Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (33 page)

Himmler was so driven by his attempt to apply “Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest” to society that he concluded the “‘struggle of the creative Teutonic-Aryan race’ boiled down to the ‘struggle against the parasitic Semitic race.’”
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His hatred for Jews and other races he deemed inferior was so extreme that “various ministries of the Reich tried to tone down Himmler’s Nordic ardour.”
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An important factor that influenced the development and implementation of the Final Solution, which Himmler was charged with carrying out, was the fact that “Darwin’s theory denied the existence of any essential difference in origin between men and animals” and some races were much closer to animals then other races.
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Furthermore, those Germans who became Darwin’s disciples

wanted to see the traditional Christian values governing the social behavior of mankind set aside. Darwin also explained that the biologically superior elements occasionally thrown up during the evolutionary process were, unfortunately, not
ipso facto
of greater value than the rest. As against this, those so-called “Social Darwinists,” who were disciples of the modern creed of “natural forces” in their political outlook held that human society was also more or less a biological organism, and concluded, therefore, that the
biological factor was the one absolute
in all spheres of life.
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In a speech Himmler gave to the SS major generals in October 1943, he called Slavic peoples, which included not just Poles but also Russians and other Slavs, “subhuman beings,” beasts that must serve “their superiors,” i.e., the Germans.
²²
Germans were the superior race, Himmler explained, because humans “are a product of the law of [natural] selection” and Germany’s long history of war allowed selection to select out inferior Germans, making Germans superior to other ethnic groups.
²³

To achieve the Nazi racial goals, Hitler assigned Himmler the task of building the SS “into an organization of carefully selected men who would become the leaders of a new German race.”
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The SS eventually took the lead in carrying out the extermination of all Jews in German-controlled Europe.

Himmler attempted to divide the Polish people into two racial groups, the Aryans and those capable of being re-Germanized and, in contrast, the “other” Poles who were good only to work as slaves for the Germans.
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The Nazis commissioned German anthropologists, such as Professor Eugen Fischer and other academics, to determine which Poles were “sufficiently Aryan” to Germanize.
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Although Hitler originated the Holocaust machine, Himmler was the man who did his bidding “without showing or giving into moral qualms or doubts” about the mass murder he supervised.
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Since most Soviets were Slavic, a people judged as an inferior race by the Nazis, Himmler and his associates also began plans to Germanize Soviet territory. This goal included eliminating most of the population of the cities by the “hunger plan,” i.e., deliberately causing starvation.
²⁸
The “push to build a pure, master race included the extermination of everyone Himmler and Hitler considered ‘racially impure,’” which meant all non-Aryans.
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Hitler’s long-term goal was to return all Soviet cities to farmland by the extermination of most Slavic peoples. The German army and SS managed to murder over 12 million innocent people toward achieving this goal before they were finally driven out of Russia.

HIMMLER’S MANY ANTI-SEMITIC PROGRAMMES

The superior race idea dominated Himmler’s goals.
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He even set up a system to require SS men to obtain a certificate to marry in order to ensure that they “would not produce children of ‘contaminated’ blood,” by which he meant had mixed race genes.
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Himmler’s fixation on the scientific aspects of Darwinism and racism extended to the degree that he organized an extensive expedition to locate the genetic origins of the “Aryan race.”
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The leader of the expedition was zoologist Dr. Ernst Schäfer whose team of scientists examined Tibetan nobles for signs of “Aryan ancestry.”
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The cost of the expedition was over 250 million Reichsmarks, and they evidently never found any convincing scientific evidence to support their racist theory.

Himmler also set up the now infamous
Lebensborn
programme discussed in chapter 15. 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.”
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Furthermore, throughout “Europe the Germans had kidnapped thousands of ‘racially valuable’ children, [and had] taken them from their families to Germanize them [as]…one of the ways of helping the super-race to be fruitful and multiply.”
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To increase the number of German births, in 1941 Himmler banned most contraceptives. The major exception was use of condoms to help deal with the German syphilis problem.
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Evidently, the major influence that motivated Himmler to become a racist was not a direct study of Darwin, or even the German translations of Darwin, but the Nazi social Darwinists and Hitler himself:

Euthanasia was for Hitler a program to rid the German people of anyone considered mentally or physically deficient—any perceived weakness in the collective gene pool. In that sense it was the logical extension of the mélange of late-nineteenth-century racist and Social Darwinist ideas that Hitler had picked up as a youth. In his 1929 speech at the Nuremberg Party Congress, he had stated that, if one million children were born in Germany in a given year, and if the weakest seven or eight hundred thousand were eliminated, the German people would be strengthened.
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As Himmler scholar Richard Breitman wrote, Nazi Germany from its very beginnings was a racial state, although it took several years to lead the country down the path to the Holocaust.
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Nonetheless, we should not “overlook the racial hostility that contributed to [the] plans and early killings of Poles and Gypsies” and later Jews. War, Breitman wrote, was a cover to provide “appropriate opportunities for Hitler and other Nazi leaders to pursue their racial paranoia to extreme limits.”
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PRODUCING A PURE GERMAN RACE

