Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (42 page)

Professor Weinert’s views on the evolution of human races were largely well received by the Nazi movement as shown by the official National Socialist Racial Policy Office publication listing Weinert’s books, including
Die Rassen der Menschheit
(
The Races of Mankind
), as valuable books on racial theory.
The Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte
, edited by Alfred Rosenberg, included an article by Heinz Brücher on Weinert’s work promoting one of Weinert’s books on race and human evolution.
²²

THE THESIS OF ROSENBERG’S BOOK

The theme of Rosenberg’s book was not only blood purity, anti-Semitism and the rejection of Christianity but the importance of the domination of society by “those who are racially superior.”
²³
The book outwardly appeared to be very scholarly bolstered by its detailed erudition documented by hundreds of footnotes, some longer than an entire page. And, not surprisingly Rosenberg’s major target

was the Jews. His monumental, consistent, and practically unqualified anti-Semitism requires a separate chapter [in his book]. In addition, Rosenberg was outspoken in his frequent derogatory references to Negroes (referred to him usually as “Niggers”). He normally discussed them in connection with the problems of miscegenation, and often deliberately equated Negroes with Jews.
²⁴

Furthermore, Rosenberg judged

European history as the struggle of the German people against the debilitating influences of Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church, and he pillaged literary and historical sources for material to support his thesis. He was enabled more readily to do this by adopting a purely subjective concept of race. …what he strongly approved of was,
ipso facto
, Germanic; what he profoundly rejected was, in accordance with the same definition, Jewish.
²⁵

The Myth of the Twentieth Century
was inspired by Rosenberg’s “intellectual mentor,” Stewart Chamberlain, and also by Arthur de Gobineau who wrote
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
, as well as Friedrich Nietzsche who preached the superman superiority theory. According to James Whisker, Professor of Political Science at West Virginia University, the theme of Rosenberg’s book was to reinterpret all of history in terms of race conflicts.
²⁶

Both Chamberlain and Rosenberg “believed that humankind was divided absolutely into superior and inferior beings.”
²⁷
Furthermore, the superior race must not commit “racial pollution” by “sexually intermixing with inferior beings.”
²⁸
Rosenberg concluded the biological genes that produced a superior culture and political system were unique to Nordic men. He wrote that the “German people are not marked by original sin, but by original nobility.”
²⁹
His racism, he stressed, was based on Darwinism and the best science of the day supported by the leading German scientists.
³⁰

As was true of many Nazis, Rosenberg was influenced by Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau was a major proponent of White supremacy theory. In his

most influential work, the four-volume, mid-1850s
Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines
(
Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
), de Gobineau declared the superiority of the white race over others. He argued that the white race would prosper only if it did not become contaminated by mixing with other races. This belief eventually became one of the major principles of Nazi philosophy.
³¹

RACISM AT THE CORE OF ROSENBERG’S NAZI IDEOLOGY

In his introduction to Rosenberg’s book, to document the book’s importance to Nazism, Professor Peel wrote that Nazi

orthodoxy was never as monolithic nor as all-embracing as that of Marx and Lenin. There was, of course, agreement on the major issues—that World Jewry was the irreconcilable enemy of all Aryan civilization and culture and especially of Germany.
³²

Although Rosenberg’s beliefs about Darwin were mixed, he openly supported Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” and “superior race” ideologies. The fact is, the Nazis

combined their racial theories with the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to justify their treatment of the Jews. The Germans, as the strongest and fittest, were destined to rule, while the weak and racially adulterated Jews were doomed to extinction.
³³

Rosenberg stressed the Darwinian idea that “life arises out of struggle, out of death.”
³⁴
He openly “denied absolutely” creation
ex nihilo
for several reasons, including the fact that he thought “a creationist view” of origins was “an Asian-Jewish idea, passing from Paul (Saul) through the Roman Catholic Church to Luther.”
³⁵
Rosenberg also taught that Jews were sons of the “Jewish Jehovah” who was a “swindler, a promoter of lies and a murderer.”
³⁶

In short, the major ideas that inspired Rosenberg to compose his new “German Bible” were anti-Semitism, rejection of Christianity and the right of “those who are racially superior” to dominate the racially inferior.
³⁷
For all of these reasons, he aggressively attacked the Judeo-Christian idea of creation. A major factor for the success of Rosenberg’s ideas and Nazi politics in Germany was that they appealed to professors, students and civil servants. It was this ideology that drove Hitler to commit his crimes against humanity.
³⁸

