Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (52 page)

The director of the Master Plan

was professor Konrad Meyer. About a dozen different scientific disciplines such as geology, climatology and urban planning were involved in the initial planning stage.… In a separate study, just recently initiated, the DFG admits that as of 1933, it “wholeheartedly supported the NS [Nazi] regime,” that it participated in banning Jewish and democratic scientists from academic life [and]…sponsored “criminal research” and financed sterilization experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp as well as Josef Mengele’s research on twins.
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In 2011, University of Minnesota Professor Paul Zachary “PZ” Myers wrote the following in response to a debate on Christian radio about whether Darwinism influenced Nazism. It illustrates the misinformation existing about the topic of this book:

one of the points the Christian fool trotted out was the tired old claim that the Nazis were no true Christians—no True Christian™ would ever commit such horrible acts. It’s an annoyingly feeble and unsupportable argument, but it has a lot of life in it, unfortunately.
¹⁵

His “True Christian™” is a way of mocking Christianity. Professor Myers adds that this argument was been covered previously in an

evolution column for the
Philly Inquirer
, and has gone on through several articles thanks to that hack from the Discovery Institute, Richard Weikart. It started with an article titled “Severing the link between Darwin and Nazism,” which cited real scholars like Robert Richards and Daniel Gasman to ably refute Weikart’s ridiculous claim that Nazism was inspired by Darwin. The Nazis banned Darwin’s books and rejected the idea that Aryans could have evolved from the lower orders.… So Flam got a contribution from…Scott Gilbert, who pointed out that biology and Darwinism were not factors in Hitler’s rise to power: the Lutheran and Catholic churches were.… Nazism was not science-based. It was pseudo-scientific religious dogma, tightly tied to the German culture of the time, which was almost entirely Catholic and Lutheran. All you have to do is look at Hitler’s own words.… You cannot blame the horrors of the Third Reich on Darwin.… If you wanted a lever to shift public opinion on anything in the 1930s, religion was where you applied your force.
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These irresponsible, but common, claims have been carefully refuted by this and hundreds of other well-documented books. It is true that many Christians supported the Nazi Party during, and before, World War II, and one major reason was because they were convinced that both Darwinism and eugenics were true and scientifically proven. Actually, churches and ministers were a major source of support of eugenics, both in the Northern United States and in Germany.
¹⁷
The German church’s response to Darwinism and the eugenics movement is not only well documented, but also provides much insight into the results of uninformed and uncritical acceptance of hypothetical and unproven scientific theory.

The church in Hungary defined Jews as a race and “not only did the priesthood [in Hungary] not speak up against the use of the term ‘race’ to define a group of citizens in order to discriminate [against] them legally—it even supported this approach.”
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Even many active Christians, some who were ordained Christian clergy and held at some level to Jewish ethics, were deceived by Darwinism.

Herczl documented that there was resistance by some church leaders to the treatment of Christians of Jewish background.
¹⁹
The very groups that should have strenuously opposed Darwinism and eugenics, on the grounds that it is blatantly contrary to basic Christian teaching, all too often rejected biblical teaching and accepted the so-called “scientific” theory of Darwinism.
²⁰

Professing German Christians even produced publications supporting eugenics. One full length book by a Protestant theologian, published in 1940, that attempted to justify Nazi eugenics was
Erbpflege und Christentum : Fragen der Sterilisation, Aufnordung, Euthanasie, Ehe
(
Eugenetics and Christianity
:
Questions about Sterilization, Nordic purity, Euthanasia, Marriage
). Since many Germans admired the “Northern race,” the word
Aufnordung
, was created, which could be translated as “to advance people to become like the northern race,” meaning more “Arian.” The word was popularized by Hans F.K. Günther, a national socialist ideologue who got the term from Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, a psychologist and race theorist of the era.

The book argued that Christians should support the Nazi programme of eugenics in order to achieve racial purity. This book, although placed on the Catholic Index of censored books, “received high praise from Protestant circles in Germany.”
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In the end, the efforts of church leaders to appease or even support the Nazi movement did not deter the Nazis from their long-term goal of eliminating Christianity from Germany.

Another example was a religion textbook titled,
Licht and Leben
(
Light and Life
), that advocated eugenics. Yet another example was a booklet called
Blut und Rasse im Licht der Bibel
(
Blood and Race in Light of the Bible
) by Max Slawinsky, which supported eugenics and the need to apply it to society. He used the same rationale for his conclusions as the Nazis did, including that it was “scientific.”
²²
These books show that many German pastors bought into Darwinian eugenics, and this was one other reason why so many Christians supported Nazism. Unfortunately, the societal and church mistakes that led up to the Third Reich in Germany are now a worldwide problem.

