Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (25 page)

even though his last Jewish ancestor had been born in 1616. This confirms, Hitler reported, that “in the course of generations a racially pure Jew can emerge by Mendelian laws.” This proved to Hitler that
Mischlinge
should not be accorded equal status.
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As a result, debates were common within Nazi circles over how to classify persons who were half- or quarter-Jews, the so-called
Mischlinge
. The solution was to turn to biological science, a solution that illustrates the importance of biology

in framing Nazi racial laws. One of the key disagreements among Nazi racial experts was about how to apply Mendelian genetics to interracial marriage and sexual relations. On September 25, 1935, one of the leading race experts of the Interior Ministry, Arthur Gütt, wrote a brief synopsis [that]…supported allowing quarter-Jews to marry Germans, and he thought that half-Jews should be sorted by anthropologists to determine their racial fitness.
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If the
Mischlinge
were deemed by the eugenic experts to have sufficient Germanic physical traits then they were permitted to marry Germans, but not marry other
Mischlinge
. Karl Astel, a Nazi and prominent University of Jena scientist disagreed with Gütt and “submitted a rebuttal to Himmler, arguing that because of Mendelian genetics, no
Mischlinge
should be allowed to reproduce with Germans. Otherwise Jewish hereditary traits could resurface in subsequent generations, even if they were latent presently.”
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At the start of World War II, another important factor was the entire cultural life of German scientists and academics that had for decades been

more or less under the influence of biological thinking, as it was begun particularly around the middle of the last century, by the teachings of Darwin…. Though it took decades before the courage was found, on the basis of the initial findings of the natural sciences, to carry on a systematic study of heredity, the progress of the teaching and its application to man could not be delayed any more.
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Professor Cornwell concluded that, although most scientists merely acquiesced to Hitler, some arguing that science lies outside of politics and morality, no small number of scientists enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis. Nonetheless, by the end of World War II, very few German scientists remained untainted by a regime bent on eugenics and genocide.
²¹

SUPPORT BY ACADEMICS AND SCIENTISTS

Although well documented, it is not widely known that Germany’s medical doctors were among Hitler’s strongest and earliest supporters. In a study of doctors under Hitler, professor Michael Kater determined that “German physicians…were overrepresented in the Nazi party as well as its adjunct organizations as early as 1933” a claim that has been documented with “graphic clarity.”
²²

German psychiatrist Fredric Wertham observed that German doctors “without coercion, acted not figuratively but literally in line with the slogan of one of the most notorious concentration-camp commanders.” That slogan was “There are no sick people in my camp. They are either well or dead.”
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Weikart wrote that the Nazis “had no difficulty finding physicians willing and enthusiastic to participate in killing the disabled, for quite a few leading physicians already had jettisoned the idea that the disabled had a right to live.”
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Hitler’s conclusions about the loss of

biological vitality and evolutionary progress of the German people was a common theme in eugenics literature in the early twentieth century. In a book written shortly before World War I, the famous professor of hygiene and avid eugenics advocate, Max von Gruber, warned about biological degeneration that would occur if German [Aryan] birthrates continued to decline. He voiced the same concern in a 1918 article in Germany’s
Awakening Renewal
that Hitler may well have read. Many other eugenicists, including Ploetz, agreed with Gruber that limitation of births would result in biological degeneration.
²⁵

Hitler’s eugenic programmes were supported by numerous scholarly writings, such as a book by Dr. Hans Hoff, a professor at the University of Vienna, titled in English,
Euthanasia and Destruction of Life Devoid of Value
. Germany’s racial cleansing campaign that led to their euthanasia programmes and the Nazi death camps were manned, or largely supported by, medical doctors and scientists. Fredric Wertham, in a study of Nazi eugenic programmes concluded that doctors “were directly responsible” for the “unprecedented occurrence of mass violence [and] the deliberate killing of large numbers of mental patients.”
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So many academics and scientists supported the Holocaust that the Nuremberg war crimes held a separate trial for those involved in torture and murder.
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Furthermore, with devastating consequences, Hitler’s scientists developed both conventional and high-tech weapons that enabled Nazi Germany to continue waging war far longer than they otherwise could have.

In the end, though, organizational weakness and chaos undermined any technological advantages that Germany possessed.
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The Nazi era’s final sordid chapter involved what turned out to be development of futile “wonder weapons”; brutal, inhumane and often worthless concentration camp experiments; the use of slave labour; and the technologies that allowed unsurpassed cruelty and mass murder, all supported in various ways by a large number of prominent scientists. The extent of the influence of German and other scientists is indicated by the fact that some early twentieth-century eugenicists actually argued that polygamy would be a way to

advance human evolution. The philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels and the chemist and anti-Semitic publicist Willibald Hentschel were the most prominent advocates of replacing monogamy with polygamy. Other eugenicists, such as August Forel and some feminist eugenicists, pressed for freer sexual relations to replace strict monogamy. This debate among eugenicists over marriage reform was reflected in discussions among Nazi leaders about marriage and sexual relations.
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The Nazis also had the local police locate all homeless people, a social class that the

