Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (10 page)

idiotic bourgeoisie looks with amazement at such miracles of education, full of respect for this marvelous result of modern educational skill, the Jew shrewdly draws from it a new proof for the soundness of his theory about the
equality of men
that he is trying to funnel into the minds of the nations. It doesn’t dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions.… The same pains and care employed on intelligent races would a thousand times sooner make every single individual capable of the same achievements.
⁴¹

Hitler concluded that “contamination by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe is just as much in keeping with the perverted sadistic thirst for vengeance of this hereditary enemy of our people as is the ice-cold calculation of the Jew.” This began the “bastardizing the European continent at its core” which deprived “the white race of the foundations for a sovereign existence through infection with lower humanity.”
⁴²
The end result was many of the few blacks that lived in Nazi Germany also suffered persecution.
⁴³
The racial scientists disagreed on exactly which races were inferior, but most all eugenic scientists agreed that “there was never any doubt about…blacks.”
⁴⁴

ORIENTALS ALSO AN INFERIOR RACE

The Nazi leadership also regarded the Orientals as an inferior race but wanted to retain them as allies until the war was won—then they would decide what to do about the oriental problem. It is for this reason that Hitler taught that the state should determine who can marry based on racial lines so as to prevent producing a “monster halfway between men and apes.”
⁴⁵
Goebbels claimed that “Hitler made fun of the Japanese Minister after an evening party in the Chancellery, and said that [Minister] Matsuoka reminded him of a yellow ape from the primeval jungle.”
⁴⁶

Once the inferior races (evidently all humans but Aryans) were all exterminated, Hitler believed that future generations would be eternally grateful for the benefits that his race programmes brought to humanity. As a committed Darwinist, Hitler “consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution” in order to benefit all humanity.
⁴⁷
British evolutionist Arthur Keith added that, if war is the progeny of evolution,

and I am convinced that it is—then evolution has “gone mad,” reaching such a height of ferocity as must frustrate its proper role in the world of life—which is the advancement of her competing “units,” these being tribes, nations, or races of mankind.
⁴⁸

Keith also believed that there is no way of eliminating war “save one, and that is to rid human nature of the sanctions imposed on it by the law of evolution. Can man…render the law of evolution null and void? …I have discovered.… There is no escape from human nature.”
⁴⁹
The problem was “Germany has drunk the vat of evolution to its last dregs, and in her evolutionary debauch[ery] has plunged Europe into a bath of blood.”
⁵⁰
As a committed Darwinist, Keith added that this fact is not proof that the law of evolution is evil because, “A law which brought man out of the jungle and made him king of beasts cannot be altogether bad.”
⁵¹

SUMMARY

Of the many factors that produced Hitler’s eugenic and genocidal programmes, according to his own writings, one of the more important was Darwin’s notion that evolutionary progress occurs primarily as a result of the elimination of the weak in the struggle for survival and allowing the strong to flourish.
⁵²
Although it is no easy task to assess all of the many conflicting motives of Hitler, Darwin-inspired eugenics clearly played a critical role. It both justified and encouraged Hitler’s views on eugenics, race, and war. Darwinism also played a major role in the early twentieth century eugenics movement in other nations including America and Canada.
⁵³

Hitler not only unabashedly intended to produce a superior race, he also openly relied on Darwinian thought in both his extermination and war policies.
⁵⁴
The Holocaust was one of the fruits of Hitler’s reading literature “on social Darwinism that had formed the basis of Hitler’s education.”
⁵⁵
Hitler firmly believed that the world would eventually appreciate his programmes that lifted humans to genetically higher levels as a result of reducing race pollution by preventing superior Aryans from breeding with inferior races:

Hitler was influenced above all by the theories of the nineteenth-century social Darwinist school, whose conception of man as biological material was bound up with impulses towards a planned society. He was convinced that the race was disintegrating, deteriorating through faulty breeding as a result of a liberally tinged promiscuity that was vitiating the nation’s blood. And this led to the establishment of a catalogue of ‘positive’ curative measures: racial hygiene, eugenic choice of marriage partners, the breeding of human beings by the methods of selection on the one hand and extirpation on the other.
⁵⁶