HITLER’S DECEPTIONS

Hitler, although he “willingly appeared to be religious at times…he saw organized religion as a threat to his power.”
²³
For example, on January 1, 1945, in his last proclamation made only a few months before he committed suicide, Hitler wrote

I cannot close this appeal without thanking the Lord for the help that He always allowed the leadership and the
Volk
to find, as well as for the power He gave us to be stronger than misery and danger. If I also thank Him for my rescue, then I do so only because through it I am happy to be able to continue dedicating my life to the service of the
Volk
. In this hour as the spokesman of Greater Germany, I therefore wish to make the solemn avowal before the Almighty that we will loyally and unshakably fulfill our duty also in the new year, in the firm belief that the hour will come when the victory will favor for good the one who is most worthy of it, the Greater German Reich.
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This oft-quoted passage has been frequently used to prove that Hitler was a strong Christian, but it actually proves that he was a consummate liar if it served his purpose—as did his entire proclamation, such as his boast in 1945 that he had no doubt that Germany would win the war, when it was very clear they could not. The fact is, Hitler and the Nazi movement did distort and exploit Christianity just as others have in our time. His real feelings were made clear in words he spoke in private to his close associates. He once said about Christians:

For the moment, I am just keeping my eye upon them: if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them. This filthy reptile raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the state, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews.
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THE ROLE OF THE PHYSICIANS AND SCIENTISTS

As documented in chapters 5–7, both medical doctors and university professors played a major role in the Nazi movement and the Holocaust, especially in laying the foundation in the 1920s of the eugenics movement.
²⁶
Goede noted that although some physicians tried to resist being part of Hitler’s killing machine, sometimes successfully, most

physicians did not even make the attempt, despite their oath. They engaged in the most awful medical tests on humans. For example, placing prisoners in ice water in order to observe the moment of death or implanting slivers of wood and glass into bodies to study the development of  infection—all this, of course, with the purpose of “enhancing medicine.” The Robert Koch Institute infected people with typhus and plague in the pursuit of suitable vaccines.
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The result was that almost 250,000 innocent people were murdered, including 80,000 handicapped people. For these crimes, as noted in previous chapters, twenty medical doctors and three Nazi functionaries were tried in Nuremberg in 1946 and

8 were sentenced to death, 7 received a life sentence—most were released by 1954. Professor Hubertus Strughold, highest ranking doctor in the German Air Force, was not tried but taken to the USA with his research where he became the father of space medicine. Why did hundreds, perhaps thousands, of physicians kill people? Although incomprehensible to us, scientific curiosity must have been one of their motivations. Still, the majority shared the ideological and racist belief in eugenics and euthanasia.… The topic remains controversial: in the spring of 2008, German doctors rewarded 92-year-old Hans-Joachim Sewering for his merits as one of Germany’s leading physicians. He had been a member of the SS and had allegedly contributed to the euthanasia program.
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DARWINISM’S ROLE IN THE HOLOCAUST

That Darwinism played a critical role in the Holocaust and World War II is not debatable, only its relative influence is. The Nazi regime’s leaders had sealed their fate with Hitler’s version of Darwinism and, as a result, the “regime’s genocide and other untold acts of inhumanity” occurred. Numbers do not tell the whole story, only individual people do. When the war was over the Nazis had only their

own collective suicide in an inexorably lost war to contemplate. But like a mortally wounded wild beast at bay, it fought with the ferocity and ruthlessness that came from desperation. And its leader, losing touch ever more with reality, hoping for miracles, kept tilting at windmills—ready in Wagnerian style in the event of ultimate apocalyptic catastrophe, and in line with his undiluted social-Darwinistic beliefs, to take his people down in flames with him if it proved incapable of producing the victory he had demanded.
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As a result of Hitler’s Darwinian beliefs and those of his leading disciples, plus the German people’s passiveness, never before

in history has such ruination—physical and moral—been associated with the name of one man.… Hitler’s name justifiably stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times. The extreme form of personal rule, which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national savior was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern, economically advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets, was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years.
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The fact is, Hitler and his close disciples were “the main author” of a war that cost over 55 million lives and left millions more grieving over their lost loved ones. Those that survived were forced to attempt to do the impossible, namely

put their shattered lives together again. Hitler was the chief inspiration of a genocide the likes of which the world had never known, rightly to be viewed in coming times as a defining episode of the twentieth century. The Reich whose glory he had sought lay at the end wrecked.
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Ironically, Hitler’s

arch-enemy, Bolshevism, stood in the Reich capital itself and presided over half of Europe…in its maelstrom of destruction Hitler’s rule had also conclusively demonstrated the utter bankruptcy of the hyper-nationalistic and racist world-power ambitions (and the social and political structures that upheld them) that had prevailed in Germany over the previous half a century and twice taken Europe and the wider world into calamitous war.
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In the end, one of the worst and most ruthless slaughters in all of history, surpassed only by Stalin and Mao with their equally anti-theistic materialism underpinned by evolution, were the product of Hitler and his loyal Darwinian disciples and followers.

MARTIN LUTHER: THE GERMAN REFORMER

No discussion of the factors that caused the Holocaust and the rise of Hitler is complete without a discussion of Martin Luther (1483 –1546). Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and major instigator of the Protestant Reformation. His translation of the Old and New Testament Bible into German, the language of the people (instead of Latin), made the Bible far more accessible, resulting in a major impact on the church and German culture. It also fostered the development of a standard version of the German language and influenced the translation of the Bible into English.
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EXAMINING THE CLAIM THAT LUTHER WAS RESPONSIBLE
FOR THE HOLOCAUST

To the claim that Hitler was a Christian is often added the allegation that Martin Luther was a racist anti-Semite, and that this claim reflects the church’s view during the Nazi era. A typical example is Professor Giberson’s claim that more blame for the Holocaust lies