Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (31 page)

What was the source of Bormann’s hatred of Jews? Professor Steinberg wrote that a major source was from his mentor, Hitler and the “basic argument behind Hitler’s madness was pure social Darwinism.”
¹⁷
As Hitler explained to Goebbels

One might well ask why there are any Jews in the world order? That would be exactly like asking why there are potato bugs? Nature is dominated by the law of struggle. There will always be parasites who will spur this struggle on and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak. The principle of struggle dominates also in human life. One must merely know the law of this struggle to be able to face it. The intellectual does not have the natural means of resisting the Jewish peril because his instincts have been badly blunted. Because of this fact nations with a high standard of living are exposed to this peril first and foremost. In nature, life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew.
¹⁸

BORMANN’S HATRED OF CHRISTIANITY

Although the Nazis were forced to tolerate religion, the major conflict between Christianity and Nazism was very clear

as Martin Bormann exclaimed: “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.” Hitler supported this view, stating: “One day we want to be in a position where only complete idiots stand in the pulpit and preach to old women.” The Nazis viewed Christianity as a faith tainted by the Jews. In response, the Nazis offered the German people a new religion based around blood, soil, Germanic folklore and the Thousand Year Reich. The Nazis were no different here from earlier revolutionaries who tried to offer the people a brave new secular world. It was no surprise that racial supremacy played a large part in the new “religion.”
¹⁹

Bormann made his absolute disdain for Christianity and his open hostility and support of breaking the church as rapidly as possible absolutely clear.
²⁰
He was one of many high-level Nazis who “intended eventually to destroy Christianity” for the reason that “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable” because Nazism is based on science and science had superseded the Christian church, which he regarded as anti-science.
²¹
He added “National Socialism and Christian concepts are incompatible” because the Christian churches were all built on

the ignorance of men and strive to keep large portions of the people in ignorance because only in this way can the Christian Churches maintain their power. On the other hand, National Socialism is based on scientific foundations. Christianity’s immutable principles, which were laid down almost two thousand years ago, have increasingly stiffened into life-alien dogmas. National Socialism, however, if it wants to fulfill its task further, must always guide itself according to the newest data of scientific researchers.
²²

Bormann added, “Christian Churches have long been aware that exact scientific knowledge poses a threat to their existence” and instead they have relied on pseudo-science such as theology. Furthermore, Bormann concluded, the church takes “great pains to suppress or falsify scientific research. Our National Socialist worldview stands on a much higher level than the concepts of Christianity.”
²³

One reason why Bormann hated Christianity was because he believed that “the concepts of Christianity…in their essential points have been taken over from Jewry” and therefore, Bormann concluded, Christianity must be obliterated. He added that when Nazis speak of a belief in God, they do not understand God to be that of the

naïve Christians and their spiritual opportunists, [as] a human-type being, who sits around somewhere in space.… The force of natural law, [in the universe]…we call the Almighty or God.…The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and of life, the more we adhere to them, so much the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty.
²⁴

He also believed that “No one would know anything about Christianity if pastors had not crammed it down “their throat as children” and when “in the future our youth no longer hear anything about this Christianity, whose doctrine is far below our own, Christianity will automatically disappear.”
²⁵
These statements were, ironically, originally published in
Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, 1933–1944
(Ecclesiastical Yearbook of the Evangelical Church in Germany).

Bormann’s hatred of Christianity was so extreme that he “instructed his wife to ‘make sure that none of our children get depraved and diseased by the poison of Christianity, in whatever dosage.’”
²⁶
His wife agreed with her husband that their children must never be allowed to become infected with the “poison” of Christianity.
²⁷
Ironically, their eldest son became an active Catholic and, on August 20, 1958, was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in the order of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart at the Jesuit Church in Innsbruck, Austria.
²⁸

Many other examples exist of the fact that Bormann did everything in his power to destroy Christianity.
²⁹
In Poland, Bormann required Germans and Poles to attend separate churches, and ruled that all church property was to be confiscated by the state excepting only the church building itself. Furthermore, all monasteries and cloisters were closed because they “worked against German morality,” i.e., the Darwinian survival of the fittest morality.
³⁰
Furthermore, “the seizure of church property…was consistent with the well-established animosity the Nazis showed toward this institution.”
³¹

Bormann even required the German Protestant churches to raise one million Reichsmarks per month, and the German Catholic Churches 800,000 Reichsmarks a month, to help finance a war that many Christians opposed.
³²
Furthermore, as Head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Bormann was able “to indulge his long-held prejudice in a direct and sinister fashion.” In this role he could easily

indulge his hatred of Christianity. Like many of the Nazi leaders …he had done everything he could to harass both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. He despised Christianity as a corrupting and softening influence, interfering with the creation of the new Nordic man.
³³

Bormann, “one of the Nazi Party’s most powerful functionaries and greatest anticlericals,” also tried, often successfully, to block Nazi officials and others who attempted to mitigate Germany’s disenfranchisement and suppression of Christianity.
³⁴
Bormann not only fought for separation of church and state, but also church and political party.

