Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (27 page)

biomedical scientists played an active, even leading role in the initiation, administration, and execution of Nazi racial programs…scientists actively designed and administered central aspects of National Socialist [Nazi] racial policy.
⁷⁷

Arthur Caplan opines that a major reason for the “innocuous rise of eugenics in Weimar Germany” was because the Germans saw eugenics as

an adjunct to efforts at public health reform. Germans eager for a rebirth after the disaster of the First World War eagerly seized on the hope extended by physicians, geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists that using social Darwinism to guide public health was the vehicle for German regeneration.
⁷⁸

The importance of Darwin and his disciples’ writings is illustrated by Viktor Frankl, a Jewish doctor who survived the horrors of Auschwitz. Dr. Frankl astutely evaluated the influence of modern scientists and academics in helping to prepare the way for the Nazi atrocities by concluding that the

gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or, as the Nazis liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry…in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
⁷⁹

Dr. Frankl accurately summarized the case against academia and the scientists in Nazi Germany.

_______________

1
Max Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 1946 ed. (Reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 7.

2
Cited in Robert N. Proctor,
Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 6.

3
Proctor,
Racial Hygiene
, 10.

4
Louis L. Snyder,
Hitler’s German Enemies: Portraits of Heroes Who Fought the Nazis
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990).

5
Abraham Wolf,
Higher Education in Nazi Germany
(London: Methuen, 1944), 30.

6
Marcus Chown,
The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11.

7
Eric Metaxas,
Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 286.

8
Wolf,
Higher Education in Nazi Germany
, 30.

9
Wolf,
Higher Education in Nazi Germany
, 30.

10
Elie Wiesel, “Without Conscience,” foreword to Vivien Spitz,
Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account Of Nazi Experiments on Humans
(Boulder: Sentient Publications, 2005), xvii.

11
Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 7.

12
Richard Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 141.

13
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 141.

14
Edwin Black,
War against the Weak: Eugenics and American’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 2003), 269–275.

15
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 141.

16
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 144.

17
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 144.

18
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 143.

19
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 143.

20
Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 33.

21
John Cornwell,
Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact
(New York: Viking, 2003).

22
Michael H. Kater,
Doctors under Hitler
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 54.

23
Frederic Wertham,
A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence
(New York: Macmillan, 1966), 155.

24
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 187.

25
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 127.

26
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
, 153.

27
Spitz,
Doctors from Hell
.

28
Alan Steinweis,
Kristallnacht 1938
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

29
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 129.

30
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 118.

31
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 118.

32
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 118.

33
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 118.

34
Thomas Röder, Volker Kubillus and Anthony Burwell,
Psychiatrists: The Men behind Hitler
(Los Angeles: Freedom Publishing, 1995), 234.

35
Röder, Kubillus and Burwell,
Psychiatrists: The Men behind Hitler
, 235.

36
Cited in Röder, Kubillus and Burwell,
Psychiatrists: The Men behind Hitler
, 235–236.

37
John Grabowski,
Josef Mengele
(Farmington Hills: Lucent Books, 2004), 27.

38
Dennis Sewell,
The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics
(London: Picadon, 2009), 138–139.

39
Sewell,
The Political Gene
, 438–439.

40
Sewell,
The Political Gene
, 139.

41
Sewell,
The Political Gene
, 139.

42
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
, 167.

43
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
, 167.

44
Proctor,
Racial Hygiene
, 193.

45
Cited in Christopher Hutton,
Race and the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Polity, 2005).

46
Alan D. Beyerchen,
Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

47
Beyerchen,
Scientists under Hitler
, 4.

48
Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 11.

49
Jeremy Bernstein,
Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall
, 2nd ed. (New York: Copernicus Books, 2001), 994.

50
J.L. Heilbron,
Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 173.

51
Heilbron,
Dilemmas of an Upright Man
, 174.

52
Wiesel, “Without Conscience,” foreword to Spitz,
Doctors from Hell,
xvx.

53
Christopher R. Browning,
The Origin of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy
(London: William Heinemann, 2004), 411.

54
Kater,
Doctors under Hitler
, 222.

55
Spitz,
Doctors from Hell
, 264–265.

56
Spitz,
Doctors from Hell
, 266.

57
Beyerchen,
Scientists under Hitler
, 16.

58
Beyerchen,
Scientists under Hitler
, 16.

59
Beyerchen,
Scientists under Hitler
, 16.

60
Wiesel, “Without Conscience,” foreword to Spitz,
Doctors from Hell,
xviii.

61
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 186.

62
Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic
, 186.

63
Cornwell,
Hitler’s Scientists
, 412.

64
Wiesel, “Without Conscience,” foreword to Spitz,
Doctors from Hell,
xx.

65
Konrad Lorenz, “
Nochmals: Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im Unterricht
,”
Der Biologe
9 (1940): 24–36.

66
Kater,
Doctors under Hitler
, 142.

67
Arthur Caplan, “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,”
The Lancet
363, No. 9422 (May 22, 2004): 1741–1742.

68
Jean Medawar and David Pyke,
Hitler’s Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by the Nazi Regime
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001).

69
Benno Müller-Hill,
Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany, 1933–1945
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 82.

70
Santi Corvaja,
Hitler and Mussolini: The Secret Meetings
, trans. Robert L. Miller (New York: Enigma Books, 2008), 17.

71
Corvaja,
Hitler and Mussolini
, 46, 85.

72
Corvaja,
Hitler and Mussolini
, 83

73
Corvaja,
Hitler and Mussolini
, 83–84.

74
Aaron Gillette,
Racial Theories in Fascist Italy
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 185.

75
Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 6.

76
Wiesel, “Without Conscience,” foreword to Spitz,
Doctors from Hell,
xx.

77
Proctor,
Racial Hygiene
, 6

78
Caplan, “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” 1742.

79
Viktor E. Frankl,
The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy,
3rd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), xxxii.