Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (16 page)

The various eugenic institutes also researched the “persistence” of various “primitive racial traits” in certain races inside and outside of Germany. Eugenicists soon claimed that they found an abundance of evidence for the Cro-magnon racial type in inferior races, and also Neanderthal racial traits. Like their American and British counterparts, German racial hygiene institutes and researchers at various universities began to discover genetic evidence for virtually every human malady from criminality to hernias, even divorce and “loving to sail on water.” They saw their work as a noble effort to continue “Darwin’s attempts to elucidate the origin of species.”
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The central concept of the
survival of the fittest
philosophy, the observation that all animals and plants contain a tremendous amount of genetic variety and that some of these differences may have a survival advantage in certain environments, has been well documented. The best example is artificial selection in which breeders select males and females with the maximum amount of the trait they are concerned with, and then again select from their offspring those animals that display the maximum of that trait. As a result, a wide variety of modified plants and animals have been bred. Of course, artificial selection is not natural selection, a problem with which Darwin never fully dealt.

Breeding for certain traits, though, invariably is a trade off that usually results in the loss of other desirable characteristics. Because producing a plant or animal with certain traits usually results in the loss of other traits, cows are bred either as dairy cows or for meat, but not both. The Nazi’s theory inadequately considered this data and the implications of the tremendous amount of biological diversity that we now know exists.

The racist theories closely followed the spread of Darwinian evolutionary theory, which had a wide following in Germany almost immediately after the publication of the German edition of
On the Origin of Species
.
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As Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould concluded, “Biological arguments for racism…increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory” by scientists in most nations.
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Also used for the support of racism were comparisons of various cultures that were assumed to be the product of racial superiority. The Nazis concluded that inferior races usually produced inferior cultures, but only superior races could produce superior cultures.
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Hence, historian Dr. Karl Schleunes notes that racism came into scientific repute through its solid link with what he calls the third great synthesis of the nineteenth-century, the Darwinian theory of evolution and the survival-of-the-fittest worldview.
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AMERICAN AND BRITISH SUPPORT

Darwinists’ views about race existed not only in Nazi Germany but also in America, as is apparent from surveys of textbooks published from 1880 to around 1950. For example, Princeton biologist Edwin Conklin stated in his college text that comparisons

of any modern race with the Neanderthal or Heidelberg types shows that…Negroid races more closely resemble the original stock than the white or yellow races. Every consideration should lead those who believe in the superiority of the white race to strive to preserve its purity and to establish and maintain the segregation of the races.
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German eugenicists relied heavily on work completed in Britain and America, especially that research related to sterilization policies.
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For example, the national compulsory sterilization laws were quite literally based on the “model eugenical sterilization law drawn up by the supervisor and the eugenics record office of Cold Spring Harbor, New York.”
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Franz Bumm, the President of the Reich Health Office, noted that “the value of eugenics research had been convincingly demonstrated in the United States, where anthropological statistics had been gathered from 2 million men recruited for the American armed forces.”
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Soon after the American Supreme Court ruled that sterilization of minorities for eugenic purposes was constitutional, Adolf Hitler’s cabinet passed a eugenic sterilization law using the American ruling as an example.
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The 1933 German law was compulsory for all people, “institutionalized or not, who suffered from allegedly hereditary disabilities including feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, epilepsy, blindness, severe drug or alcohol addiction and physical deformities that seriously interfered with locomotion or were grossly offensive.”
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The German laws were then used to inspire even harsher laws in the United States—in Virginia, Dr. Joseph DeJarnette argued that the progressive and scientific-minded Americans should be shamed by the “enlightened” progressive German legislation, and that
Americans
should be taking the lead in this area instead of Germany.
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As a whole, the Germans and Americans shared information and ideas and influenced each other to develop eugenics programmes.

The next step in Germany was for the government to provide “loans” to couples that it concluded were “racially and biologically desirable” and therefore should have more children. The birth of each child reduced the “loan” indebtedness by 25 per cent. Later came sterilization laws and then, in 1939, euthanasia of certain mentally handicapped or diseased persons.

Ultimately, euthanasia was extended to include physically disabled persons, some with minor disabilities. These policies motivated American and British eugenicists to endorse the German programme as a model because it was “without [the] nefarious racial content” of American programmes.
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Conversely, German eugenicists repeatedly acknowledged their debt to the American and British researchers and periodically honoured eugenicists from British and American universities with various awards. Furthermore, many of the American eugenicists argued that the Nazis were outdoing them and were able to convince American courts (including the Supreme Court) of the validity of even some of the most outrageous eugenic claims.
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Some of these eugenic-based ideas became part of American law and practice until after World War II when the full horror of the German eugenics programmes became widely known.

JEWS IN GERMANY AND DARWINISM

The early German eugenic leadership moderated their anti-Semitic rhetoric in an attempt to attract Jews to the eugenics movement.
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Many early German eugenicists believed that German Jews were Aryans and, consequently the eugenic movement was supported by many Jewish professors and doctors both in Germany and abroad. The Jews were only gradually incorporated into the German eugenic theory, and later its laws.

