Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (30 page)

22
Lagnado and Dekel,
Children of the Flames
, 7.

23
Welch,
Rise & Fall of the Nazis
, 256.

24
Robert Jay Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
(New York: Basic Books, 1986), 17.

25
Lagnado and Dekel,
Children of the Flames
, 9.

26
Evans,
The Third Reich at War
.

27
Eric Metaxas,
Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 510.

28
Metaxas,
Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
, 511.

29
Metaxas,
Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
, 511.

30
Metaxas,
Bonhoeffer—Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
, 514.

31
Evans,
The Third Reich at War
, 607.

32
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 9.

33
Evans,
The Third Reich at War
, 609.

34
Lagnado and Dekel,
Children of the Flames
, 43.

35
Evans,
The Third Reich at War
, 611–612.

36
Robert Millikan,
The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan
(New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950).

37
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 9–10.

38
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 10.

39
Astor,
The Last Nazi
, 21.

40
Astor,
The Last Nazi
, 21

41
Astor,
The Last Nazi
, 21.

42
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 344.

43
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 9–10.

44
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 17.

45
Welch,
Rise & Fall of the Nazis
, 310.

46
Posner and Ware,
Mengele: The Complete Story
, 9.

47
Lagnado and Dekel,
Children of the Flames
, 42.

Martin Bormann:
Hitler’s right-hand man

INTRODUCTION

M
artin Bormann (June 7, 1900 – May 2, 1945) joined the Nazi party in 1927 and rose steadily in the Nazi hierarchy. He first held the post of Party Treasurer and, after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, was appointed the National Party Organizer. In 1942, Bormann became Hitler’s secretary and was appointed deputy Führer. He soon gained Hitler’s full trust and achieved immense power within the Third Reich by controlling access to the Führer and even filtering the documents that Hitler saw.

As a result of his position, Bormann had an enormous influence on government policy. He turned out to be “one of the most powerful men in the Reich.”
¹
Bormann’s power was so great that he sometimes even blocked Hitler’s closest associates, including Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler and Albert Speer, from seeing Hitler. Many historians have suggested Bormann held so much power that he became Germany’s actual co-leader during the war. This is illustrated by a collection of transcripts edited by Bormann during the war and which appeared in print in 1951 as
Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944
.

MARTIN BORMANN’S BACKGROUND

Bormann was born in Halberstadt, Germany, dropped out of college and joined the German Army during the last few months of the First World War. After the war, he joined a radical political group called
Rossbach Freikorps
. As a result of his involvement, he and future Nazi leader Rudolf Höss were found guilty of murdering and torturing Walter Kadow, who had been accused of betraying saboteur Albert Leo Schlageter. Bormann spent only a year in prison for his part in the murder. Soon Hitler became Bormann’s “God,” and he determined that “rather than believe in Jesus Christ, the Germans were to worship Adolf Hitler.”
²

EVOLUTION AND EUGENICS

Bormann’s eugenic evolutionary racist ideas were clearly reflected in his policies. Bormann is said to have hated the Slavic peoples more than Hitler or even Himmler. Although Hitler claimed he was making war on “the Bolshevist center in Moscow,” in fact, he “chose instead to make war on the Russian people” as a racial group.
³

The importance of racism in Nazi military aggression was illustrated by the fact that Moscow widely distributed photographs showing Nazis hanging or shooting Russian civilians as evidence that the Nazis really were “waging a war of extermination against the Russian people.”
⁴
Evidence supporting this conclusion is, in contrast to the Western policy, “The German army, as a matter of official policy, did not feed Russian civilians or prisoners of war.”
⁵
A top-secret German document uncovered after the war and dated February 1942

revealed that of 3,600,000 Soviet prisoners of war, “only several hundred thousand are still able to work…. A large part has starved or died…in the majority of cases, the camp commanders have forbidden the civilian population to put food at the disposal of prisoners.”
⁶

The “limitless abuse of Slavic humanity” by the Nazis even extended to genocide, openly murdering millions of Slavic Russians.
⁷
The reason for this horrible abuse of power was that “the Nazi leaders were absolute racists; they believed utterly in the superiority of their so-called Aryan (non-Jewish Germans and Scandinavians) race. They had no doubt that they were the pinnacle of racial evolution, that eugenically they were the best.”
⁸
Furthermore, the Eastern Europeans were regarded by the Nazis as

sub-human…a dreadful creature…only an imitation of man with man-resembling features, but inferior…as regards intellect and soul…so science proved, they thought. And therefore no inferior group could be allowed to pollute their racial strain.
⁹

Bormann was concerned that Ukrainian “children will become Ukrainian adults, with their vulgar, inexpressive faces,” a problem that he was determined to solve by drastic measures including murder. He added that he was also very much struck by the fact that in the Ukraine he

saw so many children and so few men. Such prolific breeding may one day give us a knotty problem to solve, for as a race they are much hardier than we.… If these people are allowed, under German supervision—that is, under greatly improved conditions—to multiply too quickly, it will be against our interests, for the racial pressures which these damned Ukrainians will exercise will constitute a real danger. Our interests demand just the reverse—namely, that these territories, hitherto Russian, should in time be populated by a larger number of German colonists than local inhabitants.
¹⁰

Bormann added that the “Slavs are to work for us. Insofar as we don’t need them, they may die.” For this reason, vaccination and German health services were unnecessary for the Slavic peoples. Furthermore, the high

fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives and practice abortion, the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is sufficient if they can count up to a hundred. At best an education is admissible which produces useful servants for us. Every educated person is a future enemy. As to food, they are not to get more than necessary. We are the masters, we come first.
¹¹

As to the treatment of the Slavs, “Hitler agreed with Bormann and set off on a rambling monologue concerning the manner in which he felt that the Slavs should be handled. Bormann, …sent a summary…to Rosenberg as a policy directive from the Führer’s Headquarters.”
¹²

The extent of Bormann’s cruelty was such that he sent a missive to the Armed Forces High Command claiming that its treatment of Russian prisoners of war “was not severe enough” and some prison guards “had even developed attitudes of being the protectors of the captives. This was intolerable.”
¹³
Bormann’s solution was to remove the prisoners from Army supervision and turn them over to SS who would treat them much more severely and without compassion.

Bormann’s spouse, Gerda Bormann, was a very loyal Nazi wife who produced ten Aryan children and was so imbued “with the Nazi doctrine of producing large numbers of suitably Aryan children,” that she proposed her husband make a
Volksnotehe
(National Emergency Marriage) contract with his mistress to prevent his illegitimate children from having an inferior status. This scheme conjured up by Frau Bormann amounted to legalizing bigamy partly because she believed it was used during the Thirty Years’ War to respond to the enormous war manpower losses.
¹⁴

His wife Gerda also “agreed with her husband that the Jews were responsible for most of the troubles of the world.”
¹⁵
Gerda was so supportive of the goal to eliminate all Jews that she once wrote to her husband that the “power of Jewry was horrible” and

not even the war would weaken this race, which fought its battles with money rather than blood. “Neither disease nor filth will ever eradicate this vermin,” Gerda wailed. “How on earth can we get rid of them wholesale?” Her husband knew, but her question indicates that he had not taken her into his confidence. Nor did he ever give the slightest hint in any of his letters. In matters of secrecy, too, he was his Führer’s ideal henchman.
¹⁶