Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (3 page)

Darwin’s conclusions about the inferiority of certain human races openly influenced his theory of evolution.
¹²
In
The Descent of Man
, where Darwin added that on seeing the Fuegians “absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair…tangled, their mouths, frothed with excitement, and their expression…wild, startled, distrustful,” the idea immediately occurred to him: “such were our [primitive evolutionary] ancestors.”
¹³
Also, Darwin’s direct experiences with what he called

savages provided him with further proof of their inalterable racial difference. When a party of Fuegian natives Christianized and civilized in England, returned on board the
Beagle
as missionaries to their native land, the Fuegians reverted to their savage ways, convincing Darwin that racial habits and racial natures were entrenched and basically unchangeable. The conversion the savages had undergone had been superficial and fleeting, while their suitability to their native way of life, and their clear inferiority, were permanent. All that remained of racial evolution for Darwin, as for Wallace, was the extermination of the inferior races by the superior [races].
¹⁴

These ideas spread to many nations including in Canada and the United States.
¹⁵
For example, in the first half of the nineteenth century the United States was “infatuated” with

eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder. At one Illinois mental hospital, new patients were dosed with milk from cows infected with tuberculosis, in the belief that only the undesirable would perish. As many as four in ten of these patients died. A more popular tool of eugenics was forced sterilization, employed on a raft of lost souls who, through misbehavior or misfortune, fell into the hands of state governments. By 1930, California was enraptured with eugenics, and would ultimately sterilize some twenty thousand people.
¹⁶

These ideas were greatly expanded by Ernst Haeckel and other scientists in Germany. Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton were not the originators of eugenics and racism, but served to popularize it enormously and give it scientific respectability as no other men in history did. Hitler was a voracious reader but, as far as we know, never read Darwin’s works, but he did read those of Darwin’s German disciples, such as Ernst Haeckel and others who popularized Darwin’s theory. Hamann wrote that

Hitler did not usually gain his knowledge directly from such philosophers and theoreticians as Darwin…but instead from reports in newspapers, pamphlets, and popular periodicals, which regurgitated the main theses of the writers who happened to be in vogue [such as Darwin was in Germany then].
¹⁷

Waite believed that most of Hitler’s knowledge about Darwinism and his anti-Semitic ideas came from newspapers, magazines pamphlets and other popular writing since they were very popular topics then.
¹⁸
It is well documented that Ernst Haeckel and the German scientific establishment had a major influence on the Nazi leadership. Furthermore, it was Darwin himself who was responsible for popularizing, on a global scale, the ideas of evolution via survival-of-the-fittest natural selection. Although anti-Semitism existed in Europe long before Hitler, one major difference existed in Hitler’s anti-Semitism, namely it was based squarely on race and reflected the influence of Darwinism.
¹⁹

Clearly, Darwin’s ideas played a critical role in the Nazi movement, even though many of Hitler’s disciples likely never even read Darwin in the original English. Reasons why include they were not fluent in reading English and their anti-British sentiment. Furthermore, parts of the German translations of Darwin were not always very faithful to the original English. Nonetheless, Darwin’s critical influence on German biologists, especially Haeckel, is well established.

HITLER’S DISCIPLES WERE ANTI-SEMITIC

Cutting-edge ideas often are introduced to cultures through the educational system, and that was certainly the case when it came to nurturing the seeds of anti-Semitism and eugenics in the land that would ultimately become Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the world’s very first formal anti-Semitic and eugenic organizations was The Association of German Students, established in 1881.
²⁰
Many of its members eventually became German professors who were careful to indoctrinate their students, including many future pastors, into this new Darwinian way of thinking. These pastors, in turn, passed the ideas on to their own congregations.

This was not universally true, of course. Especially in the early years of Hitler’s rule, the church, particularly the so-called “Confessing Church” was the only source of major opposition to Nazism.
²¹
But there were many faithful church members who remained self-protectively silent and, in general, the churches as a whole for several reasons did relatively little to help Hitler’s victims.
²²

What’s more, some church leaders openly rejected their Christian teachings in favour of the Nazi programme. As one Berlin pastor insisted, “The Jews belong to the Semitic race. Compared to the Aryan race, the Semitic race is inferior. For the Aryan people, particularly for the German people, contact with [the Jews] is fatal because…their different ways and their inferiority” damages Germany.
²³

Due to the influence of various academics and scholars,

Hitler came to view history as the struggle between the races, in which the strong defeat, dominate, or destroy the weak—a vulgarized view of social Darwinism in which war plays a fundamental role. This notion became the centre of Hitler’s worldview and eventually contributed to unprecedented destruction.
²⁴

This worldview was in dynamic contrast to Christianity.

