Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (4 page)

Boteach approved of Oxford University’s debates on evolution because of the unhealthy climate that he believed existed there—a climate that had produced a dogmatic, unquestioning acceptance, of the

propositions necessitated by the Theory of Evolution. If it is unhealthy for an individual to jump blindly into religious doctrines and belief, and I have constantly told my students that it is, then the same is true of scientific theory as well. Judaism has a very proud intellectual tradition which should continue to govern all aspects of our life.
³⁵

The major opposition to Hitler’s policies was Christianity, of which a central doctrine was the need to help the disenfranchised, the poor, the deformed, the handicapped and the mentally ill, all of those that the Nazi leaders wanted to eradicate.

THE NAZIS OPPOSITION TO CHRISTIANITY

The Nazi opposition to Christianity was somewhat muted at first, but their long-term goal was very clear and well articulated:

From the beginning, the Nazi party had paid lip service to religious values, endorsing what it called a positive Christianity. What positive Christianity entailed, aside from opposition to Jews and Marxists, the Nazis never explained. Before taking power, Hitler studiously avoided conflict with the churches. Indeed, by supporting their independence and their proper role in the affairs of state, by opposing godless communism and espousing the moral regeneration of Germany, he appealed to thousands of individual Christians. “I need the Catholics of Bavaria just as I need the Protestants of Prussia,” he avowed.
³⁶

Although Hitler was reared a Catholic, he “harbored little affection for the church” and privately voiced contempt for “hypocritical priests” and their “satanic superstition,” and “his Nazi deputies sparred with the representatives of the Catholic Center Party in the Reichstag.” He also was known to read anti-Catholic literature with much interest.
³⁷
Although Hitler told the new Reichstag, “The rights of churches will not be diminished,”

he revealed his true feelings in private, explaining to intimates that he would tolerate the churches temporarily for political reasons. “But,” he added, “that won’t stop me from stamping out Christianity in Germany, root and branch. One is either a Christian or a German. One can’t be both!”
³⁸

At this time, ironically, the “Lutheran church moved closer to Hitler—and to destruction.”
³⁹
Even “Catholic university students pledged their loyalty to the Führer and learned to execute the stiff Nazi salute.”
⁴⁰
In the meantime, around 1933, the

resistance to Nazi interference in Lutheran affairs crystallized around the imposing figure of Martin Niemöller, an influential pastor in Berlin. Niemöller…sympathized with Hitler’s call for national revival but balked when the Nazis tried to insert an article banning non-Aryan pastors into the Lutherans’ cherished confession of faith. Niemöller circulated a letter calling on his colleagues to return to Holy Scripture.
⁴¹

An example of Nazification of the German church was when the Lutheran Bishop appointed by the Nazis, Ludwig Müller, stated

that the Old Testament of the Bible, “with its Jewish morality of rewards and its stories of cattle dealers and concubines,” would be discarded, and that the New Testament would be cleansed of the ideas of the “Rabbi Paul.”
⁴²

Not surprisingly this statement only drove more clergy into Niemöller’s movement. By January 1934, his league had close to 7,000 members. Shaken by these developments, the Nazis resorted to using its growing police powers against the church, resulting in Gestapo agents “encouraging” parishioners, by force if necessary, to

denounce dissident pastors, who were then barred from the pulpit. On January 24, one offending Berlin minister was dragged from his bed by five young toughs and beaten. The next day, Hitler exercised his own brand of intimidation. He called Niemöller and eleven other Lutheran leaders to his office…his eleven colleagues hastily dissociated themselves from the Pastors’ Emergency League. As Hitler recalled with satisfaction later, they “were so shaken with terror that they literally collapsed.” That night, the Gestapo raided Niemöller’s home. A few days later, a bomb exploded in his hallway. He was forced to take a leave of absence, and his less well-known associates were packed off to concentration camps.
⁴³

Niemöller did not cease his resistance against the Nazis. He was sent to a concentration camp in 1937, only days

after delivering a defiant sermon: “No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak.” Germany’s Catholics, meanwhile, were learning for themselves what Hitler’s pledge to respect religious traditions was worth. Not even an ironclad contract with the Nazi state could save the Catholic church from the brutal attentions of Nazi thugs. Early in 1934, the Nazis unleashed bands of Hitler Youth to bully Catholic youth groups into submission. The SS raided the other remaining Catholic organizations and forcibly disbanded them, confiscating their property. Undaunted, a few prominent German Catholics bravely protested Nazi policies that violated Church teachings.
⁴⁴