Nazis considered biologically inferior. In 1938 the Gestapo put over ten thousand vagrants and beggars in concentration camps, since by that time everyone chronically unemployed was labeled work-shy and “asocial.” Not only vagrants and the unemployed, but also alcoholics, prostitutes, and “habitual criminals” were often labeled “asocial” by the Nazis.
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The source of these ideas was German biologists and professors. Weikart wrote that “many biologists and eugenicists before and during the Nazi period” believed that “asocial” traits were hereditary. This is exemplified in the partnership of Siegfried Koller, medical statistician, and Heinrich Wilhelm Kranz, director of the University of Giessen Institute for Genetics and Racial Hygiene, authors of a major study of “asocials” published around 1940.
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They concluded that “to move toward a biological solution of the antisocial problem, it is absolutely imperative to deem antisocials from antisocial families as the biologically most unhealthy and most dangerous” of all families.
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As a result of this conclusion, the Nazi government

advocated compulsory sterilization, forced labour, marriage prohibitions, and annulment of existing marriages for those deemed “asocial.” Koller’s work was well-received by Nazi authorities, who appointed him to the Biostatistical Institute of the University of Berlin in March 1941.
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The Nazis also asked Professor Koller to oversee the planning to “solve” the problem of “asocials.” Some of the other prominent professors who actively supported Hitler’s eugenic programmes included Dr. Emil Kraepelin, a graduate of Leipzig University. He taught clinical psychiatry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich and researched the hereditary factors involved in mental illness.
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Another prominent professor was Dr. Ernst Röder, a medical doctor who taught at University of Munich Medical School and was the director of the psychiatry branch of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute until the war ended. He then attempted to flee the country, but was arrested in 1945.
³⁵
In 1943, Röder wrote an article in the periodical
Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie
(
Racial and Social Biology
) that revealed his loyalty to Hitler. In it he said,

It is the unfailing historical merit of Adolf Hitler and his true followers that they dared to take the first decisive step past the purely scientific discoveries to open the way for the ingenious racial hygienic work in and on the German people. It was important to him to…keep pure the German race, to fight the parasitic races of foreign blood such as the Jews and the Gypsies, and to further increase the population according to quantity and quality and prevent the propagation of the hereditarily ill and inferior…the Nuremberg Laws, the State Citizen Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood made because of a build-up of Jewish influence, particularly prevented the further infiltration of Jewish blood into the German gene pool.
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The Nuremberg Laws classified a German as Aryan if all four of their grandparents were of “German or kindred blood,” and “Jews” if they descended from three or four Jewish grandparents. A German with two or just one Jewish grandparent was classified as a
Mischling
, or crossbreed of “mixed blood.” The Nuremberg Laws also deprived German Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and other Germans. These laws were actually the beginning of the Holocaust, and scientists played a central role in the development and implementation of them. Professor Grabowski concluded that the

…Nuremberg Laws were implemented by the top scientists at the leading research centers in Germany. One of the most active in this area was professor Otmar von Verschuer of the University of Frankfurt, arguably the most renowned racial scientist of the day. Von Verschuer, who praised Hitler for being the first statesman “to recognize hereditary biological and race hygiene,” helped establish the Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt.
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Components of the expression “hereditary biological and race hygiene” were euphemisms for programmes that justified actions against a variety of people and included everything from discrimination, to sterilization, to genocide.

THE GENOCIDE BEGINS

Under Hitler, the German medical community was accustomed to receiving questionnaires to be completed for racial hygiene bureaucrats; so it was not unusual when the “Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe Genetically Determined Illness” wrote to doctors and midwives in 1939 to compile

details of any children under three years of age exhibiting Down’s syndrome, spina bifida, missing or malformed limbs, spasticism and a range of similar conditions. The registration forms were sent to Berlin, where a panel of doctors sifted through them writing either a plus or minus sign on each. In October, those children whose files had been marked with a plus were collected from their parents and taken to special paediatric clinics. There they were put to death.
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The methods used to kill those with so-called “genetic illnesses” (many of which were not genetic) at first varied, and later much more effective methods were developed:

Some clinics used cyanide gas, others administered an overdose of morphine. In one clinic where, presumably, the doctors were anxious about the legality of what they were being asked to do, the children were simply left to starve to death. The physicians need not have been so concerned about themselves: the Führer signed a secret order exempting participating medical staff from prosecution and backdated it to September so that even the pioneers of child-murder would be covered.
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The next step was to send a set of forms asking about children in the next age bracket, a process that was “repeated until the state had identified, abducted and murdered all handicapped children up to the age of seventeen.”
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Last, the adult “handicapped” and mentally deficient were targeted, resulting in killing many thousands of persons, many of which were not afflicted with a genetic disease, and some that had very minor “handicaps” such as hare lip. The whole process was carried out by, or under the supervision of, medical doctors. In January 1940, Dr. Karl Brandt visited a Brandenburg psychiatric hospital to witness new and more effective killing methods:

A prototype gas chamber had been constructed, disguised as a communal shower room. Approximately twenty inmates of the asylum were led naked into the room. After the door was closed, a doctor then turned on a supply of carbon-monoxide gas, which dispersed into the room through small holes in what otherwise looked like water pipes. Six minutes later, the room was cleared of gas and a team of SS men took the bodies to the hospital crematorium. Karl Brandt expressed his satisfaction and ordered that, as in this case, qualified doctors must carry out all future exterminations.
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