Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (35 page)

Before receiving his doctorate, Goebbels read widely for his classes, and a major influence on his intellectual development included Darwin’s ideas, as well as those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred Rosenberg and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
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As early as 1915, he had begun to “have serious doubts about his religious beliefs” and in 1919, he openly rejected both the Catholic Church and Christianity. He once wrote “it hardly matters what we believe in, so long as we believe in something.”
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His rejection of the family faith bothered his father, as did his political move toward socialism.

GOEBBELS BECOMES A NAZI

Goebbels became a Nazi in 1925 when he met Hitler, who soon became his god and changed his life forever. He became enthusiastically committed and worked tirelessly to change Germany into the Nazi ideal. Nazism became his new religion as it also became “the religion of the German revolution.”
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When it became clear that “the Führer was intransigent on his anti-Semitism, Goebbels went along. And what he did, he did thoroughly.”
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Under the influence of Hitler and the Nazis, Goebbels also became more and more anti-Semitic, eventually leaving Else Janke, whom he stated he would have married if she was not a Jewess. He once wrote that Jews were “inhumanly wicked…congenital money-grabbers who deliberately inflicted suffering on others to satisfy their greed.”
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When Goebbels read
Mein Kampf
he had nothing but praise for the book, exclaiming that Hitler was “half plebeian, half god.”
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No doubt he also learned much of his Darwinism worldview from Hitler, about whom Bullock wrote the “basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.” To defend this claim, Bullock quoted the following from Hitler’s speeches

“Man has become great through struggle.… Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality.… All life is bound up in three theses: Struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive.”… “The whole work of Nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness—an eternal victory of the strong over the weak. There would be nothing but decay in the whole of Nature if this were not so. States which offend against this elementary law fall into decay…through all the centuries force and power are the determining factors.… Only force rules. Force is the first law.” Force was more than the decisive factor in any situation: it was force which alone created right.
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Goebbels adopted this view, writing in his diary that “man is and remains an animal—here a beast of prey, there a house pet, but always an animal.” This statement summed up his life quite well after he became a Nazi.
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And, as one of the most educated and intelligent of the leading Nazis, Goebbels soon became head of the large Nazi party propaganda and public information machine.
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Darwinism went beyond a theory applied to race, but also to nations:

Historians like Heinrich von Treitschke, Max Lenz, and Erich Marks, as well as German history teachers, now saw the rivalry with England as a continuation of Germany’s move toward global power. They buttressed their position with theories derived from Darwin; according to these theories, political expansion would enhance Germany’s vitality and at the same time help fulfill the nation’s mission by extending the influence of its culture, which they rated higher than that of other peoples.
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Goebbels was responsible for the massive Nazi propaganda rallies, parades, and impressive night time torchlight shows. He also controlled the media and supported a mass burning of those books that the Nazis objected to, especially books authored by Jews.
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The book burning, set to begin at midnight, was organized by the German Student Association and supported by many professors.
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As a result, at midnight “bonfires were blazing in many German University towns.”
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On May 3, 1933, about 20,000 books were burned in one day alone, which included “some of Germany’s greatest intellectual and cultural resources” that Goebbels branded as “‘intellectual filth’ produced by ‘Jewish asphalt literati.’”
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PROPAGANDA MINISTER

Called the virtuoso of lying propaganda, Goebbels is best known for his media and social manipulation in Nazi Germany.
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As propaganda minister, Goebbels created the myth—which he himself likely believed—that Hitler was “the man of destiny, the new saviour” of Germany.
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Dr. Goebbels pushed the use of the term “Führer,” meaning leader, to refer to Hitler alone, and made its use compulsory in Germany when referring to Hitler.

Goebbels also helped fashion the “Führer myth,” the idea that Hitler was at the apex of human evolution, “superior to all other human beings.”
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It was Goebbels who made Hitler a god in the mind of the public and introduced pseudo-religious content into his rule. He also pushed use of the “Heil Hitler” greeting in everyday conversations

arousing the protest of several party bigwigs. “Heil” sounded more like an exorcism or magic formula than a greeting. It was designed to replace the customary “
Grüss Gott
” or “
Guten tag
” [“Good Day”]. The personal Judaeo-Christian, western God was dead, as Nietzsche proclaimed. But a people without a god could hardly be expected to make sacrifices that went against their own material well-being. A new god, a god for the masses, was needed to spur them on to greater efforts. Goebbels had read Le Bon’s
Psychology of the Masses
. He knew that what the masses needed was a god and human sacrifice. For a god he gave them Hitler; as sacrificial victims he offered them…the Jews.
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His chief propaganda theory was “the Big Lie”: if something is repeated often enough, people will believe it no matter how false. This technique worked very well in disenfranchising the Jews. Goebbels took control of, not only the press, but also radio, film, theater, music, literature and publishing, purging Jews and all opposition to Nazism from them.

