Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (21 page)

Haeckel’s ideas of racial superiority soon began to resemble the racism of the infamous Arthur de Gobineau. Haeckel was especially active and successful in promoting the application of social Darwinism to social policy. His central focus was on the idea that social Darwinism explained why some civilizations advanced while others remained primitive.
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Haeckel made important contributions in several areas of science such as invertebrate zoology, but his

greatest influence was, ultimately, in another, tragic direction—national socialism [Nazism]. His evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to…his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others…. His brave words about objective science—all contributed to the rise of Nazism. The Monist League that he had founded and led…made a comfortable transition to active support for Hitler.
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Ernst Haeckel was so important to the German Darwinism movement that he is referred to as the father of German evolution.
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It was Haeckel who eventually convinced his influential countrymen that

they must accept their evolutionary destiny as a “master race” and “outcompete” inferior peoples, since it was right and natural that only the “fittest” should survive. His version of Darwinism was incorporated in Adolf Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
(1925), which means “My Struggle,” taken from Haeckel’s translation of Darwin’s phrase, “the struggle for existence.”
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Haeckel’s conclusions about the evolution of the different races soon became German policy. He successfully convinced most German scientists and leading Nazis 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 race.”
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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 would be the race to raise humankind up to a “new period of higher mental development.” Haeckel’s conclusions expanded on a widely held nineteenth-century theme found in the writings of various Darwinists

that each of the major races of humanity can be considered a separate species. Haeckel believed that varied races of mankind are endowed with differing hereditary characteristics not only of color but, more important, of intelligence, and that external physical characteristics are a sign of innate intellectual and moral capacity.
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As an example Haeckel taught that what he called the

“wooly-haired” Negroes to be “incapable of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development.” And the “difference between the reason of a Goethe, a Kant, a Lamarck, or a Darwin, and that of the lowest savage…is much greater than the graduated difference between the reason of the latter and that of the most ‘rational’ mammals, the anthropoid apes.” Haeckel went so far as to say, concerning these “lower races,” that since they are “psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore,
assign a totally different value to their lives
” (italics added). The Auschwitz [influenced] self could feel a certain national-scientific tradition behind its harsh, apocalyptic, deadly rationality.
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He also taught that the superiority of civilized Europeans was true not only mentally, but also physically, because evolution achieves a “symmetry of all parts, and equal development which we call the type of perfect human beauty…no woolly-haired nation has ever had an important history.”
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The races that he believed were inferior included “the lower races–such as the Veddahs or Australian Negroes.”
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Ernst Haeckel also concluded that the most evolved “race” was “the Indo-Germanic race, which has far surpassed all the other races of men in mental development.” He deduced from his research that this race separated at a very early period in evolution into “two diverging branches,” that were very different in their level of evolutionary development.
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Haeckel’s conclusions were
not
a minority or extreme view in Germany then and much of the world; rather he was viewed as a mainline highly “respected scientist.”
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The views of some of his followers, however, often were even more extreme.
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Haeckel fought hard to convince the world that a belief he once held, namely the Jewish (and Christian) creation story, was wrong. One major reason why he rejected the Genesis account of creation was that creationism taught that all races came from one original human couple, Adam and Eve, and therefore all races were equal. Haeckel wrote, the

five races of men, according to the Jewish legend of creation, are said to have been descended from “a single pair”—Adam and Eve—and in accordance with this are said to be varieties of one kind or species. If, however, we compare them without prejudice,
there can be no doubt that the differences of these five races are as great and even greater than the “specific differences” by which zoologists and botanists distinguish recognized “good” animal and vegetable species
…. The excellent paleontologist Quenstedt is right in maintaining that, “
if Negroes and Caucasians were snails, zoologists would universally agree that they represented two very distinct species, which could never have originated from one pair by gradual divergence
.”
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After his conversion to Darwinism, Haeckel ardently advocated romantic nationalism, racial regeneration, and anti-Semitism.
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Haeckel became the major spokesman of Darwinism in Germany, and his name became synonymous with materialism and naturalism. Simmons claimed that Haeckel’s last years were not happy and that he was especially upset by World War I, the war between his country, Germany and England, the home of his hero, Charles Darwin.
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HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN

Another influential academic who was responsible for spreading racism in Germany was Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the son of a British admiral and a German woman. Chamberlain was influenced by his father-in-law, the composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Wagner and Chamberlain both exerted a powerful influence on Hitler.

