Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (49 page)

Each species strives to conquer new territory. The species goes before the individual. History provides us with enough examples to prove that mankind, too, is under this law. In the midst of their prosperity, the Romans lost the desire to have children. They sinned against the law of maintaining the species. Their state was undermined and overcome by foreign peoples … Our nation, too, once hung in the balance. National Socialism restored to the German people the will to have children, and preserved our people from certain decline, which would have been inevitable under the law of species and the law of the greater number of offspring.

To support this argument, the authors again quoted Hitler who wrote:

“Marriage, too, cannot be an end in itself, but rather it must have the larger goal of increasing and maintaining the species and the race. That only is its meaning and its task.”… The goal of female education must be to prepare them for motherhood.
²⁵

In part three, the text again stressed that humans “do not live as individuals like animals” do, but as a society that has “come together as ethnic states,” adding

the individual has only one purpose: to serve the whole group. Major accomplishments are possible only by the division of labour. Each bee risks its life without hesitation for the whole. Individuals who are not useful or are harmful to the whole are eliminated. The species is maintained by producing a large number of offspring. It is not difficult for us to see the application of these principles to mankind: …The ethnic state must demand of each individual citizen that he does everything for the good of the whole, each in his place and with his abilities.… “He who loves his people proves it only by the sacrifices he is prepared to make for it.”

If a person acts against the general interest, he is an enemy of the people and will be punished by law. A look at our history proves that we as a people must defend our territory to preserve our existence. “The world does not exist for cowardly nations.” Military service is the highest form of education for the Fatherland. “The task of the army in the ethnic state is…to serve as the highest school for education in service of the Fatherland.”
²⁶

The text concluded by stating that every citizen must be ready to serve “for the good of the whole, for the will of the Führer, even at the cost of sacrificing his own life…. The good of the nation goes before the good of the individual.” Furthermore, these Darwinian

natural laws are incontrovertible; living creatures demonstrate them by their very survival. They are unforgiving. Those who resist them will be wiped out. Biology not only tells us about animals and plants, but also shows us the laws we must follow in our lives, and steels our wills to live and fight according to these laws. The meaning of all life is struggle. Woe to him who sins against this law: “The person who attempts to fight the iron logic of nature thereby fights the principles he must thank for his life as a human being. To fight against nature is to bring about one’s own destruction.”
²⁷

THE GOVERNMENT PRESSES FOR DARWINIAN INDOCTRINATION

One of the leading authorities on biology pedagogy during the Third Reich was Paul Brohmer, a professor at Kiel Teachers’ College. His book,
Der Unterricht in der Lebenskunde
(
The Teaching of Life Sciences
), was part of a series devoted to “National Socialist Pedagogy in School Instruction.”
²⁸
Professor Brohmer stressed that Nazi ideology was based on the laws of biology.

After glorifying Darwin for inaugurating a “new, more fruitful era of biology,” he criticized Darwin for the individualism inherent in some of his writings because it reflected English liberalism. Brohmer believed that evolution should stress holism and collectivism rather than individualism. Brohmer stressed, however, that this criticism was not directed against evolution, which he fully supported, but only against certain parts of Darwin’s writings.

Another instructor of biology teachers, Ferdinand Rossner, in a book approved by the Nazi Ministry of Education, also pressed for extensive coverage of evolution and eugenics in all biology classes.
²⁹

After the Nazis had sufficient time to revise the educational curriculum to correspond to their ideological agenda, all higher level German biology texts in the late 1930s and early 1940s included extensive discussion of evolution, including evolution of the human races and the biological ranking from low to high that resulted from evolution.

The 1942 edition of the officially Nazi endorsed textbook titled,
Biologie für Oberschule und Gymnasium
, devoted an entire chapter on evolution and its importance for the Nazi worldview.
³⁰
Dr. Graf went beyond Darwinian evolution as expounded in Darwin’s 1871 book,
The Descent of Man
, stressing that evolution has proven humans were not specially created but rather are just another animal and, furthermore, that evolution substantiates the Nazi teaching of human inequality. In the chapter titled, “Racial Science,” in the fifteen pages devoted to human evolution and the common ancestors of humans and apes, he included illustrations of our racial lineage as documented by a set of human skulls.
³¹