He was also behind the two most notorious anti-Semitic films in history,
The Eternal Jew
and
Jude Süss
.
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Although a first class intellectual, “Goebbels was guided almost exclusively by irrational factors” such as his faith in Hitler’s worldview.
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Nor was he guided by law but rather

Goebbels had complained bitterly to the Führer about the Justice ministry’s undersecretary Franz Schlegelberger, who often rejected Goebbels’s requests for action against the Jews on the grounds that no legal basis existed. Since Auschwitz was located within the Reich, some legal basis would have to be created for taking Jews there, which had not been necessary for deportation to the ghettos in the Soviet Union.
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Instead of obeying German law, Goebbels became increasingly impatient because he believed that the

extermination of the Jews was not progressing fast enough. He found a welcome opportunity to move things along when an anonymous attack was made on an anti-Soviet exhibition in the Berlin Lustgarten on 18 May. He immediately blamed the Jews.
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Ironically, Goebbels was physically not even close to the Nazi ideal—rather, he was closer to the exact opposite of it. Dutch described Dr. Goebbels, who was a small man with a large head, a crippled foot, and a fragile body, but a mesmerizing voice, as a

small, ugly…deformed, dark and obviously not an Aryan type: yet daily and even hourly he preaches the principle of the great, blond, handsome Aryan-German “lordly race,” a race which is to be allowed to seize the dominion of the world. In 1933…a local paper published a caricature showing an ugly, deformed, dark-haired little figure of a man, and below were the words: “And who may this man be? Why, to be sure, it is the representative of the well-built, healthy, blond, and blue-eyed Nordic race!”
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GOEBBELS’ WAR AGAINST CATHOLICS

Around 1936, Goebbels launched a programme to persecute the Catholic Church because

he wanted to eliminate a power from which millions of Germans derived spiritual strength and comfort. For this purpose he was going to proceed above all against the Catholic monks.… The drive against the Catholics was characterized by unprecedented violence, and its moral level could not have been lower. Every day the press published accounts filled with the basest accusations—stories of a type which no self-respecting newspaper ever would have printed before. On April 30, 1937, this resulted in the arrest of several thousand Catholic monks…articles against the Catholic Church followed, all of them slanted to show that the guilt of the defendants had already been established.”
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Despite his best efforts, Goebbels’ attempt failed because the German people would not accept his claims of criminality by the Catholic monks and

it began to dawn on millions of Germans that, in the name of the state, they were being fed deliberate lies. Goebbels suffered a considerable loss of prestige, and people who for years had not seen the inside of a church now went there to demonstrate whom they believed, and whom they distrusted.
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Even his fellow government staffers saw that the attempt to discredit the Catholic Church by Goebbels had failed:

“All of us working at the Propaganda Ministry could see which way things were going,” Fritzsche later said.… Goebbels alone stubbornly refused to be convinced of his error. None of his friends and collaborators could make him change his mind.
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Nonetheless, the bulk of his income came from his writings denouncing the Catholic church.
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The Catholic Church’s opposition to Nazism especially galled him. One example was the pivotal anti-racist papal encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge
given at the Vatican on Passion Sunday, March 14, 1937. Pope Pius XI appealed to “natural law, written by the Creator’s hand on the tablet of the heart” directed at Nazi Germany

to put a stop to the blasphemies, which, in words and pictures, are multiplying like the sands of the desert; to encounter the obstinacy and provocations of those who deny, despise and hate God, by the never-failing reparatory prayers of the Faithful, hourly rising like incense to the All-Highest and staying His vengeance.
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The Nazis knew that such words were directed to them.

Goebbles’ anti-Christian attitudes were no doubt also influenced by Hitler. He wrote in his diary in 1939, “The Fuehrer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race.”
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Bullock adds the “truth is that, in matters of religion at least, Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist.”
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GOEBBELS BECOMES A RADICAL ANTI-SEMITE

As indicated, no evidence existed that Goebbels’ early home life was anti-Semitic, but as an adult he became a radical eugenicist and anti-Jewish racist.
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He lost his Catholic faith during his university days and replaced it with his new heroes: Nietzsche, Hitler and Darwin. One man who worked closely with Goebbels, Rudolf Semmler, wrote that “Goebbels’ hatred of Jews was fanatical. Everything Jewish is to him like a red rag to a bull. The hatred is so strong that he becomes incapable of even recognizing facts when he has to deal with them.”
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Gilbert notes that Goebbels rejected the church’s teachings and replaced it with those of the Darwinists, adding that

Pope Pius XI challenged the Nazi claim of Aryan racial superiority, insisting that there was only a single human race. His assertion was challenged by the German Minister of Labour, Dr. Robert Ley, who declared in a speech in Vienna on November 22 [1938]: “No compassion will be tolerated for the Jews. We deny the Pope’s statement that there is but one human race. The Jews are parasites.”
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