Chamberlain was one of several popular German writers to argue that the Aryans were innately biologically superior to all other races and peoples, including the Persians, Greeks, and especially the “parasitic Semites” whom he branded as a “race of inferior peoples.” In 1899 he published a book titled,
The Foundations of the 19th Century
, in which he concluded that Darwinism had demonstrated that the Aryan race was superior to all other races.
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Aryans were so superior to all other races that they were the v
ery foundation of advanced civilization
.
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Chamberlain believed Aryans were the “foundation” of modern industrial society because, among other achievements, they led in the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment. Although Chamberlain openly disagreed with some of Darwin’s conclusions, he agreed with Darwin about the importance of the racial struggle for existence. Darwin interpreted the evolutionary success of
homo sapiens
as being principally the result of its evolutionary superior brain, as shown by the much larger brain case typical of higher primates (and especially by the apex of brain evolution in humans). He ignored facts, such as Neanderthals had an even larger brain than modern humans.

Chamberlain seized on this idea and concluded that human racial differences were reflected not only in skull variations (primarily shape and size variations), but also in all of those traits that historically have been used to identify human races (skin colour, nose, lip and eye shape, among others). Chamberlain taught that the brain is of far more importance than any other body structure in measuring human evolutionary advance.

It was widely believed at the time that the larger the brain, the higher the intelligence. He utilized as evidence for his theory not only the findings and assumptions of physical anthropologists, but also the then-fashionable “science” of cephalic indexes, the measurement of brain size and traits, supposedly a measure of evolutionary advancement level.

Cephalic indexes were based on the idea that brain configuration and other physical traits could be used both to distinguish humans from monkeys and to rank the human races from less to more advanced. This idea received widespread support from the German academic and scientific communities and helped to

prepare the way for national socialist [Nazi] biopolicies…. Beginning in the 1890s with the work of Otto Ammon on cephalic indexes and other such scientific proof of Aryan superiority, much German anthropology, especially the most scientific branch, physical anthropology…[concluded] If humankind evolved through natural selection…then it was obvious that the races of humankind must be arranged hierarchically along the ladder of evolution. …there is little doubt that the anthropologists who discovered all the measurable divergent physical, psychological, and mental characteristics of the various races thought they were scientific. And so did the general public.
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Chamberlain’s work is still very influential today, primarily among white power and various racist groups as a “racial explanation for human history.”
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Furthermore “most of the isms which have profoundly influenced the twentieth century [such as communism, fascism and Marxism] have their genesis in these decades.”
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EARLY SUPPORT FOR NAZI POLICIES

The academic foundation for Nazi policies existed before Hitler, and even before the Nazi party was formed. As early as 1917, the president of Stanford University, biologist Dr. Vernon Kellogg, concluded that Darwinism was used as part of the justification for war and German supremacy advanced by high-level German officers, “many of whom had been university professors before the war.”
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They not only proposed an evolutionary rationale, but advocated a particularly crude form of natural selection that inexorably involved bloody battles where the “weak” were more likely to die.
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Kellogg, in his report on the beliefs of top-level German generals, noted that:

Professor von Flussen is Neo-Darwinian, as are most German biologists and natural philosophers. The creed of the
Allmacht
[“all might”] of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals; all else is illusion and anathema…. This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on, so that this natural law may work out in its cruel, inevitable way the salvation of the human species. By its salvation is meant its desirable natural evolution.
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Kellogg concluded that the German professors and generals believed the most evolutionarily advanced race “should win in the struggle for existence.” Furthermore,

this struggle should occur precisely that the various [racial] types may be tested, and the best not only preserved, but put into position to impose its kind of social organization—its
Kultur
—on the others, or, alternatively, to destroy and replace them. This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at [the German] Headquarters…. Add…the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can never shatter.
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One reason why popular support was so high for Nazism was because the public schools also taught evolution as critically important in social policy. German historian Richard Grunberger noted that since

Nazi ideology leaned heavily on Darwinist notions, the Party’s educational pioneers—like Baldur von Schirach or Robert Ley—liked to talk of the Adolf Hitler Schools institutionalizing the principle of continuous selection. Having been pre-selected during their second year in the
Jungvolk
, potential Adolf Hitler pupils were racially examined and sent to a fort-night’s youth camp for a final sifting. A main criterion of selection was physical appearance; after acceptance, Adolf Hitler scholars were largely evaluated according to qualities of leadership.
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