The text included much discussion of the Jewish “race” in contrast to the superior Aryan “race.”
³²
In another biology text published in 1934, Europeans were “divided into five main racial types: Nordic, Dinaric, Alpine, Mediterranean, and Eastern/Baltic.”
³³
To support this theory, the textbook used photographs and charts to compare physical characteristics of the various races and

the best-looking and best-groomed were the Nordics. Eyes were compared, as were lips, chins, noses (Nordic—thin; Mediterranean—curved; Dinaric—quite fleshy; Eastern—thick, not curved; and so on), faces, heads, and body shapes. To this were added spiritual and intellectual qualities that…naturally, demonstrated the superiority of the Nordic race.
³⁴

A leading biology text for
Mittelschule
(middle school), with the official imprimatur of the Reich Ministry of Education, included extended attention to human evolution.
³⁵
Of the ten main chapters, two were on evolution and one was devoted exclusively to human evolution. The human evolution chapter alone comprised over 14 percent of the main part of the text.

One text that covered evolution and the origin of humans in detail recommended that students visit a zoo to view primates to reinforce what the text claimed was the close similarity between humans and apes.
³⁶
As this text made clear, all Third Reich German schoolchildren were to be taught that some lower primate was their evolutionary relative.

The Nazi Ministry of Education also published lists of books recommended for school libraries, many that taught Darwinism. One of the approved texts was
Abstammungslehre und Darwinismus
(
Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution
) by University of Berlin zoologist Richard Hesse, devoted to proving evolution. The 1936 edition contained a chapter titled, “Evolutionary Theory Is Valid Even for Humans.”
³⁷

That same year, the Ministry of Education approved
Rassenpflege und Schule
in which professor Martin Staemmler taught neo-Darwinian evolution of human races by means of mutation and natural selection. He also expounded on the racial struggle for survival and the important role of
Lebensraum
(the need for more living space to allow the Aryan race to expand) in that struggle.
³⁸

A separate section of many texts was reserved to discuss Jews as an inferior race, but “not a ‘pure’ race,” rather a “complicated mixture of Oriental and Middle Eastern peoples” that could be distinguished from the latter by their fleshier noses.
³⁹

THE MEYER-ZIMMERMANN TEXT

A leading higher grades biology textbook published in Nazi Germany was
Lebenskunde: Lehrbuch der Biologie für Höhere Schulen
(
Biology Textbook for Higher Level Technical Schools
) by Dr. Erich Meyer and Dr. Karl Zimmermann. This text came to the same racist conclusion as the popular text used in America,
A Civic Biology
, by George William Hunter, used in the famous Scopes Trial in 1925. Instead of “Negroes,” which the Hunter text deemed inferior, the Meyer text focused on “Jews” and “Gypsies” as examples of “inferior races.” This text concluded that “primitive races have found their last place of refuge” in remote areas of the world such as Africa, and that these “primitive races are physically, as well as mentally, far behind the highly developed races.… The most highly developed races are the master races; greater aptitude enabled them to found superior cultures and civilizations.”
⁴⁰

The socialist collectivist ideology was also fostered in this text by teaching students that “the crown of the entire curriculum” was achieved by a

thorough treatment of reproduction, heredity and evolution, formation [i.e., evolution] of races, racial science, racial care, and population policy. Thus biology instruction leads to the biological-racial foundations of the People’s Community and of the state leadership.
⁴¹

This officially-approved biology text likewise discussed human evolution in some detail. For example, the authors stated that during the Ice Age, humans “improved physically and intellectually” because the harsh conditions then propelled the evolution of humans upward by elimination of the less fit. The “half-animal prehuman” evolved into a “primitive human who lived in caves and knew how to use fire and make stone tools and hunting weapons.”

These typical examples illustrate the fact that both human evolution and the evolution of unequal races were standard topics in Nazi biology texts. The authors then claimed that all humans “are subject to the iron law of natural selection” as a result of

the development of higher cultures, the effect of natural selection was reduced, at times even neutralized.… Natural selection had, in the past, exterminated men ill with severe inherited weaknesses; however, in modern culture these are retained and not prevented from proliferating…modern culture has worked against nature. It has chiefly perpetuated the survival and propagation of the weakly and sick to the detriment of the one of outstanding ethnic value. What we observe here is sometimes called
Negative Selection, Anti-Selection
.
⁴²