Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (48 page)

every opportunity was taken to drive home the Nordic Germanic [eugenic] message. All disciplines emphasized the…inferiority and biological unattractiveness of the “non-Aryan” races. This was not particularly aimed at the non-Aryan students, but was part of the indoctrination of their German peers. It was as if the “alien blood” students did not exist as sentient beings.
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Bendiscioli wrote that the Nazi Government was centred

around the idea of the “race” or “nation” (
Volk
).… It aims at the biological preservation, the eugenic perfection, and the purity of the race. As a result of this attitude the teaching of biology has become a subject of primary importance in German schools. The governments of the various states have made the theory of heredity, racial doctrine, racial hygiene, and demographic politics, obligatory subjects on scholastic curricula.
¹⁰

BERNHARD RUST’DARWINIST MINISTER OF SCIENCE, EDUCATION AND NATIONAL CULTURE

Bernhard Rust (1883 –1945) was introduced to Darwinism and eugenics in college and graduated with a doctorate in German philosophy. Dr. Rust joined the Nazi party in 1922. A zealous Nazi, he eventually controlled every level of the German educational system.

Soon after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Dr. Rust was selected
Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung
(Reich Minister of Science, Education and National Culture), and set about to reshape the German educational system to conform to the racist and anti-Christian goals of Nazism.

It was Dr. Rust who, in 1933, issued the rule requiring students and teachers to greet each other with the Nazi salute as a symbol of loyalty to Nazi Germany. His major educational goal was to immerse German youth in Nazi philosophy, especially social Darwinism. Rust also was instrumental in purging German universities of Jews and other “enemies of the State.” Teachers who were known to be critical of the Nazi Party were dismissed or, in Nazi ideology sent to be “retrained.”

DARWINISM PERMEATES NAZI BIOLOGY TEXTBOOKS

As a further precaution against “wrong thinking,” schools could use only books that had been approved by the Nazi party. In Dr. Rust’s view, “the whole function of education is to create Nazis.”
¹¹
Rust also believed that non-Aryan science, such as Albert Einstein’s “Jewish physics,” was flawed. In an address to scientists, Rust said that the “problems of science do not present themselves in the same way to all men. The Negro or the Jew will view the same world in a different light from the German investigator.”
¹²

Dr. Rust also became the director of a national scientific research centre that oversaw the use of prisoners for the now infamous, often brutal, Nazi medical experiments. After the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) indicted him for his involvement in human medical experiments—but Rust had beaten the hangman and already committed suicide.

After the Nazis took over Germany, biology instruction and textbooks rapidly became saturated with Darwinian evolution. Prior to this, the subject was rarely mentioned in the textbooks. In 1938, the Ministry of Education published an official school curriculum handbook that included a chapter on new biology requirements.
¹³
This curriculum included the biology goals developed by the National Socialist Teachers’ League, no doubt influenced by Ernst Haeckel’s writings and authored by Darwin’s disciples, H. Linder and R. Lotze, emphasizing evolution. It was Haeckel who first translated Darwin’s 1859
On the Origin of Species
into German.

The biology curriculum included teaching plant and animal evolution in grades three and four, and human evolution in grade five. The required topics for biology instruction in the upper grades included human evolution and the origin of the human races.

The guidelines repeatedly stressed that evolution was central to both the Nazi worldview and the biology curriculum. The curriculum specifically mandated a detailed coverage of evolution, including the evolution of human races by “selection and elimination” of the less-fit races. It stipulated that students must accept as “self-evident this most essential and critically important natural law of elimination [of the unfit] together with evolution.”
¹⁴
Eugenics, although introduced in geography and history, was

developed much further in biology. The teaching of racial studies and eugenics soon was required in designated classes. This order was a bonanza for the extremists whose eugenics texts had gone unread for years. Hundreds of books and pamphlets were published for all levels of instruction. Written in turgid and propagandistic prose…the books, after providing minimal introductions to genetics and prehistory, were dedicated almost entirely to a totally [we recognize now] unscientific definition of races and their supposed characteristics.
¹⁵

Teachers in the fifth grade were also required to cover the emergence of “primitive” human races “in connection with the evolution of animals.” Eighth grade students were taught evolution in far more detail, including the worldviews of Lamarckism and Darwin, and their political implications, as well as the origin and evolution of the human races.

The race segment included material on putative prehistoric humans and the evolutionary history of contemporary “races,” including the Nordic and Jewish “races.” The Teachers’ League material stressed that, while the “individual organism is temporary, the life of the species to which it belongs is lasting,” and is ruled by the laws of evolution.
¹⁶

BIOLOGY TEXTBOOKS TIE DARWINISM, NAZISM AND RACISM TOGETHER

The close connection between Nazism and Darwinism was explained in detail in many of the biology textbooks.
¹⁷
One text, written for fifth grade girls, after explaining that “all creatures, plants as well as animals, are in a continual battle for survival” added that the animal that does

not secure sufficient territory and guard it against other predators, or lacks the necessary strength and speed or caution and cleverness, will fall prey to its enemies.… The battle for existence is hard and unforgiving, but is the only way to maintain life. This struggle eliminates everything that is unfit for life, and selects everything that is able to survive. …the laws of nature are built on a struggle for survival.
¹⁸

The implications of these ideas to Nazi war and racist policies are obvious. The textbook then provided a set of examples to support the above claim, concluding that “every creature has to fight for its survival…summarized in the principle: Each individual wants to maintain its existence in the struggle for survival (self preservation instinct, fighting will, individuality).”
¹⁹
The text then added that humankind is also “subject to these natural laws, and has won its dominant position through struggle” against inferior animals.
²⁰
Support for this conclusion included the claim that people historically “had both to secure their own prey, and protect themselves against the larger carnivores.” Furthermore, each person must fight for his place in his community and those who are less fit in the “struggle for survival…will perish. Our Führer tells us: ‘He who wants to live must fight, and he who does not want to fight in this world of perpetual struggle does not deserve to live!’”
²¹

In part two, the authors continue, noting that all living things which are successful

in the struggle for survival are not satisfied merely with existence, but seek to preserve their species as well. Here too is a drive that corresponds to natural law. Without this drive, species would long since have vanished.… Maintaining the species also is a struggle. The deer ruts in the fall and offers battle to other deer in competition for females. The stronger and cleverer deer passes on his inheritance. The rooster defends his status and his hens courageously. The battle for females selects the fittest.
²²

The text, after stressing that the “drive for maintaining the species is stronger than the instinct for self-preservation,” then details the importance of sacrificing one’s life for the Nazi state and evolution. Examples provided to support the Nazi goal of sacrificing one’s life for the Nazi state include the fact that a female rabbit defends her

young against hawks, often at the cost of her own life. A fox risks its life to secure food for its young. The life of the individual can be sacrificed to assure the continuation of the species. (The law of the species is stronger than that of the individual!)
²³

This text then claims that a natural law exists that applies to all life, namely, nowhere on earth is there a life form that exists which produces only one or two offspring because that

would inevitably lead to extinction.… [Therefore a] large number of offspring are an important means in the struggle for survival of the species. The house mouse can resist the field mouse simply through its larger number of young. In such instances, one can speak of a battle of births.
²⁴

This argument was used by the Nazis to develop their policy of encouraging German women to have large families. They used both propaganda and awards, such as money and honours, to achieve this goal. The Nazis also justified their wars for
territory
by Darwinism: