Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (9 page)

Hitler also wrote about the dangers of the “higher” more evolved races breeding with the “lower” races in a now infamous account:

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl who he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master. For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he [the Jew] will forever be master over bastards and bastards alone. And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals.
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Hitler reasoned that a “higher race would always conquer a lower” race because this is what the law of evolution demands.
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In the 1933 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler explained that a higher race should rule a lower race because this is a “right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right” because it was founded on the scientific fact of evolution.
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Evolution is clearly expressed in Hitler’s analogy that human evolutionary progress is similar to climbing a ladder, noting that

it is impossible to climb higher without first taking the lower steps. Thus, the Aryan had to take the road to which reality directed him and not the one that would appeal to the imagination of a modern pacifist. The road of reality is hard and difficult, but in the end it leads where our friend [the pacifist] would like to bring humanity by dreaming, but unfortunately removes [humanity] more [away from the dream] than bringing it closer.
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Hitler also deduced that under conditions of limited reproduction, if the birth rate decreased, then the natural struggle for existence, which allows only the strongest and healthiest to survive, will be replaced by the mistaken anti-evolutionary desire to save the weakest and sickest. Hitler reasoned the result of this misguided approach is that the progeny of the strong who breed with the weak will cause the offspring to be inferior to the strong, resulting in the degeneration of the race.
Therefore, the weaker race will eventually replace the stronger.

It is for this reason that the drive for life will decimate what Hitler described as the “so-called humaneness of individuals.” In other words, the inferior races must be destroyed to make room for the superior races, and what Hitler believed was misplaced Christian humaneness will only interfere with this goal.

Historian Professor Richard Weikart documented that Hitler’s “evolutionary ethic swept aside any humane impulses and provided a way to justify any action, no matter how abominable, if it promoted the interests of the ‘best’ humans.”
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In Hitler’s words, if reproduction

is limited and the number of births diminished, the natural struggle for existence which leaves only the strongest and healthiest alive is…replaced by the obvious desire to ‘save’ even the weakest and most sickly at any price; and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature [evolution] and her will continues.
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As a result of his policy, Hitler concluded that the stronger race will replace the weaker one. Furthermore, the drive for survival will decimate the “fetters of the so-called humanity of individuals,” resulting in the elimination of the weak and giving their place to the strong.

Hitler believed that humans were animals to which the genetic laws learned from livestock breeding can, and should, be applied. Instead of permitting natural forces and chance to control evolution, the government must control evolution in order to advance the human race. The first step to achieve this goal was to isolate the “inferior races” to prevent them from further contaminating the “Aryan” gene pool.
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Inferior races included not only Jews but also Slavs (mostly Russians, Poles, Czechoslovakians and Ukrainians). Although the “Germans intended to eliminate the Jews before the end of the war, most Poles would work as helots [a class of serfs between a slave and freeman] until they too ultimately shared the fate of the Jews.”
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The reason was to “the Nazis, the Poles were
Untermenschen
(subhumans)…subjected to a program of extermination and enslavement.”
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The same fate awaited the Russians for the same reason.
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The widespread public support for this policy was partly a result of the belief common among the educated classes, that it was scientifically proven that certain races were genetically inferior. Hitler believed that he was simply applying facts proven by science to produce a superior race of humans as part of his plan for a better world. He believed that the “business of the corporate state was eugenics or artificial selection–politics as applied biology.”
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He even used his belief in human evolution to justify his own vegetarianism, noting that “monkeys, our ancestors of prehistoric times, are strictly vegetarian.”
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As early as 1925, Hitler outlined in Chapter 4 of
Mein Kampf
his view that application of Darwinism to society was the
only
basis for a successful Germany to which the title of his most famous work—in English,
My Struggle
—alluded. Although the title refers to Hitler’s own struggle, the Darwinian struggle for existence was an important theme of Hitler’s writings. As Clark concluded, Adolf Hitler “was captivated by evolutionary teaching—probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas—quite undisguised—lie at the basis of all that is worst in
Mein Kampf
and in his public speeches.”
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As an adult, Hitler “foresaw the biological evolution of Germans into supermen.”
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Hickman adds it is no coincidence that Hitler firmly believed in Darwinism and “whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his psychosis, it is certain” that the concept of struggle was important because his book,
Mein Kampf
, clearly set forth “evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest, and the extermination of the weak to produce a better society.”
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Furthermore, the conclusion that evolution can be directed by scientists to produce a “superior race” was the
central leitmotif
of Nazism. Although Hitler drew his racist ideology from many sources, the “concatenation of ideas and nightmares which made up the…social policies of the Nazi state, and to a considerable extent its military and diplomatic policies as well, can be most clearly comprehended in the light of its vast racial program.”
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Weikart documented that Hitler “synthesized traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes into an overarching social Darwinist framework” and, as a result, Darwinist racism contributed