According to Elizabeth Wiskemann, “Himmler really believed that he could breed better Germans and arrange for all the sub-humans (
Untermenschen
) to die out or rot away or, in plain language, be murdered” to produce his mythical superior race.
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The pure German race Himmler envisioned “was tall, blond, and blue-eyed,” an ideal many Germans, including Himmler himself, did not measure up to. Himmler was so blinded by his ideology that he believed Germany would eventually win the war against the far more numerous Slavic masses because the Slavic people were evolutionarily inferior.
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Germany had to win the war because, Himmler believed, the law of survival of the fittest will always prevail.

Himmler enjoyed major support for his racial programmes from German academics, including the German Society for Racial Hygiene, which had 1,300 members by 1933, many of which were academics.
⁴²
The Society even published a peer reviewed academic journal,
Archiv für Rassen and Gesellschaftsbiologie
. The most important institute involved in this movement was the highly respected Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics. When the Nazis came to power, German universities began to train students in “racial studies and eugenics,” which ensured the growth of a class of educated scientists that supported the Nazi racial programmes.
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In 1935, Himmler founded the
Ahnenerbe
, a well-funded research organization of scholars, both reputable and those less so, to find evidence that Aryans played a critical role in history. Himmler and other Aryan scholars believed that the Aryans evolved in the icy barrens of the Arctic where they ruled as the invincible master race.
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The identification of the true Aryans and the eradiation of all other races became the cornerstone of the Nazi agenda.
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The evidence for this theory, the scholars felt, would help to scientifically justify Germany’s war and genocidal behaviour. They found little evidence for their theory in spite of long, expensive expeditions by researchers to various lands in the Arctic Circle.

HIMMLER BUILDS THE SS INTO A POWERFUL ORGANIZATION

During Himmler’s sixteen years as head of the SS, he built it “into a vast empire, and in the process, he acquired the power of life and death over millions” of people by expanding

the SS, a bodyguard unit whose membership originally totalled 280, into an enormous, cold-blooded military and economic empire totaling 50,000 members. Along the way, he acquired a number of new titles, including Chief of Police, Reich Commissioner for the Solidification of German Peoplehood, and Commander of the Political Police.
⁴⁶

Himmler also developed a “policy of turning Poland into a nation of illiterates” in an attempt

to “sift out those with valuable blood and those with worthless blood.” Polish children between the ages of six and ten would be examined, and those who were thought racially acceptable would be snatched from their families and raised in Germany; they would not see their biological parents again. The Nazi policy of stealing children in Poland is significantly less well known than is the extermination of the Jews, but it fits into the same pattern. It demonstrates how seriously a man like Himmler believed in identifying the value of a human being through racial composition. Removing these children was not for him—as it might seem today—some evil eccentricity, but an essential part of his warped worldview.
⁴⁷

One of the first direct steps that lead to the Holocaust was for the
Einsatzgruppen
in the occupied territories to murder select Jewish males. Many Jewish males were also sent to concentration camps. As more and more males died from overwork or were shot, Himmler was forced to begin the next step. Once you kill the family’s breadwinner, the Nazis were faced with the problem of what to do with the women and children that were left behind. In the summer of 1941, Himmler made a watershed decision to murder the Jewish women and children as well, a decision authorized by Hitler that permeated down through the ranks to the mobile killing units, the
Einsatzgruppen
.

HIMMLER AS A MASS MURDERER

Himmler had no qualms about killing millions of people, especially those he deemed inferior races such as Jews, to achieve his Darwinian eugenic goal of producing a “superior” race. His goal was that all Jews will eventually be murdered and, with some exceptions, Himmler claimed that his “soldiers and
Einsatzgruppen
enthusiastically obeyed” his orders.
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As noted, Himmler also wanted to eliminate all other “inferior races” especially the Slavic population, and once said the “purpose of the Russian campaign [was] to decimate the Slavic population by 30 million” persons. The rest would serve as slaves for Germany.
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Himmler also used his admiration for modern technology to achieve mass murder by using “some sort of streamlined and quiet procedure.” Because of the enormous numbers, in the tens of millions of “inferior” people that must be eliminated, he reasoned, why not exploit

the most modern technology? Himmler’s own handwriting thus provides the earliest evidence of a plan for a kind of death factory, with poison gas as the killing agent and crematoria to dispose of the bodies.
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Although Hitler raised the idea of gassing the Jews in his book
Mein Kampf
, and the T-4 Programme used carbon monoxide to gas mental patients and others, it was Himmler who, in December 1939, came up with gas poison as the solution to the “Jewish Problem” which began on a large scale in earnest in December 1941.
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To prevent the victims from resisting, they were told that they were going to be deloused in showers. The victims then undressed and were told to keep their clothes together so they could dress when the delousing was completed.