Although many Roman “Catholics in positions of authority went along with the regime and prayed quietly that conditions would improve” that hope largely ended on

June 30, 1934, when Hitler authorized the infamous Blood Purge…. On the long list of enemies abducted and shot, however, were several outspoken Catholic activists and writers. In light of these murders, there could no longer be any doubt about Hitler’s determination to silence Christians of conscience, whatever their denomination.… With the established churches effectively neutralized, the Nazis attempted to foster their own religion by replacing Christian rituals with secular ones that glorified the regime. The party issued guidelines for Nazi ceremonies “of a liturgical character, which shall be valid for centuries.”
⁴⁵

Furthermore, in steps eerily similar to what is going on in the U.S. today, to reduce the influence of Christianity

the Nazis promoted a busy cycle of festivals that celebrated pagan and political turning points.… This new calendar was observed with particular zeal in Himmler’s SS, which took the trend toward secular religion further by instituting its own rites for baptisms, weddings, and burials. A typical SS marriage ceremony took place by the light of torches, with changed refrains from a Wagnerian opera, a reading from Norse mythology, and a ritual exchange of bread and salt. Celebrants at SS “christenings” professed belief in the “mission of our German blood.”
⁴⁶

As will be documented in this work, weaning of Americans from Christianity by banning public display of Christian symbols and ritual is remarkably reminiscent of what Nazi Germany did.
⁴⁷
And Darwinism and its implications were a major impetus for these Nazi goals. As Keith concluded at the end of World War II, “Hitler is an uncompromising evolutionist, and we must seek…an evolutionary explanation if we are to understand his actions” against the Jews, the Christians, the handicapped, and against what he regarded as the misfits of society.
⁴⁸
This is the goal of this volume.

_______________

1
Fritz Redlich,
Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 340.

2
Gertrude Himmelfarb,
Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution
(New York: Doubleday, 1959).

3
Arthur Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), 10, 203.

4
Arthur Keith,
Essays on Human Evolution
(London: Watts & Co., 1946), 46.

5
Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
(London: John Murray, 1871), 2–3.

6
Darwin,
The Descent of Man
, 9–10.

7
Darwin,
The Descent of Man
, 201.

8
Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1874), 178.

9
John Jackson, Jr. and Nadine M. Weidman,
Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction
(Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 71.

10
Brigitte Hamann,
Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 200, 203.

11
Jackson and Weidman,
Race, Racism, and Science
, 71.

12
Stefan Kühl,
The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

13
Darwin,
The Descent of Man
, 2nd ed., 404.

14
Jackson and Weidman,
Race, Racism, and Science
, 71.

15
Jane Harris-Zsovan,
Eugenics and the Firewall: Canada’s Nasty Secret
(Winnipeg: Shillingsford, 2010).

16
Laura Hillenbrand,
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
(New York: Random House, 2010), 11.

17
Hamann,
Hitler’s Vienna
, 233.

18
Robert Waite,
The Psychopathic God
(New York: Basic Books, 1977), 66–71.

19
Thomas Chiders,
The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

20
Wolfgang Gerlach,
And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 2.

21
Gerlach,
And the Witnesses Were Silent
.

22
Joseph Keysor,
Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible
(New York: Athanatos, 2010).

23
Gerlach,
And the Witnesses Were Silent
, 4.

24
Redlich,
Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet
, 274.

25
Ray Comfort,
Hitler, God & the Bible
(Washington: WND Books, 2012), 132.

26
Comfort,
Hitler, God & the Bible
, 147.

27
Copy in Cornell University archives, section IIC3c1.

28
Peter Longerich,
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

29
Shmuel Boteach,
Moses of Oxford: A Jewish Vision of a University and Its Life
(London: André Deutsch Ltd, 1995), 485.

30
See Charles Darwin,
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 286.

31
Boteach,
Moses of Oxford
, 484.

32
Boteach,
Moses of Oxford
, 484.

33
Arthur Keith, cited in Boteach,
Moses of Oxford
, 485–486.

34
Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
, 12.

35
Boteach,
Moses of Oxford
, 532.

36
George Constable, ed.,
The New Order
(Alexandria: Time Life, 1990), 122–123.

37
Waite,
The Psychopathic God
, 69.

38
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 123–124.

39
Constable, ed.,
The New Order
, 124.