Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (53 page)

at the feet of Martin Luther than Charles Darwin. Luther had described Jews as “poisonous envenomed worms” and encouraged Christians to destroy them, inaugurating hostilities that continued unabated into the twentieth century.
³⁴

This, at best, is a very distorted view. A main source of this claim is a single mention of Luther in Hitler’s Bible of Nazism,
Mein Kampf
, where Hitler wrote:

the great warriors in this world who, though not understood by the present, are nevertheless prepared to carry the fight for their ideas and ideals to their end.… To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
³⁵

Hitler said nothing about Luther and Jews in
Mein Kampf,
but that Luther was a man who fought for his ideas, a conclusion that is true regardless of whether one agrees with Luther. Obviously, whether or not Luther’s views about the Jews inspired Nazism is, at best, only indirectly related to Christianity’s validity. However, the question has come up so often that this chapter examines this claim. Eric Metaxas wrote that, as a younger man,

Luther’s attitude toward the Jews was exemplary, especially for his day. He was sickened at how Christians had treated Jews. In 1519 he asked why Jews would ever want to become converted to Christianity given the “cruelty and enmity we wreak on them—that in our behavior towards them we less resemble Christians than beasts?”
³⁶

A few years later in an essay titled, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” Luther wrote

If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property.
³⁷

In his later years, Luther’s attitude toward Jews, and many other things, had changed drastically. It must be stressed that Luther’s concern was not Jews as a nationality but Judaism as a religion. The Nazis major concern was Jews as a race, not their religion. Jews who were baptized Christians, even those that were ordained ministers or priests in a Christian church, were usually sent off to the camps like every other Jew.

Jewish historian Nachum T. Gidal concluded that Luther’s fulminations against the Jews

found little response either among the populace or in the world of humanists scholarship.… Luther’s Bible [the translation into German] gave the people access to Jewish religion and history, which had previously been unfamiliar to them and had therefore inspired unease and distrust.… In this way many non-Jews were actually drawn closer to the Jews by reading Luther’s Bible.
³⁸

He added that Luther “felt a close bond with the Old Testament.”
³⁹

LUTHER’S ILLNESS CONTRIBUTED TO HIS INTOLERANT RHETORIC ABOUT THE JEWS

Metaxas claims that

Luther seemed to have an absolutely torrid love affair with all things scatological. Not only were his linguistic flourishes styled along such lines, but his doctors seem to have followed suit: for one of his ailments, they persuaded him to take a draught of “garlic and horse manure,” and he infamously received an enema—in vain—moments after he had departed this world. So it is in this larger context that one has to take his attitude toward the Jews, which, like everything else in his life, unraveled along with his health.
⁴⁰

Luther’s attacks on Jews evidently began in 1528 when, after consuming a

large meal of kosher food, he suffered a shattering attack of diarrhea. He concluded that the Jews had tried to poison him. By that time he was making enemies everywhere. In his last decade, his list of ailments ballooned to include gallstones, kidney stones, arthritis, abscesses on his legs, and uremic poisoning.
⁴¹

Furthermore, these health issues only added to his many other health problems, some that were very serious, including:

constipation, hemorrhoids, a cataract in one eye, and a condition of the inner ear called Meniere’s disease, which results in dizziness, fainting spells, and tinnitus. He also suffered mood swings and depression. As his health declined, everything seemed to set him off. When a congregation sang anemically, he called them “tone-deaf sluggards” and stormed out.
⁴²

It was at this time that his nastiness hit its peak. He “wrote the vile treatise
Von den Juden and ihren Lügen
(
On the Jews and Their Lies
), and the man who once described the Jews as ‘God’s chosen people’ now called them ‘a base and whoring people.’”
⁴³

Nonetheless “Luther’s foulest condemnations of the Jews were never racial,” as was the Nazi’s, but clearly religious.
⁴⁴
Furthermore, to be fair, Luther was “an equal opportunity insulter…attacking everyone with equal fury, including Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and fellow Protestants.” Metaxas listed some examples including:

He attacked King Henry VIII as “effeminate” and blasted his theological opponents as “agents of the devil” and “whore-mongers.” His language waxed fouler and fouler. He called the pope “the Anti-christ” and “a brothel-keeper above all brothel-keepers and all lewdness, including that which is not to be named.” He blasted the Catholic church’s regulation of marriage and accused the church of being “a merchant selling vulvas, genitals, and pudenda.” Expressing his contempt for the devil, he said that he would give him “a fart for a staff.” He viciously mocked Pope Clement III’s writings: “Such a great horrid flatus did the papal arse let go here! He certainly pressed with great might to let out such a thunderous flatus—it is a wonder that it did not tear his hole and belly apart!”
⁴⁵

