Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (32 page)

7
Shub and Quint,
Since Stalin
, 96.

8
Rudolph J. Rummel,
Death by Government
(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 118.

9
Rummel,
Death by Government
, 118–119.

10
Cited in James McGovern,
Martin Bormann
(New York: William Morrow, 1968), 79.

11
Cited in McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 79.

12
Cited in McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 79.

13
Cited in McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 79.

14
McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 106.

15
McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 102.

16
Von Lang,
The Secretary: Martin Bormann
, 201.

17
Jonathan Steinberg,
All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–1943
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 195.

18
Cited in Steinberg,
All or Nothing
, 195

19
Matthew Hughes and Chris Mann,
Inside Hitler’s Germany: Life under the Third Reich
(New York: MJF Books, 2000), 80.

20
Joseph Keysor,
Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible
(New York: Athanatos, 2010), 180–181.

21
William L. Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 240.

22
Martin Bormann, 1942; cited in George L. Mosse,
Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 244.

23
Martin Bormann, 1942; cited in Mosse,
Nazi Culture
, 244.

24
Martin Bormann, 1942; cited in John S. Conway,
The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–1945
(New York: Basic Books, 1968), 384

25
Martin Bormann, 1942; cited in Conway,
The Nazi Persecution of the Churches
, 384

26
McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 190.

27
McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 102.

28
McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 190.

29
Conway,
The Nazi Persecution of the Churches
.

30
Richard Steigmann-Gall,
The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 228–229.

31
Steigmann-Gall,
The Holy Reich
, 229.

32
Von Lang,
The Secretary: Martin Bormann
, 183.

33
McGovern,
Martin Bormann
, 65,

34
Steigmann-Gall,
The Holy Reich
, 215.

35
Steigmann-Gall,
The Holy Reich
, 215.

36
Hughes and Mann,
Inside Hitler’s Germany
, 81.

37
Walter Buch was Bormann’s father-in-law and head of the Nazi Party court.

38
Point 24 proclaimed “positive Christianity” as one of the tenets of the Nazi Party’s Constitution.

39
Steigmann-Gall,
The Holy Reich
, 230.

40
Steigmann-Gall,
The Holy Reich
, 230

41
Meaning “worldview.”

42
Hughes and Mann,
Inside Hitler’s Germany
, 82.

43
Steinberg,
All or Nothing
, 232.

44
McGovern,
Martin Bormann
.

45
Jim Marrs,
The Rise of the Fourth Reich
(New York: William Morrow, 2009).

Heinrich Himmler:
Darwinist and mass murderer

INTRODUCTION

H
einrich Himmler, as head of the infamous SS, was one of the worst mass murderers in history. He was directly or indirectly responsible for the systematic murder of over 11 million innocent people. Himmler was both tenaciously anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. The number of lives lost under his administration included about 6 million Jews and over 5 million others, including Catholics priests, intellectuals and high-level military personnel.
¹

For this reason, the name Heinrich Himmler “stands today as the symbol of the mass murders committed by the Third Reich.… Himmler
was
Nazism.”
²
Himmler was head of the infamous SS (
Schutzstaffel
, or Security Squad) and the chief architect of the Final Solution to the Jewish “problem,” namely, their total annihilation.
³

Under his command, the SS who worked as concentration camp guards enslaved over 15 million innocent people. The two most important architects of the Holocaust were Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Himmler was determined that what he referred to as the Jewish race “must disappear from the face of the earth.”
⁴

HIMMLER’S BACKGROUND

Himmler’s mother was a pious Catholic, his family solidly middle class, and his father a respected German school headmaster. Historian Oswald Dutch wrote that nothing in Himmler’s background “gives a hint of the source of his cruelty and persecution mania.”
⁵
As a youth, he was a creationist, viewing the “scientific picture of life in the universe as the detailed record of God’s design.”
⁶
All of this was soon to change when he went to college and became involved in the Nazi movement.

All of Himmler’s birth family members were very supportive of higher education, and were “directly involved in the scramble for academic success.”
⁷
A diligent student, Himmler attended the University of Munich where, as an agriculture science student, he studied Darwinism. In college, his doubts would eventually result in abandoning both his creationism and his Catholic faith. He also probably learned about Darwinism and racism either directly, or most likely indirectly, through the writings of people such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the famous German professor Dr. Ernst Haeckel “who had transformed Darwinian evolution into the science of race.”
⁸

In December 1924, Himmler read Haeckel’s book,
The Riddle of the Universe,
and, although he did not at that time agree with all of it, the book exposed him to the implications of the Darwinian worldview as interpreted by Haeckel.
⁹
Himmler learned some of his anti-Semitic ideas from Haeckel who “hated cities,” which he associated “with Jews, whom he hated.”
¹⁰

At this time, the intellectual life in Germany, including at the University of Munich, was influenced by a

trend of thought which was to become significant as the second cardinal principle of the National Socialist “purification” policy.… “Social Darwinism,” a movement that gained a great deal of support after 1890, and had a profound effect upon Hitler’s mind.
¹¹

It was also at the University of Munich where he adopted many of his anti-Semitic values. An important factor was his reading of numerous anti-Semitic books, such as those by Houston Stewart Chamberlin.
¹²
Furthermore, Himmler not only “lost his religious faith” in college, but came to believe that Christianity was “merely another manifestation of Jewish superstition” that polluted German culture.
¹³
He became such a fanatical anti-Christian that he declared the Nazis “shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity” from Nazi-controlled Europe.
¹⁴

Drawn to politics at university, he graduated in 1922 and become active in the Nazi party the following year. In 1927, Himmler married a Polish nurse —very ironic because a little over a decade later he became active in ordering the murder of millions of Poles, a race, along with Gypsies and Negroes, that were judged inferior by the Nazis.
¹⁵
When Germany attacked Russia, Himmler declared it was German’s intention to “kill thirty million Russians,” which the Nazi government called “sub-man…in mind and spirit lower than any animal.”
¹⁶

From the Darwinists, Himmler learned that the “origin of the species had laid down the laws of evolution as they affected all forms of life.” English naturalist Charles Darwin further concluded that evolution was the result

of a long, gradual development through a struggle for existence, in which the stronger and more efficient element always prevailed; the species had continually progressed and improved by a process of natural selection. The revolutionary significance of this theory, supported as it was by careful and detailed research, lay in the fact that it offered a simple mechanical explanation for life’s phenomena (that is to say, it showed that these were naturally self-regulating) to replace the earlier acceptance of a supernatural power responsible for the creation of life on earth.
¹⁷