Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (20 page)

96
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,” 159.

97
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
, 159.

98
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
, 158.

99
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
, 157.

100
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
.

101
Bruno Bettelheim,
The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age
(New York: Free Press, 1960).

102
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
, 187.

103
Richard Milner,
The Encyclopedia of Evolution
(New York: Facts on File, 1990).

104
Gerald Astor,
The Last Nazi: The Life and Times of Joseph Mengele
(New York: Donald Fine, 1985); Jerry Bergman,“Darwinism as a Factor in the Twentieth-Century Totalitarianism Holocausts,”
Creation Research Society Quarterly
, 39, No. 1 (2002): 47–53.

Hitler’s leading
Darwinian scientists

INTRODUCTION

T
he writings of leading early twentieth-century German biologists reveal that many of them actively supported Nazi race policies. They believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to the manner that farmers used to breed cattle. In formulating their racial policies, Hitler’s government relied heavily on the works of Darwinists and prominent Darwinian spokesmen such as Haeckel. Consequently, the development and implementation of government policies designed to evolve a “superior race” had widespread support from the scientific community. This philosophy culminated in the extermination of approximately 6 million Jews and over 5 million other people who belonged to what German scientists labelled as “inferior races.”

GERMANY, THE LEADER IN SCIENCE

In the first part of the twentieth century, Germany was the science Mecca of the world, and German scientists were the most accomplished in their respective fields.
¹
They won the lion’s share of Nobel Laureates and honours until the end of World War II, and most supported, or at least were sympathetic to, the Nazi racial genocide. The importance of German science is illustrated by the fact that researchers the world over until the Second World War had to learn German to read the major scientific literature.
²
The critical effect of the replacement of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim creationist worldview by Darwinism on Nazi race policies has been well documented.
³
Protestant minister William Bell Riley even called Hitler’s Nazism “the philosophy of evolution in action.”
⁴

It is also well documented that Nazi leaders were profoundly influenced by Darwinism, but it is somewhat less well known that the Nazis enjoyed widespread support from most of the German scientific community, especially biologists.
⁵
The now classic work by German Jewish historian Max Weinreich constitutes a “formidable indictment against the German intellectual elite.”
⁶

Importantly, German scholars and intellectuals, most university trained and many university professors “provided the ideas and techniques which led to and justified” the unparalleled slaughter of the Jews and other “inferior” races.
⁷
Weinreich notes that the physical anthropologists, biologists and all branches of the social sciences, and humanities in particular, supported and often actively contributed to the Holocaust machine.

Nazi beliefs about race also were widely shared by the worldwide scientific community, especially biologists. Darwin’s major influence on Nazi policy can be evaluated by an examination of the writings of leading early twentieth-century German biologists. Arthur Keith concluded that the Nazi treatment of Jews and other “races,” then believed to be “inferior,” was largely a result of the widespread belief among biologists that Darwinism provided profound insight that could be used to significantly improve humankind.
⁸
In short, Nazism was

based on Charles Darwin’s doctrine of the survival of the fittest …which Herbert Spencer argued that those better adapted to the conditions of life prevailed not only in nature but in human society as well. Thus, from Darwin’s doctrine, the [Nazi] racists concluded that the strong and victorious were also in the right.
⁹

The goal of the Nazis eventually was the totally extermination of all people that they judged “inferior,” especially Jews “in all lands,” so that “no [inferior] germ-cell would remain” in the world and, consequently, they could never again pollute the pure Aryan race.
¹⁰
As noted, the core philosophy driving the Nazi Holocaust was that just as breeders could raise superior strains of horses and dogs so too it is possible to enhance the quality of humans by controlling their breeding. According to Nazi ideology

race was the factor that governed men’s lives. It was because of their race that they acted for good or bad and tended toward survival or extinction. When citizens were corrupted by the rule of an inferior race, government was corrupted. When they were governed by a positive and lofty race—endowed with the right, the will, and the ability to rule—they enhanced humankind, its society, and its culture. Hence, the reform of government was possible only by improving the race.
¹¹

As Professors Weikart and Stein show, this view was widely shared by Darwinists of the time.
¹²