In the end, what he wrote about the Jews “would rightly haunt his legacy for centuries and would in four centuries become the justification for such evils as Luther in even his most constipated mood could not have dreamed.”
⁴⁶
Specifically:

At the very end of his life, after becoming a parody of his former cranky self, Luther said and wrote some things about the Jews that, taken on their own, make him out to be a vicious anti-Semite. The Nazis exploited these last writings to the utmost, as though they represented Luther’s definitive take on the matter, which is impossible, given what he’d said earlier in life.
⁴⁷

His infamous rants against the Jewish religion were written a mere three years before his death, when he was very ill, suffering from serious, painful illness. This is when Luther wrote that Christians should set

fire to their synagogues and schools, destroying their houses, confiscating their prayer books, taking their money, and putting them into forced labor. One may only imagine what Luther’s younger self would have thought of such statements. But Goebbels and the other Nazis rejoiced that Luther’s ugliest ravings existed in writing, and they published them and used them with glee, and to great success, giving the imprimatur of this great German Christian to the most un-Christian and—one can only assume—demented ravings. The hundreds of thousands of sane words he had written were of little interest to the men in brown.
⁴⁸

SUMMARY

Among the many factors that influenced the Holocaust and the Nazi movement, Jewish author Ray Comfort concluded that the

evolutionary philosophies espoused by Charles Darwin were at the core of Hitler’s ideology, and this belief in the superiority of the Aryan race motivated the Third Reich to implement the practices of eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilization, and racial extermination. As Nazi Leader Rudolf Hess admitted, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”
⁴⁹

Clearly, racism was central to the Nazi’s Final Solution, the Holocaust.
⁵⁰
Fortunately, today more attention is now being given to the problem of the philosophy of Darwin and its implications than during the last several decades, especially in books written for laypeople.
⁵¹
This was a major goal of this work.

_______________

1
James T. Campbell,
Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 117.

2
Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles, “Hitler’s Racial Ideology: Conflict and Occult Sources,” in
Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual
, Vol. 3, Chapter 9 (White Plains: Kraus, 2009), 228; also available online at
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=395043;
accessed September 3, 2012.

3
Campbell,
Middle Passages
, 117.

4
Campbell,
Middle Passages
, 117.

5
Max Domarus,
The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary
(Wauconda: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2007), 412.

6
Wolfgang Goede, “Science under the Swastika,”
The Pantaneto Forum
, Issue 32 (October 2008): 1.

7
Wilhelm Niemöller,
Kampf und Zeugnis der Bekennenden Kirche
(Bielefeld: Ludwig Bechauf Verlag, 1948). [In English:
Struggle and Testimony of the Confessing Church
.]

8
Cited in Domarus,
The Essential Hitler
, 401.

9
Eric Metaxas,
Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 351–352.

10
Cited in Ian Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–45: Nemesis
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 356.

11
Beate Wilder-Smith,
The Day Nazi Germany Died: An Eyewitness Account of the Russian and Allied Invasion of Germany
(San Diego: Master Books, 1982), 31.

12
Wilder-Smith,
The Day Nazi Germany Died
, 31–32.

13
Goede, “Science under the Swastika”: 2–3.

14
Goede, “Science under the Swastika”: 2–3.

15
P.Z. Myers, “Hitler Was a True Christian™,” October 27, 2011 (
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/10/hitler_was_a_true_christian.php;
accessed September 3, 2012).

16
Myers, “Hitler Was a True Christian™.”

17
Jerry Bergman, “The Church Preaches Eugenics: A History of Church Support for Darwinism and Eugenics,”
Journal of Creation
, Vol. 20, Issue 3 (December 2006): 54–60.

18
Moshe Y. Herczl,
Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry
, trans. Joel Lerner (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 47.

19
Herczl,
Christianity and the Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry
, 202.

20
Christine Rosen,
Preaching Eugenetics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

21
Doris L. Bergen,
Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 41.

22
Bergen,
Twisted Cross
, 41.

23
Domarus,
The Essential Hitler
, 426.