Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (5 page)

40
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 124.

41
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 125–126.

42
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 126.

43
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 126.

44
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 126.

45
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 128.

46
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 128–129.

47
Keysor,
Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible
.

48
Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
, 14.

The Holocaust: Government-sponsored mass murder inspired by social Darwinism

INTRODUCTION

I
n 1942, journalist Wallace Deuel wrote, “The Nazis are [now] engaged in the greatest programme of selective human breeding in all modern history. They have set out to change, by controlled procreation, the whole character of the German people.”
¹
Part of this programme of applying social Darwinism to society was the elimination of less fit humans, including Jews, Slavs and other “inferior” racial groups, a genocide programme collectively known today as the Holocaust.

The period of recent history called the Holocaust formally began in 1933 when Hitler assumed power in Germany. It ended only in 1945 when the Nazis were soundly defeated by the Allied nations. The term holocaust is from the Greek word
holokauston,
meaning “sacrifice by fire,” and refers to the Nazis’ persecution and planned total slaughter of all Jewish people in Europe. The Hebrew word
Shoah
, meaning “devastation, ruin or waste,” is also used to refer to this historical genocide.

In addition to murdering Jews, the Nazis used Darwinian-inspired eugenics to justify the removal of several other “inferior races” and groups from the human gene pool. The categories the Nazis judged as “sub-human peoples” included Slavic peoples (especially Poles and Russians), Gypsies, Asiatic and Mongolian races and the disabled.
²
These peoples were labelled racially inferior and less evolved, and, consequently, were claimed to have a genetically corrosive influence on society. Anyone who actively resisted the Nazis, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and the communists, were often sent to forced labour camps to die or were murdered directly.
³

The primary perpetrator of the Holocaust was a political party called the Nazis, an acronym for
Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(in English, National Socialist German Worker’s Party) and their supporters. The Nazis used a variety of terms to conceal their actual goals, which included the application of active social Darwinism to governmental policy, requiring the extermination of all inferior races. For example, the “Final Solution” phrase was a euphemism they used to refer to their plans to murder every Jew living in Europe.

THE GOD OF THE NAZIS

What the Nazis called Biologism (
Biologismus
) was “an essential feature of National Socialism,” which acquired its ideological base largely by applying biology, specifically Darwinian evolution, to humans. The Nazis taught that both “the biological doctrine of race…and of the concept of ‘Living Space,’ [were], according to…Social Darwinism” fully

justified by the “eternal struggle for existence” and the “right of the stronger.” The theory of heredity had a particular impact, influencing National Socialist marriage law and providing a logic for the euthanasia program. The ideology of the “
Volk
Community” was also derived from…biologism, which from the alleged primacy of species preservation over self-preservation inferred a natural law of the subordination of the individual to the community.
⁴

The Nazis stressed that
Kampf
(often translated as “struggle”) was “a central concept of National Socialist ideology.” They taught that the basic force in human life was the struggle “among opposing powers and forces for dominance or destruction.” To lend support to achieve this goal the Nazis appealed “to the authority of”

[Charles] Darwin (“struggle for existence”), and Nietzsche (struggle as the manifestation of the “will to power”). In the Social Darwinist sense, struggle was explained as the agent of political and racial selection.
⁵

Darwin’s 1871 book,
The Descent of Man
, influenced the Nazi “Theory of Descent” (
Abstammungslehre
) idea and explained the existence of

the present variety of species as the result of a process of natural selection. The struggle for existence allows only the best-adapted individuals to survive and reproduce, while the others are “culled out.” In the biologistic worldview of National Socialism, the Theory of Descent became the model for human society, peoples, and races as well. Fantasies of master races and theories of racial value have their origins here.
⁶

Darwinism influenced not only the development of the worldwide eugenics movement but also the academic elite’s attempt to disenfranchise Christianity. As science historian Ronald Numbers concluded, in Darwin’s “revolutionary essay
On the Origin of Species
(1859), Darwin aimed primarily ‘to overthrow the dogma of separate creations’ and extend the domain of natural law throughout the organic world. He succeeded spectacularly.”
⁷
As this book will document, in almost all cases, acceptance of Darwinism was accompanied by the rejection of Christianity, either as a cause or an effect. Many leading Nazis, such as Martin Bormann, were aggressively hostile to Christianity and what it stood for.