As Rudolf Höss adds, “such a struggle, legitimized by the latest scientific views, justified the racists’ conceptions of superior and inferior people and nations and validated the conflict between them.”
⁵⁷
Historian George Victor concluded that the Holocaust was largely Hitler’s idea, and “he believed correctly that, if he died before launching it, there would be no Holocaust. The men Hitler had designated as his successors—Hoess and Göring—did not share his genocide intentions” and, Victor claimed, openly opposed dealing with the problem of inferior races by murder.
⁵⁸
Hitler’s leadership was critical in birthing the Holocaust, and Darwinism played a central role in Hitler’s beliefs about race.
⁵⁹

Genetic research indicates the possibility that Hitler had Jewish background, which makes his inferiority concerns somewhat ironic. Jean-Paul Mulders traced Hitler’s living relatives in both the Führer’s native Austria and the United States. Geneticists identified groups of genes called haplogroups that define populations. Hitler’s dominant haplogroup, E1b1b, is relatively rare in Western Europe, but between 50 an 80 per cent of North Africans share Hitler’s dominant group, which is especially prevalent among in the Berber tribes of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Somalia. Hitler’s second most dominant haplogroup is the most common in Ashkenazi Jews. As Decorte noted, “The findings are fascinating if you look at them in terms of the Nazi worldview, which ascribed such an extreme priority to notions of blood and race. This pure type of ‘superman’ and the [Nazi] breeding programs to perfect ‘purity’ were sheer fabrication.”
⁶⁰

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1
Richard Lukas,
The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939–1944
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997).

2
Philipp Gassert and Daniel S. Mattern,
The Hitler Library: A Bibliography
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001).

3
Richard Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism on Anti-Semitic Ideology in Germany and Austria. 1860-1945,” in Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, eds.,
Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 112.

4
Ambrus Miskolczy,
Hitler’s Library
(New York: Central European University Press, 2003); Gassert and Mattern,
The Hitler Library
.

5
Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism,” 112–114.

6
Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism,” 113.

7
Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism,” 113.

8
Kurt Lüdecke,
I Knew Hitler: The Story of a Nazi Who Escaped the Blood Purge
(London: Jarrolds, 1938), 30.

9
Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism,” 112–114.

10
Adolf Hitler,
Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944
, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens; intro. H.R. Trevor-Roper, “The Mind of Adolf Hitler” (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953), 285. As noted, the English translation of the work must be considered with caution.

11
George L. Mosse,
Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).

12
Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf
(Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin/The Riverside Press, 1962), 285.

13
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 286.

14
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 286.

15
Cited in Richard Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 50.

16
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 325.

17
Robert Clark,
Darwin: Before and After
(Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids International Press, 1958), 115.

18
The Nuremberg Trials
, 14:279, cited in Joseph Tenenbaum,
Race and Reich
(New York: Twayne, 1956), 211–212.

19
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 295.

20
Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism,” 114.

21
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 132.

22
Leon Poliakov,
The Aryan Myth
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996).

23
Lukas,
The Forgotten Holocaust
, 4.

24
Lukas,
The Forgotten Holocaust
, 4.

25
Leon Goure,
The Siege of Leningrad
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1981).

26
George Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,”
American Scientist
76, No. 1 (Jan–Feb 1988): 50–58.

27
Hitler,
Hitler’s Secret Conversations
, 189.

28
Clark,
Darwin: Before and After
, 115.

29
George Victor,
Hitler: The Pathology of Evil
(Washington: Brassey’s, 1998), 96.

30
Richard Hickman,
Biocreation
(Worthington: Science Press, 1983), 51–52.

31
Tenenbaum,
Race and Reich
, vii.

32
Weikart, “The Impact of Social Darwinism,” 115.

33
John Whitehead,
The Stealing of America
(Westchester: Crossway, 1983), 15.

34
Daniel Gasman,
The Scientific Origin of National Socialism
(New York: American Elsevier, 1971).

35
Hitler,
Hitler’s Secret Conversations
, 116.

36
Victor,
Hitler: The Pathology of Evil
, 108.

37
Clark,
Darwin: Before and After
, 115.

38
Bryan Mark Rigg,
Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military
(Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2002).

39
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 403.

40
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 403, emphasis in original.