Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (24 page)

66
Frederic Wertham,
A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence
(New York: Macmillan, 1966), 160.

67
Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–45
; Thomas Röder, Volker Kubillus and Anthony Burwell,
Psychiatrists: The Men behind Hitler
(Los Angeles: Freedom Publishing, 1995).

68
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 125.

69
Wertham,
A Sign for Cain
.

70
Dieter Kunz and Susan D. Bachrach, eds.,
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

71
Karl Binding and L. Alfred Hoche,
The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value: It’s
[sic.]
Measure and It’s
[sic.]
Form
(1920), trans. Robert L. Sassone (Santa Ana: privately published, 1975).

72
Philipp Gassert and Daniel S. Mattern,
The Hitler Library: A Bibliography
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001); Nancy L. Gallagher,
Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State
(Hanover: University of New England Press, 1999).

73
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,” 56.

74
Haeckel,
The Wonders of Life
, 118–119.

75
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,” 57.

76
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 18.

77
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 18.

78
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 131.

79
Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–45.

80
Goldhagen,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
, 108.

81
Kunz and Bachrach, eds.,
Deadly Medicine
; Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–45
.

82
Benno Müller-Hill,
Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany, 1933–1945
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

83
Heather Pringle, “Confronting Anatomy’s Nazi Past,”
Science
(July 16, 2010): 274–275; Paul Gray, “Cursed by Eugenics,”
Time
(Jan. 11, 1999): 84–85.

84
George Santayana,
Persons and Places
(New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1944).

85
Jerry Bergman, “Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust,”
Creation ex nihilo Technical Journal
13 (November 1999), No. 2: 101–111.

86
Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–45
, 615.

87
Wolfgang Goede, “Science under the Swastika,”
The Pantaneto Forum
, Issue 32 (October 2008): 8.

88
Goede, “Science under the Swastika,” 8.

Hitler’s academics
and doctors

INTRODUCTION

T
he German Führer, Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi movement as a whole, had strong support from almost the entire German scientific and academic community, especially during the early years of his dictatorship. Their support extended to his eugenic policies, including the extermination of the Jews and others whom the racial hygiene “experts” judged as racially inferior.

Among Darwin’s most important disciples, and a major supporter of Hitler, was the scientific and academic establishment. During the twentieth century, Germany’s scientific community was the most advanced in the world. Cambridge University historian John Cornwell wrote that during the first three decades of the last century Germany held the premier position for scientific achievement compared with all other nations of the world. German scientists were then among the most accomplished and honoured in most fields, as demonstrated by the fact that they were awarded the lion’s share of Nobel prizes, as noted in the previous chapter.

Academics, including doctors, biologists, anthropologists and “all branches of the social sciences and the humanities,” provided the necessary scholarship and technical support that enabled the Holocaust to occur.
¹
Rudolf Ramm wrote in 1943 that the fact is, “biology and genetics are the roots from which the National Socialist worldview has grown.”
²
An important point is that “many intellectuals cooperated fully in Nazi racial programmes, and many of the social and intellectual foundations for these programmes were laid long before the rise of Hitler to power.”
³
Snyder included only one academic, musicology professor Kurt Huber, in his study of those who opposed Hitler.
⁴
Huber’s concern about Hitler may have been partly because he (Huber) was physically handicapped and a candidate for the extermination camps.

Professor Wolf was able to document only three professors who “raised their voices in protest against the dismissal of their colleagues or against the burning of the books.”
⁵
The 1914 Nobelist Max von Laue was one of the few scientists to openly defy the Nazis, and his opposition was typically symbolic, such as going to the funeral of the Jewish scientist Otto Hahn.
⁶

Another example of the strong support of academia for Nazi policies was when Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer openly opposed how the Jews were treated and then opposed Hitler, the result was

Bonhoeffer’s right to teach at Berlin University was officially revoked. He had given a lecture there on February 14, which turned out to be his last. His long relationship with the world of academia ended forever. He would protest and appeal, but there was no way to rescind the judgment. And yet, in the topsy-turvydom of Hitler’s Germany in which academia was closed to Jews, it can hardly have been entirely disheartening. His [Jewish] brother-in-law Gerhard Leibholz was forced to “retire” that April.
⁷

Wolf documented close to 300 professors who “signed a declaration in praise of Hitler,” and students at dozens of major German universities boycotted Jewish professors.
⁸
He was able to locate only three professors that “raised their voices in protest against the dismissal of their colleagues or against the burning of the books, and one of the three was a Swiss (Professor Karl Barth)” who was forced to resign from his chair in the University of Bonn and return to his home country, Switzerland.
⁹
Dr. Karl Barth was a theologian who became well known for his courageous and almost unheard of action protesting the Nazis. Many professors went beyond signing declarations. In fact, medical “doctors played a crucial role in the science of organized cruelty that we call the Holocaust.”
¹⁰
Furthermore, Hitler’s support involved impressive numbers of academics and scholars that

were to a large extent people of long and high standing, university professors and academy members, some of them world famous, authors with familiar names and guest lecturers abroad, the kind of people Allied scholars used to meet and fraternize with at international congresses.
¹¹

The claim of the harm of so-called

racial mixing was incorporated into academic anthropology by Eugen Fischer, professor at the University of Freiburg. As a young scholar, Fischer…traveled to German Southwest Africa to investigate miscegenation firsthand. His book,
The Rehoboth Bastards and the Bastardization Problem among Humans
(1913), examined a community of descendants of European men and African women.
¹²

Professor Fischer concluded from his research that miscegenation usually resulted in progeny that were about midway between the two parental races, causing the average offspring to degenerate compared with the race of the “higher” evolved parent. It was for this reason that “he opposed racial mixture and supported racial segregation in German colonies. Fischer’s work was important in giving a scientific patina to opposition to miscegenation.”
¹³
Fischer’s two-volume work,
Foundations of Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene
, co-written with Erwin Baur and Fritz Lenz, was a major scientific basis for Nazi racist policy.
¹⁴

Although we have no firm evidence that Hitler read any of Fischer’s books, many anthropologists and racial thinkers promoted the same or similar ideas, and Hitler likely learned his racial conclusions from a number of sources.
¹⁵
We do know that Hitler learned many of his racist conclusions from biology and medical professors who

played an important role in the debate over racial policy. According to the official Nazi commentary on the Nuremberg Laws, the law was framed in such a way that it would eventually lead to the elimination of the mixed race. Hitler…knew about the significance of Mendelian genetics for racial mixture at least by 1928, for he mentioned in his Second Book that because of Mendelian genetics some offspring in a racially mixed marriage would favor one race, while some siblings might favor the other…. Cornelia Essner claims that a speech Hitler gave in late September 1935 showed “surprisingly good racial-biological knowledge.”
¹⁶

Hitler relied on Mendelian laws to support his conclusion that, even four to six generations after racial mixture occurred, a “pure Jew” could result which would “constitute a great danger” for Germany’s racial purity goals. To support his contention, Hitler provided an example of one man who had the physical characteristics of Jews