The first language into which Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
was translated—only a year after it was published in English—was German.
¹³
Although Darwinism was championed in many nations, it had more influence on German state policy than in any other country in the world.
¹⁴
So important was evolution that the Nazi goal was

absolute control over the evolutionary process, over the biological human future. Making widespread use of the Darwinian term “selection,” the Nazis sought to take over the functions of nature (natural selection)…in orchestrating their own “selections,” their own version of human evolution. In these visions the Nazis embraced ... a newer…claim to “scientific racism.”
¹⁵

The result was putative Jewish characteristics judged harmful, such as greed

could be linked with alleged data of scientific disciplines, so that a “mainstream of racism” formed from “the fusion of anthropology, eugenics, and social thought.”
The resulting “racial and social biology” could make vicious forms of anti-Semitism seem intellectually respectable to learned men and women.
¹⁶

So pervasive was biological evolution in the Nazi ideology that Professor Robert Lifton suggested the Nazi state could be called a “biocracy,” rule by biology, which has as its goal the

purification and revitalization of the Aryan race…. Just as in a theocracy, the state itself is no more than a vehicle for the divine purpose, so in the Nazi biocracy was the state no more than a…means to achieve “
a mission of the German people on earth
”: that of “
assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements in this
[Aryan]
people.
”
¹⁷

A major effect that Darwinian evolution had on German society was a complete “destructiveness of cosmic purpose.” No longer could the universe be seen as created and existing according to a Divine plan, but rather as a result of random events that implied neither finality nor purpose exists in nature.
¹⁸
Although Adolf Hitler and his associates, and not the biological theorists, were the Nazi rulers, in Lifton’s opinion the difference was “far from absolute” because among

the biological authorities called forth to articulate and implement “scientific racism”—including physical anthropologists, geneticists, and racial theorists of every variety—doctors inevitably found a unique place. It is they who work at the border of life and death, who are most associated with the awesome, death-defying, and sometimes death-dealing aura of the primitive shaman and medicine man. As bearers of this shamanistic legacy and contemporary practitioners of mysterious healing arts, it is they who are likely to be called upon to become biological activists.
¹⁹

Hitler had broad support from, not only biologists, but even from physical scientists. One of the first scientists to proudly become a disciple of Hitler was the famous Nobel Laureate physicist Philipp Lenard.
²⁰
In 1924, Dr. Lenard published an “ecstatic statement in favor of Hitler and the Nazi Party…co-signed by another famous physicist, Nobel Laureate Johannes Stark. Not long after Lenard was honoured by Hitler, most German scientists lent their support to both Hitler and Lenard.”
²¹

The inequality doctrine, the idea that some humans races are superior to others, was an integral part of German philosophy for years but reached its apex only under Hitler’s regime. It obtained its chief intellectual support from Darwinism, especially from Darwin’s major disciple, Ernst Haeckel.
²²

ERNST HAECKEL

Ernest Haeckel, a highly respected zoology professor at the University of Jena, was one of Darwin’s leading proponents in Germany. He was reared as a Christian and creationist, but his worldview radically changed when he was exposed to evolution, materialism and the anti-Christian ideas of his professors. In time, he came to “detest” organized religion and adopted “quasi-mystical” naturalistic beliefs.
²³
Haeckel was trained as a physician at Würzberg University and graduated in 1859, shortly before the publication of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
. Darwin’s
Origins
book

dramatically changed his life. Here, he thought, was the answer to everything he had been seeking in science, philosophy, ethics, religion, politics—a unified, or monist, view of the world. His own fanaticized version of evolution became an obsession and guiding passion, with Darwin his greatest hero.
²⁴

Haeckel first forcefully presented his new Darwinian views at the 1863 Congress of German Naturalists in a speech that commenced his four-decade-long role as “Darwin’s chief apostle.”
²⁵
Haeckel soon became a pivotal scientist who helped shape German biological research along Darwinian lines, expanding its range into every area of biology including

embryology, morphology, and cell theory. He also raised and discussed many issues which are still alive today and coined the term
ecology
, which he defined as the scientific investigation of the relationship between organism and environment. Stephen Jay Gould has recently documented his extensive historical significance, and some years ago Erik Nordenskjöld could write that “there are not many personalities who have so powerfully influenced the development of human culture–and that, too, in many different spheres—as Haeckel.
²⁶