The views of Darwinian racists only
gradually
entered into spheres of German society that they previously had not affected.
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The Pan-German League (
Alldeutscher Verband
), dedicated to “maintaining German racial purity,” was originally not overtly anti-Semitic, and assimilated Jews were allowed full membership. Many German eugenicists believed that, although blacks or Gypsies were racially inferior, their racial theories did not fit Jews, since many Jews had achieved significant success in Germany. By 1903, the influence of race ideas permeated the League’s programme to the degree that, by 1912, the League declared itself based on “racial principles” and soon excluded Jews from membership.
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In spite of the scientific support for these racial views, not until World War II did they have a major effect on most Jews. Most German Jews were proud of being Germans and considered themselves Germans first and Jews second. Many Jews modified the German
intelligentsia
’s racial views by including themselves in it. Their assimilation into German life was so complete that most Jews felt the anti-Semitism of the eugenists did not represent a serious threat to their security.

Most Jews were also convinced that Germany was now a safe harbour for them.
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In fact, during World War II, an estimated 150,000
Mischlinge
(part Jewish) men served in the German Army, many with distinction—and hundreds served at the rank of major or even higher as colonels or generals.
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It was later revealed that the “ideal” German soldier, whose picture was plastered everywhere, for Nazi propaganda purposes was half Jewish.
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Many German Gentiles still firmly held to the Genesis creation model and rejected the views on which racism was based, including Darwinism. What happened in Germany later was obviously not well received by Jewish geneticists, even non-Jewish eugenicists and certain other groups. As Greta Jones notes, the world

eugenics movement felt a mixture of apprehension and admiration at the progress of eugenics in Germany…[but] the actual details of the eugenics measure which emerged after Hitler’s rise to power were not unequivocally welcomed. Eugenicists pointed to the USA as a place where strict laws controlled marriage but where a strong tradition of political freedom existed.
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While ethnic Jewish persons were still held as an example of educational and professional achievement in much of American and British eugenic literature, German eugenicists began classifying Jews as evolutionarily inferior. Although intelligent, they were often seen as using their intelligence in crafty and underhanded ways for selfish gain, partly because they were seen as hereditarily immoral. Furthermore, although many American and British eugenicists objected to Germans judging certain groups as inferior, such as many Eastern Europeans, many American eugenicists also classified these groups as inferior.
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EVOLUTION USED TO JUSTIFY EXISTING GERMAN RACISM

Dr. Karl Schleunes noted, rather poignantly, that the publication of Darwin’s 1859 book,
On the Origin of Species,
had an immediate impact in Germany’s Jewish policy. Once the social Darwinists raised the struggle from the biological to the social plane, “Darwin’s notion of struggle for survival…legitimized by the latest scientific views, justified the racist’s conception of superior and inferior peoples…and validated the conflict between them.”
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The anti-Semitic attitudes of the German people were only partly to blame for causing the Holocaust—only when Darwinism was added to the preexisting mix of attitudes did a lethal combination result. The Darwinian revolution and the writings of its chief German spokesman and most eminent scientist, Professor Haeckel, gave the racists what they were confident was powerful verification of their race views.
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The support of the scientific establishment resulted in racist thought having a much wider circulation than had been possible up to this time, and enormous satisfaction “that one’s prejudices were actually expressions of scientific truth.”
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And what greater authority than science could racists have for their views? Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz, a dedicated Nazi, one of the most eminent animal behaviour scientists at that time, and often credited as being the founder of his field, stated,

Just as in cancer the best treatment is to eradicate the parasitic growth as quickly as possible, the eugenic defense against the dysgenic social effects of afflicted subpopulations is of necessity limited to equally drastic measures…. When these inferior elements are not effectively eliminated from a [healthy] population, then—just as when the cells of a malignant tumor are allowed to proliferate throughout the human body—they destroy the host body as well as themselves.
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Lorenz’s works were important in developing the Nazi programme designed to eradicate the “parasitic growth” of inferior races. The government’s programmes to ensure the “German Volk” maintained their superiority made racism almost unassailable. Although some scholars, such as biologist James King, claim that the Holocaust pretended “to have a scientific genetic basis,”
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the position of Darwinism within the government and the university elite of the time was so entrenched that few contemporary scientists seriously questioned the direct application of social Darwinism to governmental policy.
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EUGENICS BECOMES MORE EXTREME

Most of the early American, Canadian and British eugenicists stressed volunteerism should be relied on for implementation of eugenic programmes. Francis Galton, though, concluded the problem of inferior races contaminating the gene pool “was so clear-cut, and so dire, as to warrant state intervention of a coercive nature in human reproduction.”
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Later, eugenicists increasingly supported directed government action in applying eugenic laws—natural selection may produce the most fit race but only artificial selection enforced by the government could ensure that the eugenically superior dominated.

Many social workers, psychiatrists and other mental health workers in Britain, the United States and Germany were convinced of genetic origin of social deficiencies, and they increasingly felt compelled to force the government to intervene.
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Discouraged by the lack of effectiveness of their science in influencing governmental policy, and fully convinced that eugenics had been empirically demonstrated by the brilliant scientific work of Charles Darwin, Karl Pearson, Francis Galton, and many others, Western eugenic proponents felt envy that only Germany was able to fully implement the programmes that many scientists in America and Europe were then strongly advocating.
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