several elements to anti-Semitic ideology. First, Darwinism entailed biological variation within species, and many, including Darwin himself, thought this meant racial inequality. Second, the Malthusian population principle and the struggle for existence suggested that human populations were expanding faster than the food supply, so masses of humans would necessarily die in each generation, with only the fittest surviving. Third, social Darwinism contributed to the rising fear of biological degeneration by the end of the nineteenth century. Fourth, Darwinism provided the foundation for eugenics, which was a key ingredient in the Nazi worldview. Finally, biological racism increased substantially after the advent of Darwinism. To be sure, Darwinism did not necessarily imply biological racism (just as it did not necessarily imply eugenics), but nonetheless Darwinism gave impetus to hereditarian thought, and most biological racists were also avid Darwinists.
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To Hitler, individuals are not only
far less important
than the race but, he added, certain races were animals that he “labeled subhumans.” It was, therefore, “both legal and right to exterminate them in the collectivist and evolutionist viewpoint. They were not considered…persons in the sight of the German government.”
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As a result, the Darwinist movement, especially as developed by the father of German evolution, Ernst Haeckel, became one of the most powerful forces in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German intellectual history, which served as a prelude to Nazism. Evolution caught hold in Germany faster and took a firmer grasp there than in any other place in the world, and when Germans referred to Darwinism, they often were thinking of Haeckel’s interpretation of Darwinism.
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HITLER’S EUGENIC GOALS

Hitler’s policies resulted from the idealistic goal of preventing “pollution” of the superior Aryan race by putative inferior races. He elaborated his Darwinian views by comparing the strong killing the weak to a cat devouring a mouse. The Jews, especially, must ultimately be eliminated so they will no longer pollute Aryan blood. Hitler admitted that one might be “repelled by this law of nature which demands that all living things should mutually devour one another,” but the fact is that the “fly is snapped up by a dragon-fly, which itself is swallowed by a bird, which itself falls victim to a larger bird…to know the laws of nature enables us to obey them.”
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This is one example of many where

Hitler couched his rhetoric in primitive, Darwinian slogans about animals and their biological nature. To him the struggle of a species to survive meant constant war with another species until one of them was extinct. (Survival struggles of most species have no resemblance to genocidal warfare. Some species kill members of another species at hand, but they have no instinct to eradicate the species.) He believed Aryans were more than a national group—they were a genetically determined race, a species superior to others. And Germany’s enemies—Jews and Slavs—were enemies by nature and evil by nature. They could not change, and the only sensible strategy was to eradicate them.
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Hitler then argued it is for this reason that governments must both understand and apply the “laws of Nature,” especially the “survival of the fittest” law that originally produced the human races and also is the source of their further evolution. The government for this reason must aid in the elimination, or at the least quarantine, of inferior races. Hitler was especially determined to prevent Aryans from breeding with non-Aryans, a concern that eventually resulted in his Final Solution because

Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the Jews should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature’s efforts “to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile.”
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Ironically, Hitler ignored his own race theory when it was convenient, and placed many Jews (most all were
Mischlinge
, part Jewish, but still Jewish according to the Nazi definition) in high positions to further his military goals.
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HITLER’S VIEWS OF BLACKS

Hitler strongly condemned both Africans and the missionaries who tried to convert them. He believed that as a result of religious teaching, humans “no longer bother to breed the best for posterity” and then are

full of amazement at the small effect of the Christian faith in their own country, at the terrible “godlessness,” at this physically botched and hence spiritually degenerate rabble, and try with the Church’s Blessing, to make up for it by success with the Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs. While our European peoples…fall into a condition of physical and moral leprosy, the pious missionary wanders off to Central Africa and sets up Negro missions until there, too…though primitive and inferior, human beings [degenerate] into a rotten brood of bastards.
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Hitler even claimed that the “Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither desire nor understand,” and allowing inferior persons to have their own children, should instead “take pity on a poor little healthy [Aryan] orphan child and give him father and mother” rather then allowing Negroes to give birth to inferior children that

will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world. The folkish state must make up for what everyone else today has neglected….
It must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure
.
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Hitler also wrote that the “boundless sins” of humanity are shown by one example, namely the fact “that some…Negro has…become a lawyer, teacher, even a pastor.” He added that while what he called the