Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (45 page)

4
Davidson,
The Trial of the Germans
, 41.

5
Randall L. Bytwerk,
Julius Streicher: The Man Who Persuaded a Nation to Hate Jews
(New York: Dorset Press, 1983), 1.

6
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 154.

7
Davidson,
The Trial of the Germans
, 40.

8
Heinz Höhne,
The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS
, trans. Richard Barry (London: Pan Books, 1969), 303.

9
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 155.

10
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 159.

11
Davidson,
The Trial of the Germans
, 40.

12
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 155.

13
Cited in Louis Lochner,
What about Germany?
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942), 71.

14
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 160.

15
“50,000 for Streicher,”
Time Magazine
9, Vol. 26 (August 26, 1935): 22.

16
“50,000 for Streicher,” 22.

17
“50,000 for Streicher,” 23.

18
Gregory Wegner,
Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich
(New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002), 158.

19
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 161.

20
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 161.

21
Richard Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 145.

22
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 162.

23
Höhne,
The Order of the Death’s Head
, 302–303.

24
Höhne,
The Order of the Death’s Head
, 300–301.

25
Höhne,
The Order of the Death’s Head
, 300–301.

26
Höhne,
The Order of the Death’s Head
, 300–301.

27
James M. Rhodes,
The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution
(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1980), 106.

28
Adolf Hitler,
Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944
, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens; intro. H.R. Trevor-Roper, “The Mind of Adolf Hitler” (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953), 127.

29
Davidson,
The Trial of the Germans
, 39.

30
Hitler,
Hitler’s Secret Conversations
, 126.

31
Bytwerk,
Julius Streicher
, 112.

32
Bytwerk,
Julius Streicher
, 112.

33
Davidson,
The Trial of the Germans
, 40.

34
Kingsbury Smith, “The Nuremberg Trials: The Execution of Nazi War Criminals,”
International News Service
(October 16, 1946): 4.

35
Smith, “The Execution of Nazi War Criminals,” 4.

36
Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
, 154.

37
Quoted in Smith, “The Execution of Nazi War Criminals,” 4.

Lebensborn: Breeding better Nazis using Darwinism

INTRODUCTION

I
n December 1935, Heinrich Himmler established the infamous
Lebensborn
¹
homes to help accomplish the Nazi goal of achieving a superior human race by deliberate racial selection.
²
The
Lebensborn
’s two main goals were numerical quantity and racial quality, two somewhat antagonistic ideals.
³
Its “ultimate goal was to develop a racially superior stock, in accordance with pseudoscientific notions” of eugenics.
⁴

Breeding superior humans, Himmler declared, would eventually provide superior men for leadership of a superior people, the Aryans. Aryan is not a precise category, but in colloquial modern English, Aryan signifies the Nordic for Norway, the racial ideal promoted by the Nazis, which actually included most people in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria and people originally from these regions. Of course, the definition excluded all Jews, including all native German-speaking Jews.

This programme was the result of the Nazi conclusion, based on Darwinism, that “some human races are infinitely superior to other human races,” and intermarriage works against this goal because “even if the bad stock is raised [up by interbreeding] the good is lowered.”
⁵
Furthermore, the Nazis believed that inferior races breed more rapidly then the superior ones, resulting in a gradual increase in the percentage of inferior humans in the population. This belief was not a marginal view among Nazis, but rather was “central to national socialist racial theory and practice.”
⁶

The
Lebensborn
was no small project. In the nine years it was in existence, about 12,000 children, close to half illegitimate, were born in its fifteen homes.
⁷
Professor Thompson wrote:

Racial purity was an obsession with Himmler, consistently emphasized in his speeches and writings, even while he was engaged on many fronts in extending the power and influence of himself and the SS. He believed that not only physical attributes but character traits, such as loyalty, determination, courage, and a sense of honor, could be biologically transmitted. Since, in his estimation, the “Aryan race” possessed these and other virtues in abundance, Himmler demanded proof of such ancestry from his men and their wives or prospective brides. Marriages consummated on this basis would biologically ensure a future SS elite, and they would also establish the SS as the racial nucleus from which Germany could replenish an Aryan inheritance now dangerously diluted through generations of race-mixing.
⁸

In the
Lebensborn
, “the scientists and Hitler found common ground. German eugenicists, long frustrated in their dreams of selective breeding, looked with hope to the Nazi Party.”
⁹
Professor Fritz Lenz, a leading German biologist, called Nazism “applied biology.” He concluded that around a third of the German population were genetically inferior and, for this reason, should be sterilized—especially the racial inferior people such as the Jews and Slavs—and that “genetic purification was the nation’s first priority.”
¹⁰
It was not just the biologists that supported Nazism, but “Nazism was actively and enthusiastically espoused and promoted by…the medical profession.”
¹¹

For centuries, Germany had been a set of city-states, such as Bavaria and Saxony, and was unified as a single nation only in 1871. One major goal of the German nationalist movement was to produce a great nation of Teutonic people, referring to those persons whose native language was German.
¹²
The belief that Teutonic people were racially superior to all other races was bolstered by their belief that Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest applied to humans. Toward this end, the German nationalists “did not hesitate to maintain that the ‘struggle of the creative Teutonic-Aryan race’ boiled down to the ‘struggle against the parasitic Semitic race.’”
¹³

As a result, German “doctors, psychologists, biologists…scholars, scientists” concluded that the pure Germans were “the good, the true and the beautiful, while the bad, the false and the ugly” was the “work of inferior, meaning non-German” people.
¹⁴

In this view, the “master race” must exterminate the “weak for the benefit of the strong” because evolution has given the strong “the right to exterminate whole races and peoples.” These views were

Nazi ideas that were accepted by the Germans when Adolf Hitler attained power in 1933.… Thus the leaders of the Third Reich…used the pretext of purifying the German race to initiate a process of planned reproduction on the one hand and extermination [on the other hand].
¹⁵

To achieve this goal, German girls were told it was the “duty of every German woman to bear children for the Führer.”
¹⁶
Lebensborn
homes were established to help achieve this goal. The criteria used to select ideal parents for breeding the Nazi so-called super-race included over twenty

characteristics, including the applicant’s height, standing and seated; the shape of the skull, face and forehead; colour and location of the eyes and distance between them; length, breadth and curvature of the nose; length of arms, legs and body; colour, growth and quality of body hair; skin colour; back of the head, cheek-bones, lips, chin, eyelids; thorax (male applicants), pelvis (female applicants). In addition to all this, the SS man’s bride had to be able to provide evidence that neither she nor her parents suffered from any physical or mental disease. Also she had to submit to an examination by SS doctors to make sure she was not sterile. Finally, provided she overcame all these hurdles, she had to produce a family tree showing there had been no Slavonic, let alone Jewish, blood in her family since 1750.
¹⁷

The candidate parent for breeding also had to submit full-length photographs, usually nude or in a bathing suit, for evaluation. Last, the scientific “‘race experts’ subjected the question of [the candidates’] …future harmony to microscopic examination. The final decision rested with the Reichsführer” Hitler.
¹⁸
The problem was that few Germans fit this ideal—most were too dark, too short, too thin, too fat or in other ways too non-Nordic.
¹⁹

The “aim of these institutions was the breeding of a Nordic super-race with the aid of men and women carefully selected in accordance with the racial principles of the Third Reich.”
²⁰
The women did not need to be married and the fathers could have a wife and still sire at least one child with a
Lebensborn
woman. Himmler evidently followed his own advice and, in the 1940s, fathered two children by one of his several mistresses.
²¹