Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (38 page)

Hitler, who probably read Haeckel as a teenager, took up Darwinian ideas with a vengeance: “The whole of nature is a powerful struggle between the strong and the weak, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak.” He extended this doctrine to peoples and argued: “A stronger race will drive out the weak, for the vile urge in its ultimate form will, time and again, burst all the absurd fetters of the so-called humanity of individuals, in order to replace it by the humanity of Nature which destroys the weak to give his place to the strong.”
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Hitler concluded that the “laws of eternal fight and upward struggle” caused him to conclude that the most important goal of the German people is “the worth and freedom” of their existence, and that their nation

must defend this with the last drop of its blood; that it has no holier duty to fulfill, no higher law to obey.” In practice, this meant that a
Volk
always had to be at war: “…those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.” The purpose of war was not only to destroy competitors but also to acquire living space and slaves, goods to which the stronger had perfect rights. Having achieved these goals, the mighty could enjoy “the happiness of survival on this earth.”
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The living space goal meant war for land and slaves, mostly Polish and Russian land and Slavic slaves.

Göring soon became, in Dutch’s words, “the first Apostle” of Hitler and not only accepted but worked to implement the ideology documented by Rhodes noted above.
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It was Göring who persuaded von Hindenburg that the only man who could lead Germany out of its deep economic depression was Hitler.
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In 1934, Göring became head of the
Luftwaffe
(the German air force) and, by 1936, when Hitler began planning for war, Göring became second in command in Germany.

Two years later, Göring presided over the passage of laws designed to limit the freedoms of certain Germans, especially Jews. It was Göring who created the Gestapo and established the first concentration camps in Germany.
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Clearly

Hitler’s Darwinian myth was the least elevating of all his [Göring’s] ideologies. It reduced the meaning of life to mere biological subsistence, offering the individual a salvation that amounted to nothing more than a temporary share in the collective immortality of one of the fittest peoples and told an individual that he was nothing more than an insignificant, transitory member of a species scraping and clawing for continued life.
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As soon as President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as head of the German Government “thousands of Germans were arrested for being Jews or Catholics.”
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Göring eventually went with the party line and

was attracted at first to the idea of expelling all German Jews, either to Madagascar or to the western powers. But he argued that it would only be possible to deal adequately with the problem in wartime because war released the Nazis from the constraints of international law and the pressure of public opinion. After the outbreak of war the seizure of Jewish assets increased in scale, as did the exploitation of Jewish labour.… Goering’s home contained numerous works of art acquired on the same grounds…. It was during the “cleansing” of the European economy that the Nazi leadership moved toward a final solution to the Jewish question.
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To achieve these goals, Göring founded the Secret State Police, called the Gestapo, who had the authority “to murder the opponents of National Socialism” which included Jews.
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Göring soon became even more deeply involved in the Jewish “question,” believing that the so-called Jewish problem was by far the most important task of Germany. As a result:

Throughout the war, Göring’s officials remorselessly carried out the policies of expropriation and Aryanisation which he repeatedly authorized. Through his interest in the economics of Aryanisation, and the use of Jewish concentration camp labour, Goering was inextricably caught up in the effort to find a solution to the “Jewish question.” In the winter of 1938–9 he had acquired powers to organize the economic exploitations of the Jewish population. The wider question of what to do with the Jews thus excluded from public life he delegated to Heydrich and the SS, under his loose supervision.
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His irrational racism resulted in expressing, both in private and public, his “fierce hostility to the Jews.” Furthermore, Göring imagined

Zionist conspiracies everywhere and, like Hitler, expected a final settlement of the scores between Jew and German. The only reservations he had were expressed in terms of economic necessity. He insisted that Jewish labourers working on arms orders in Germany should not be moved eastward while they could still work, but he removed even this constraint in August 1942. Otherwise he left Heydrich free to carry out his instructions “for the achievement of the final solution to which we aspire.”
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Göring did defend his Jewish friends in several cases, such as Luftwaffe Field Marshall Erhard Milch whose father was Jewish. Göring obtained for him a “German Blood Certificate” declaring him an Aryan. When confronting the Gestapo’s objections, Göring made his famous statement, “
Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich
!” or, “I will decide who is a Jew.”
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Some claim Göring might merely have been repeating or paraphrasing the statement made by others. No doubt others made the same claim when defending their Jewish friends. This fact illustrates the irrationality of Darwinist racism.

In Göring’s view as a Nazi, “the end always justified the means,” and that meant the extermination of the Jews was justified because, he believed, it would result in a superior race and, as a result, a greater Germany.
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For Göring, in warfare “neither justice nor morality had a part to play; the strong won, the weak perished,” and that was justice as taught by classical Darwinism.
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It soon became very obvious where this ethic led.

