Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (15 page)

79
Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–45
, 840.

80
Bullock,
Hitler, A Study in Tyranny
, 389.

81
Metaxas,
Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
.

Darwinism, Nazi race policies and the Holocaust

INTRODUCTION

O
f the many factors that produced the fatal blend that resulted in the Nazi Holocaust and World War II, one of the more important was Darwin’s notion that evolutionary progress occurs primarily as a result of the elimination of the weak in the struggle for survival. Although it is no easy task to assess all of the many conflicting motives of Hitler and his supporters, Darwinian-inspired eugenics clearly played a critical role.
¹

Darwinism also both justified and encouraged the Nazi views on race and war.
²
If the Nazi party had fully embraced and consistently acted on the belief that all humans were descendants of Adam and Eve, and equal before God as taught in both the Old and New Testaments (the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures), it is probable that the Holocaust and World War II never would have occurred.

Expunging the Judeo-Christian-Muslim doctrine of human divine origins from mainline German theology and its schools, and replacing it with Darwinism, openly contributed to the acceptance of social Darwinism that culminated in the Holocaust.
³
Darwin’s theory, as modified by biologist Ernst Haeckel,
⁴
combined with the racist theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and others, clearly contributed to the death of over 9 million people in the concentration camps, and the approximately 55 million others, in a war whose economic toll for all countries was about $18.75 trillion American dollars (in 2012 dollars).
⁵
Furthermore, a major reason that Nazism reached the
extent
of the Holocaust was the widespread acceptance of social Darwinism by the scientific and academic community.
⁶

The very heart of Darwinism was the belief that evolution proceeds by the differential survival of the fittest individuals. This requires differences among a species that eventually became great enough that those individuals possessing them—the fittest—were more apt to leave more offspring. Although the process of forming new races may begin with slight differences, differential survival rates eventually produce distinct races, part of a process that evolutionists postulate leads to speciation, meaning the development of a new species.

The egalitarian ideal that all humans are created equal, which now dominates Western ideology, has not historically been universal among nations and cultures.
⁷
A major force that worked against this view was social Darwinism, especially its crude survival-of-the-fittest worldview.
⁸
The idea that the quality of the race can be improved by selective breeding is as old as Plato’s
Republic
but,

modern eugenic thought arose only in the nineteenth century. The emergence of interest in eugenics during that century had multiple roots. The most important was the theory of evolution, for Francis Galton’s ideas on eugenics—and it was he who created the term “eugenics”—were a direct logical outgrowth of the scientific doctrine elaborated by his cousin, Charles Darwin.
⁹

That Nazi governmental policy was openly influenced by Darwinism, the Zeitgeist of both science and educated society of the time, is clear from an examination of extant documents, writings, and artifacts produced by Germany’s twentieth-century Nazi movement and its many scientist supporters.
¹⁰
The Nazi treatment of Jews and other “races” then believed to be “inferior” was largely a result of their conclusion that Darwinism provided profound insight that could be used to significantly improve humankind.
¹¹
The political philosophy of Germany was built on the belief that critical factors for progress included chiefly

struggle, selection, and survival of the fittest, all notions and observations arrived at…by Darwin…but already in luxuriant bud in the German social philosophy of the nineteenth century.… Thus developed the doctrine of Germany’s inherent right to rule the world on the basis of superior strength…of a “hammer and anvil” relationship between the Reich and the weaker nations.
¹²

THE IMPORTANCE OF RACE IN DARWINISM

Evolution is based on acquiring new traits through mutations and gene shuffling that enable those possessing the traits to survive better in adverse conditions, and therefore leave more offspring, than those who do not possess them. The source of the raw material for natural selection to select from is primarily genetic mutations. People who inherit a mutation that enables more of them to survive and reproduce compared with those without that trait will be more likely to pass that trait on to the next generation. Superior individuals will be more likely to survive, and as a result, their genetic information will, over a period of several generations, be present in increasing numbers of individuals, while genetic information of the “weaker” individuals eventually will become extinct.

This process, once called
raciation
but now labelled
speciation
, is the source of the putative evolutionary “progress” that can, in theory, continue forever. If every member of a species were fully equal, natural selection would have nothing from which to select. Consequently, survival would be a result of chance, and evolution would cease for that species.

