who were a “foreign body in human [meaning Aryan] society.”

Hans F.K. Günther, a professor of “race science” at the University of Jena, argued in favour of killing persons “whose death is urgently necessary [namely]…those who are below the level of beasts [such as Jews and Negroes].” Karl Binding and L. Alfred Hoche, authors of a book titled,
The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value,
advocated the same policy.
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These articles and books advocating killing were generally favourably reviewed by biologists and university professors.
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This scholarly material on racism espoused various policies that were later adopted by the Nazis.

Although the justification for extermination programmes included a desire to eliminate “hereditary diseases” that were a drain on German resources, most of those murdered did not have hereditary conditions.
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The Nazis believed that the state had a duty to provide “redemption from evil” in the form of giving a quick and painless death to those persons judged inferior, an idea that they borrowed from Haeckel and other evolutionists.
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These ideas were not only unopposed by the scientists, but rather

most members of the scientific and academic communities…did very little to oppose the rise of Hitler and national socialism, and in many cases lent their considerable prestige as scientists to the support of the ideas of the national socialist movement.… German academics and scientists did, in fact, contribute to the development and eventual 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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The support of the medical doctors was critical in allowing the atrocities in the camps to the extent that, in Auschwitz alone,

Nazi doctors presided over the murder of most of the one million victims of that camp. Doctors performed selections—both on the ramp among arriving transports of prisoners and later in the camps and on the medical blocks. Doctors supervised the killing in the gas chambers and decided when the victims were dead. Doctors conducted a murderous epidemiology, sending to the gas chamber groups of people with contagious diseases and sometimes including everyone else who might be on the medical block. Doctors ordered and supervised, and at times carried out, direct killing of debilitated patients on the medical blocks by means of phenol injections into the bloodstream or the heart.
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Lifton added that doctors were actively consulted about how best to carry out the process of various tasks in the camps, such as

how to burn the enormous numbers of bodies that strained the facilities of the crematoria. In sum, we may say that doctors were given much of the responsibility for the murderous ecology of Auschwitz—the choosing of victims, the carrying through of the physical and psychological mechanics of killing, and the balancing of killing and work functions in the camp.… As one survivor who closely observed the process put the matter, “Auschwitz was like a medical operation,” and “the killing program was led by doctors from beginning to end.”
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In the late 1970s, Lifton interviewed a German doctor who was a fierce anti-Semite during the Nazi era. In the interview, the doctor used Darwinism to explain both the failure of Nazi beliefs about Jews and the enormous success of Jews in the West. The doctor, upon learning that Lifton was Jewish, declared unctuously,

“The Jewish question became our tragedy and your tragedy”…initiated “by the flood [of Jews] from the East, and by Darwinian principles enabling Jews to become especially able “through such a hard selection during these two thousand years” to take so many medical positions that German doctors were excluded from…. “Nowadays we know that all of us, Jews and Germans, belong to the same cultural community” and must stand together against the “adverse cultural community”…. Except for rearranging his cast of characters, Dr. S. had not changed much. Racially, he practiced what he preached, and had an enormous family: “I have always believed that those who are fit should have as many children as possible, and those who are unfit should have as few …as possible.”
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SUMMARY

Even though Germany had been the leader in both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, Darwinian ideas advocated by its leading scientists rapidly replaced the Christian worldview, beginning only a few years after Darwin published
On the Origin of Species
in 1859.
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German society rapidly adopted a thoroughly secular worldview, relying on science and materialistic philosophy for its values and morals. Ironically, the churches, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “lost their heads and their entire Bible,” including Genesis, and even

before Hitler came to power, as his ascendancy became increasingly probable, the editors of…[many] Christian papers brought their already virulently antisemitic rhetoric into closer concord with that of the Nazis. They did so unbidden, entirely voluntarily, and with unmistakable passion and alacrity.
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Some have tried to justify or rationalize the concentration camps by claiming that forcing Jews and other “inferior races” into them was not cruel punishment, or even punishment, but was similar to quarantining the sick to prevent them from spreading their disease to the healthy. This justification claims that conditions in the camps later deteriorated, but the main concern at first was simply to quarantine inferiors in order to prevent them from contaminating the Aryan gene pool. The goal, as became clear in time, was to eliminate a group of people believed to be, not just inferior, but unworthy of life and, in Hitler’s words, harmful like bacilli that must be eradicated.
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Relatively few academic studies deal directly with Darwinism and Nazism—and many evolutionists today try to avoid the subject because they realize evolution is inescapably selectionist. The best reviews of Darwinism and Nazism documents supporting the fact that the Nazi extermination programmes were based firmly on science were completed by historians of German nationality.
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Recently, several popular science and news magazines have published surprisingly candid and honest accounts of this topic.
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