GÖRING’S HATRED FOR THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Although reared a Catholic, Göring came to hate the Catholic Church because he correctly believed that they were opposed to Nazi policy. The reason was that the Church taught such doctrines as the need to help the weak and poor. Journalist Stewart Herman wrote that the “teaching of mercy and love of neighbor is foreign to the German race and the Sermon on the Mount is, according to Nordic sentiment, an ethic for cowards and idiots.”
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Göring bought into this worldview and wrote that

Catholic believers carry but one impression from attendance at divine services and that is that the Catholic Church rejects the institutions of the National Socialists [Nazi] state. How could it be otherwise when they are continuously engaging in polemics on political questions or events in their sermons!
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Göring also decreed that the “Heil Hitler” salute was the only public religious observance allowed in Nazi Germany.
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Very “aware that the churches could be dangerous,” Göring “was determined that the price the priests must pay for the luxury of being left unmolested was silence in political matters.”
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Those who refused to remain silent about the horrors of the Nazi regime were punished severely, often with their lives.

The Nazi government declared they would “smite without mercy all those whom Goebbels called ‘priest politicians’ and whom they accused of collusion with Marxists and Jews.”
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On July 15, 1935, Göring ordered the police to “prosecute with all the rigor of the law any political activity of the clergy or of the Catholic organizations…; Göring concluded with the threat to suppress all youth organizations which meddle in politics.”
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In other words, the church must stay out of the way of what the Nazis wanted to do with Jews and others, or else their members would also be punished.

GÖRING’S HITLER-INSPIRED HATRED FOR THE SLAVIC PEOPLE

Adolf Hitler considered the Slavic people a class of born slaves because of what he called “their bottomless stupidity” and “those stupid masses of the East”—words that he “endlessly repeated in his mealtime diatribes.” This was not only a measure “of his racism, but of intellectual laziness, of complacency in the face of a vast, fast-changing and secretive country of which he and his advisers knew very little.”
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Göring went along with this idea. The best example of Göring’s hatred for Slavs is the Siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), the deadliest blockade in history. The Nazis “did not want just to annex useful territory and create a new balance of power, but to wipe out a culture and an ideology, if necessary a race.”
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Consequently existing cities in Russia

were to be stripped of their valuables and destroyed (Moscow was to be replaced with an artificial lake), and the delightful new villages populated with Aryan settlers…. Within twenty years, Hitler dreamed, they would number twenty million. Russians—[the] lowest of the Slavs—were to be deported to Siberia, reduced to serfdom, or simply exterminated, like the native tribes of America. Putting down any lingering Russian resistance would serve merely as sporting exercise. “Every few years,” Speer remembered, “Hitler planned to lead a small campaign beyond the Urals, so as to demonstrate the authority of the Reich and keep the military preparedness of the German army at a high level.” As a later SS planning document put it, the Reich’s ever-mobile eastern marches…would “keep Germany young.”
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So surreal is this vision, so risible in its…shallowness.… What was the sense in occupying a country so as to destroy it? …[requiring] troops to hold half a continent in permanent slavery? For the Nazi leadership, though, it was no daydream. In July 1940, weeks after the fall of France, Hitler ordered the commander-in-chief of the army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and his military chief of staff, General Franz Halder, to start planning the conquest of the Soviet Union.
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Furthermore, individual Nazi officers were allowed to

treat the Russians they came across as they saw fit. Also assumed from the outset was ruthless food requisitioning. The occupying troops were to live off what they could commandeer locally, even if it meant that civilians starved. “The Russian has stood poverty for centuries!” joked Herbert Backe, state secretary in the Ministry for Food and Agriculture. “His stomach is flexible, hence no false pity!” Goebbels quipped that the Russians would have to “eat their Cossack saddles”; Goering predicted “the biggest mass death in Europe since the Thirty Years War.”
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Hitler’s “grand vision of extermination” had putative justifications that on the surface appeared rational, such as to obtain for

Germany agricultural land and oil wells, and eliminate an inimical regime. But it was [ultimately]…about race: a
Vernichtungskrieg
, a war of extermination. Bolsheviks, Jews, Slavs—they were vermin, brutes, cankers, poison; their very existence anathema to the National Socialist dream. Liquidating or enslaving them was not just a means to territorial domination, but part of its purpose.
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GÖRING’S END

As the war progressed, Hitler became even more unreasonable and irrational than Göring. In the end, Göring became disillusioned with the Nazi government and eventually lost Hitler’s favour. It was too late, though, because by this time the Nazis were all but defeated. The Allies then put the leading Nazis on trial for war crimes. Göring was condemned to death at the Nuremberg Trials, but just after he was found guilty and before he was to be hanged, he managed to take his own life by poison someone smuggled into his prison cell.
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SUMMARY

Hermann Göring was the second most powerful German Nazi, and one of the leaders in persecuting the churches. His example illustrates the corrupting influence of both Hitler and Darwinism on a once decent man. Although Göring had a leading role in the Holocaust, he eventually became disillusioned with Nazi philosophy—but too late—and ended his life, like so many leading Nazis, by suicide. He is a prime example of the adverse effects that an immoral life philosophy can have on a person, and illustrates the central importance of one’s worldview in society.