According to Darwinian theory, genetic differences that aid survival gradually produce new races, some of which have a survival advantage. These new groups became the superior (i.e., more evolved) race. When that trait eventually spreads throughout the entire race, because of the survival advantage it confers on those that possess it, a higher, more evolved, human will result. Hitler and the Nazi party claimed that one of their major goals was to apply this orthodox science to improve society. Furthermore, the core idea of Darwinism was not evolution, but selection of the fittest.
¹³
Hitler stressed that, to produce a better society, the Nazis must understand, and cooperate, with this science.

John Jay College historian Daniel Gasman concluded that in “no other country…did the ideas of Darwinism develop as seriously as a total explanation of the world as in Germany” and, as a result, the “literal transfer of the laws of biology” as interpreted by Darwin’s theory were applied to the social realm.
¹⁴
The inequality doctrine, although an integral part of German philosophy for years, reached its apex under the Hitler regime and obtained its chief intellectual support from Darwinism and Darwin’s German disciple, Ernst Haeckel.
¹⁵

Haeckel’s belief that “the morphological differences between two generally recognized species—for example sheep and goats—are much less important than those…between a Hottentot and a man of the Teutonic [Aryan] race” soon became German policy.
¹⁶
Especially important in Nazi policy was the belief that the Germans had evolved the “furthest from the common form of apelike men [and outstripped]…all others” and it would be this race that must raise humans to a “new period of higher mental development.”
¹⁷
This was true not only mentally but physically, because Haeckel believed evolution achieves a “symmetry of all parts, and equal development which we call the type of perfect human beauty.”
¹⁸

The evolutionary superiority of Aryans, the race superior to all others, gave them not only the right, but the
duty
, to subjugate all other peoples. And race was a major plank of Nazi philosophy. The Nazis incorporated Darwinism

in their political system, with nothing left out…. Their political dictionary was replete with words like space, struggle, selection, and extinction (
Ausmerzen
). The syllogism of their logic was clearly stated: The world is a jungle in which different nations struggle for space. The stronger win, the weaker die or are killed.
¹⁹

An important fact is that “biological racism had become entrenched in anti-Semitic discourse and also was becoming mainstream among German anthropologists.”
²⁰
The Nazi view of Darwinian evolution and race was a major part of the fatal combination of ideas and events that produced the Holocaust and World War II:

One of the central planks in Nazi theory and doctrine was, of course, evolutionary theory [and]…that all biology had evolved spontaneously upward, and that inbetween links (less evolved types) should be actively eradicated…that natural selection could and should be actively
aided
, and therefore [the Nazis] instituted political measures to eradicate…Jews, and the blacks, whom they considered [less evolved].
²¹

Terms such as “superior race,” “lower human types,” “pollution of the race,” and the term
evolution
itself (
Entwicklung
), were often used by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Their race views were not fringe science, as is often claimed, but rather were

straightforward German social Darwinism of a type widely known and accepted throughout Germany and which, more importantly, was considered by most Germans, scientists included, to be scientifically true. More recent scholarship on national socialism and Hitler has begun to realize that…[social Darwinism] was a specific characteristic of Nazism. National socialist “biopolicy,” [was] a policy based on a mystical-biological belief in radical inequality, a monistic, antitranscendent moral nihilism based on the eternal struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest as the law of nature, and the consequent use of state power for a public policy of natural selection.
²²

The philosophy that humans can control and even use Darwinian theory to produce a more highly evolved human is repeatedly mentioned in the writings and speeches of prominent Nazis.
²³
Accomplishing the Darwinian goal for society required ruthlessly eliminating the less fit by openly barbarian behaviour. Miami University professor George Stein noted that the core of German social Darwinism was developed by Haeckel and his colleagues. Specifically, the Darwinists argued on scientific grounds that humankind was

merely a part of nature with no special transcendent qualities or special humanness. On the other hand, the Germans were members of a biologically superior community…politics was merely the straightforward application of the laws of biology. In essence, Haeckel and his fellow social Darwinists advanced the ideas that were to become the core assumptions of national socialism…. The business of the corporate state was eugenics or artificial selection.
²⁴

Prior to 1933, German scientists published thirteen scientific journals devoted primarily to racial hygiene and established over 30 different institutions, many connected with universities or research centres devoted to “racial science.”
²⁵
In the Nazi era, close to 150 scientific journals, many of which are still highly respected today, covered racial hygiene and allied fields.
²⁶
Enormous data files were kept on the races, most of which were analyzed and used for research papers published in various German and other scientific journals. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was established in 1927 to study eugenics and related areas, including venereal disease and alcohol.