Ironically, this church support of Hitler’s schemes did little to endear these churches to the Nazi leadership. Even though many Nazis were raised in suitably religious homes, most of Hitler’s disciples were as virulently anti-Christian (they were especially opposed to the Catholic church) as they were anti-Semitic, thanks to the influence of their anti-Christian professors, the “theological liberalism that was really secular philosophy disguised by religious language” and their involvement in the anti-Christian Nazi movement.
²⁵
Of course, Hitler’s influence was critical as well. As Jewish author Ray Comfort remarked, “Hitler trained his disciples well. Each of then parroted his spiritual convictions for the sake of the Reich.”
²⁶
Unfortunately, some clergy today likewise have sold out to the Darwinism that was the foundation of Nazi thought.

In fact, as we will document, the Nazi leadership planned to destroy Christianity after the war and replace it with a German church worshipping Hitler and the Nazi Party with elements of pre-Christian paganism. A 150-volume U.S. government report titled, The Nuremberg Project, was prepared under the direction of General William Donovan to document Nazi war crimes for the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. Part of the 150 volumes was a 108-page report titled, The Nazi Master Plan, which concluded the Nazis “sought to eliminate the Christian Churches in Germany” after the war.
²⁷

HITLER’S INNER CIRCLE

In 1939, Oswald Dutch published a prophetic book titled,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
. In it, he described the men he felt to be the most important in the inner circle of Nazi Germany. This book inspired me to research each example given to determine which disciples of Hitler were influenced by Darwinism and which were anti-Christian. It turned out that most of his leading disciples were influenced by Darwin and most were anti-Christian.

This book was written to tell the rest of the story, with only slight variations on the men Dutch chose to investigate. With the benefit of hindsight, I have been able to select those men who were at the core of the Nazi movement from its early days and who managed to retain Hitler’s favour for most of the twelve years that he ruled Germany. Most historians would agree that the people I selected—Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Herman Göring, Julies Streicher and Reinhard Heydrich, among others—were the Führer’s nearest and most important disciples.

IS DARWIN REALLY TO BLAME?

Darwinism was far from the only cause for World War II and the Holocaust. There were many other contributing factors, including Germany’s humiliating loss of World War I, what Germans regarded as the enormous war reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles that they claim plunged Germany into a severe economic depression, and hyperinflation.
²⁸
These factors have all been discussed in detail in scores of other works and are not the focus of this book. Instead, this book exposes Darwinism’s catastrophic influences on the Nazi movement and its leaders. The written historical record makes these influences abundantly clear.

Historian and philosopher Rabbi Shmuel Boteach stressed in his book,
Moses of Oxford
, that Darwinism’s influence on Hitler is well-documented. He quoted two famous men as follows:

“The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

“In nature there is no pity for the lesser creatures when they are destroyed so that the fittest may survive….”

These statements express such similar sentiments that the reader may initially suppose they were written by the same author. However, the author of the former was a scientist, Charles Darwin, and the author of the latter statement was a political leader who lived by Darwin’s evolutionary ideology. His name: Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a spiritual and ideological student of Darwin and evolution. His entire concept of the Aryan master race evolved in response to the ethical implications of the theory of evolution.
²⁹

Boteach tells us that the first quote is by Charles Darwin,
³⁰
and the second is from
Mein Kampf
. Rabbi Boteach said that, as a Jew, he had been “watching this debate on Darwinian evolution very closely” and had strongly encouraged others, especially Jews, to do the same. He applauded the Oxford University L’Chaim Society for having “sponsored numerous debates on Darwinism, which featured scientists of international renown to address this topic.
³¹
One reason for his concern, he said, was that:

too often in the past, “scientific” positions (which are contrary to Judaism) have been adopted without delving into the validity of those scientific assertions: this is bad for the truth if the theories are wrong, and the situation is worsened [from]…belief in false or inaccurate scientific dogma. Another, perhaps more important, reason to intensify the debate on this issue in particular is the way in which Darwinism can sometimes be manipulated to promote dangerous morals and ethics.
³²

Furthermore, Rabbi Boteach quoted Sir Arthur Keith—a man who entered World War II as a leading British evolutionist and who, after having endured terrible suffering, came out opposed to war. He was one who understood the truth about evolution. As Professor Keith wrote, evolution had been

applied vigorously to the affairs of a great modern nation…Germany of 1942. We see Hitler devoutly convinced that evolution produced the only real basis for a national policy…. The means he adopted to secure destiny of his race and people [were] organized slaughter.
³³

As Keith stressed, Hitler used “evolutionary mentality” to solve an “evolutionary problem,” and, as a eugenicist, his goals include the prevention of “the greatest racial sin, racial mixing” and the elimination of all inferior human races. In Hitler’s mind, evolution and its ultimate end—a superior race—justified any available means, even the murder of over 11 million Jews and Christians, and the loss of 55 million more lives in the theatre of war (including the Pacific).
³⁴