For example, he did what he could to keep the clergy out of not only the party but also the National Socialists Teachers League. He forbade the wearing of party uniforms at church services and other religious activities.
³⁵
The only exception was Christian funerals. In addition “The Nazi authorities brought great pressure on members of the police and armed forces to renounce their church membership.”
³⁶

One of the very few high-level Nazis who was a practicing Christian was Josef Wagner. Bormann, though, was determined that not a single party leader be a practicing Christian. Consequently, Bormann

worked to have Wagner expelled in November 1941. Wagner appealed his case to Buch’s
³⁷
party court, defending himself by referring to Point 24 of the Party Program
³⁸
and insisting that he had known nothing of his wife’s [kind] conduct toward the Pope. Buch and the six members of the party jury… accepted Wagner’s defense and reversed the expulsion order. Hitler, however, refused to ratify the decision, thereby upholding Wagner’s expulsion. Buch believed that it was his son-in-law … who was really responsible [for Hitler’s decision].
³⁹

As expected, the forced expulsion of “pastors from positions of power in the party, together with the withdrawal of party members from the churches, paints an unambiguous picture of increased hostility between Nazism and Christian institutions after 1937.”
⁴⁰
As one authority wrote, “the Nazis’ attempts at
Gleichschaltung
for Protestantism failed,” but this failure

did not stop the Nazis persecuting religious opponents, including [Martin] Niemöller, who was imprisoned in 1937 and subsequently sent to a concentration camp. When the Protestant Churches went on record in 1935 to say that the entire Nazi racial-folk
Weltanschauung
⁴¹
was nonsense, 700 ministers were arrested, humiliated and their civil liberties restricted. Ultimately…by the late 1930s the policies of repression had effectively stifled open opposition within the Protestant movement.
⁴²

To replace religion, Germany needed “something scientific, ‘real’ and non-metaphysical” to “replace the operations of the World-Spirit.” Historian Jonathan Steinberg wrote that to replace religion, the Nazis

almost unconsciously, inserted biology. Darwin had discovered the “laws” of the evolution of species. It was obvious, wasn’t it, that those laws applied to human species, peoples, races? …all too obvious. A version of Darwin’s ideas swept Germany in the last third of the nineteenth century.… Darwinian ideas explained everything: why blacks were poor and backward and why, therefore, Europeans had to rule them; why Germanic peoples had free institutions and Asiatics did not; why northern peoples were more enterprising than Latins and so on.… To minds accustomed to thinking of history in…[this] way the laws of racial struggle were irresistible and were, indeed, not resisted. From the murder of the feeble-minded by so-called “euthanasia” actions in 1940 to the ethnic policies of the German army in the Balkans, the fatal…legacy can be traced.
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BORMANN’S END

During the final stages of the war, when it became clear that Germany had lost the war, Bormann attempted to break through the Red Army lines in an effort to escape. What happened then has been debated for decades. Several witnesses claimed they saw him killed by a Russian tank. Others believed he escaped to South America as did several other leading Nazis.
⁴⁴

Bormann was tried at Nuremberg in
absentia
and sentenced to hang. In December 1972, two skeletons were unearthed during construction near the Lehrter Station where Bormann’s diary was found in a discarded leather jacket in 1945, and close to where an eyewitness claimed that he had seen Bormann’s body.

After extensive forensic examination by Professor Hugo Blaschke using Bormann’s dental records (Blaschke was also Hitler’s dentist), the shorter of the two skeletons was identified as that of Martin Bormann. German authorities then officially declared him dead. This forensic identification was validated by celebrated American forensic expert Dr. Reidar F. Sognnaes.

Nonetheless, journalist Jim Marrs makes the case that Bormann was well-connected among world elites and too smart to be haphazardly killed as described in what he calls “the legend of his death.” This, he argues, was staged to avoid harassment for war crimes.
⁴⁵
He adds that Bormann had been planning extensively for his post-war future and claims that Bormann escaped successfully to South America where he died many years later.

SUMMARY

After Martin Bormann became a disciple of Hitler and Darwin, he rapidly progressed into a racist and hater of Christianity. He was active in doing whatever he could to destroy the Christian church and eliminate as many people as possible who were members of what the Nazis regarded as inferior races, including Jews, Slavic peoples and all other so-called non-Aryan races. Under Hitler, Bormann was one of the most powerful men in Germany, and was able to put into practice his hatred, contributing to the terror caused by the Nazis during their twelve-year rule.

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1
Mark Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), 28.

2
Jochen Von Lang,
The Secretary: Martin Bormann, the Man Who Manipulated Hitler
, trans. Christa Armstrong and Peter White (New York: Random House, 1979).

3
Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire
, 150–151, 213.

4
Borris Shub and Bernard Quint,
Since Stalin: A Photo History of Our Time
(New York: Swen Publications Company, 1951), 98.

5
Shub and Quint,
Since Stalin
, 98–99.

6
Shub and Quint,
Since Stalin
, 99.