THE GERMAN SOCIETY FOR RACIAL HYGIENE

An important factor that contributed to the Holocaust was the support of many leading German academics. One example is The German Society for Racial Hygiene (
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene
), an association founded in 1905 by Professor Alfred Ploetz to

propagate the doctrine of racial purity as the sole means to stem the [genetic] decline of German
Volk
. It applied principles of animal and plant husbandry to human society (“social biology”), thus foreshadowing National Socialist racism (social Darwinism). It dissolved at the war’s end in 1945.
⁸

The
Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene
was the major political organization behind the German racial policies and, as documented in Chapters 6 and 12, was supported by many leading scientists.

HITLER’S WORLDVIEW

Hitler was a committed Darwinist and “spoke repeatedly of his Darwinian worldview, such as in his book
Mein Kampf
,” which documented that he “possessed an internally logical and consistent ideology and that he felt committed to its premises and goals to the end” of his life.
⁹
The basis of his worldview was “a central concept of National Socialist ideology,” namely that the Darwinian “struggle for existence governed all beings,” and involved “the right of the stronger applied to individuals as well as to communities” to suppress the racially inferior who

were destined for destruction. For the “sake of self-preservation” a “stronger race will displace the weak ones,” and the “ridiculous fetters of so-called humanity” would break asunder, “in order to allow in its place the humanity of Nature, which destroys the weak in order to make way for the strong.”
¹⁰

Hitler was guided by the

“nearly ironclad principle” of “Nature’s will to live” in the “internal exclusivity of species among all living beings on earth.” …If unequal individuals were crossed, the offspring “no doubt will be superior to the racially inferior parental half, but not as advanced as the superior one. As a result it will later lose out in the struggle against a superior type. Such mating contradicts Nature’s will to improve breeds.” The result of this “ubiquitous instinct for racial purity in Nature is not only the sharp demarcations dividing individual races, but also their own internally uniform nature.” These “iron laws of Nature” were also responsible for the evolution of human history, in which race and racial purity were allotted decisive significance.
¹¹

THE EXTENT OF THE HOLOCAUST

It is estimated that 55 million people died as a result of the Nazis war on those persons they regarded as “inferior races.” Specifically, over
11 million people were murdered directly as part of the Holocaust, including over 5 million Slavic Christians and 6 million Jews. The Nazis murdered close to two-thirds of all Jews then living in Europe, including an estimated 1.1 million children, in their quest to create a superior race.

THE PERSECUTION BEGINS

The events leading up to the Holocaust were gradual and required a decade until the mass killing occurred by gassing in concentration camps. The beginning of the active Nazi persecution against Jews was April 1, 1933, when the Nazis instigated their first formal action against German Jews by announcing a boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses. The first major formal step that would lead to the Holocaust was the Nuremberg Laws, passed on September 15, 1935, that began to exclude Jews from public life by the force of law. These laws stripped German Jews of their German citizenship and of all the rights of citizenship.

The Nuremberg Laws also prohibited marriages and extramarital sex between Jews and Germans because, in harmony with the racist eugenic policies of Nazi Germany, the Nazis believed the inferior genes of Jews would pollute the superior Aryan gene pool. The Nazis reasoned that reducing Jewish-Aryan contact as much as possible would lower the likelihood of sexual relations between the two “races,” and, consequently, reduce the level of Aryan race degeneration.

The Nuremberg Laws also set the legal precedent for further anti-Jewish legislation and the anti-Jewish actions that soon followed. The Nazi leaders realized that they had to implement their genocide programme gradually to reduce public opposition, but ostensibly lawfully, to achieve their long-term eugenic goal of a pure, superior Aryan race. Additional anti-Jew laws included excluding Jews from parks, terminating them from civil service jobs (i.e., teaching and government work) and requiring Jews to register their property. One law even made it illegal for Jewish doctors to treat anyone other than Jewish patients. The wide-ranging set of anti-Semitic laws that were passed had the clear intent of, in Hermann Göring’s words, “Aryanizing” Germany.

Jews were also required to turn over all precious metals they owned to the government, as well as Jewish-owned bonds, stocks, jewellery and art works. Furthermore, pensions for Jews dismissed from civil service jobs were arbitrarily reduced. Next, Jews were physically segregated within German towns, their driver’s licenses suspended, Jewish-owned radios were confiscated, a curfew to keep Jews off the streets between 9
P.M.
and 5
A.M.
in the summer, and between 8
P.M.
and 6
A.M.
in the winter was passed and laws protecting tenants were not applicable to Jewish tenants.
¹²