Rosenberg and others believed that the Jews and other inferior races must be eradicated for another reason: they spread pathogens such as bacteria.
³⁹
As evidence of this claim they turned to the German public health research that

studied the medical data concerning typhus epidemics through the prism of race as a biological reality rather than as a social construct. Noting the prevalence of typhus outbreaks among the impoverished and overcrowded populations of urban Jews in Eastern Europe, they mistook correlation for causality, ignored the obvious environmental factors, and attributed the spread of typhus to alleged Jewish cultural and genetic defects.
⁴⁰

For example, in one 1940 article about “spotted fever and ethnic identity,” the German head of the public health department in Nazi-occupied Poland, Dr. Jost Walbaum, proclaimed that

“The Jews are overwhelmingly the carriers and disseminators of the infection. Spotted fever endures most persistently in the regions heavily populated by Jews, with their low cultural level, their uncleanliness, and the infestation of lice unavoidably connected with this.” One of his associates, Dr. Erich Weizenegger, similarly argued: “The sickness occurs…especially among the Jewish population. This is caused by the fact that the Jew totally lacks any concept of hygiene.”
⁴¹

This “lack” they assumed, was presumably caused by genetic racial defects. It is also ironic in view of the Jewish law on hygiene given in Leviticus.

ROSENBERG AS AN ANTI-CATHOLIC

Rosenberg was “almost as violent an anti-Catholic as he was anti-Jewish and only relatively less anti-Protestant. He is, in fact, anti-Christian.”
⁴²
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
openly assaulted “Christianity and all that it stands for.”
⁴³
His hatred of the Catholic Church “was exceeded only by his hatred of Jews.”
⁴⁴
This was true because the core of Rosenberg’s racial philosophy of the “absolute value of pure blood and race” brought him in “direct collision with Christian theology.”
⁴⁵
Roland wrote that few Germans

dared to speak out publicly against the [Nazi] regime, but certain members of the clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, criticized the Nazis from the pulpit when it became clear that they intended to supplant Christianity with a new pagan religion. The Christian cross was to be replaced with the swastika, and pictures of saints were to be removed from all chapels, churches and cathedrals.
⁴⁶

Another reason Rosenberg hated Catholicism was because of what he regarded as their

“abusive,” “Jesuitic-Roman” system which consistently preached and practiced the “spineless” Roman principles of love and non-heroic, non-Germanic pity and compassion. In the name of the Church, love and pity had undermined the honor and hero-oriented subjective conception of the Germanic people. According to Rosenberg, the Church had, with the help of all possible alliances, extirpated all that was free, proud, and honor-loving, cleverly falsifying the Nordic tribal system, customs and independence.
⁴⁷

A third reason for Rosenberg’s anti-Christian view was the Catholic Church’s opposition to the Nazi goal of breeding a superior race just as humans breed horses. For example

in 1939, when Hitler instructed the SS to embark on a discreet, but widespread, campaign for elimination of the incurably sick and insane, public opinion in Germany was by no means ready for it. The counterattack, led by the Bishop of Muenster, slowed up the euthanasia program and, even if it did not stop it, drove it further underground, thus showing how effective resistance could be achieved by the Churches on an issue attracting the support of their flocks.
⁴⁸

Lastly, the Nazis’ goal was to replace the Bible with
Mein Kampf
. All of these goals alienated many Christians, for example, Martin Niemöller (1892 –1984), a Lutheran Pastor. He was a submarine commander in the First World War, and initially welcomed the new Nazi government. He soon became “disillusioned by their plans for a state-controlled Reich Church and by the rabidly anti-Christian sentiments expressed by Alfred Rosenberg and other members of Hitler’s inner circle.”
⁴⁹

Rosenberg concluded that Christianity would soon die in Germany:

When Hermann Goering asked Rosenberg on August 22, 1939, “Do you believe that Christianity is approaching its end and that a new form [of religion] designed by us will arise?” Rosenberg answered: “Indeed! The religious value system has already ceased to be recognized.”
⁵⁰

One major result of applying Rosenberg’s ideas was

the incoherence, imprecision and irrationality of the [Nazi] ideology itself…defeated all efforts to drive out what remained of the humane and Christian values of earlier centuries. When professor Walter Frank exclaimed at Tuebingen in 1936 that “all German history…must be seen as only the prehistory of National-Socialism,” this could only have the impact of rhetoric.… Nazi biologists, avid for promotion, might measure the long skulls of their prehistortoric ancestors, but there would be others who knew that the size of the human head could be affected by rickets, as well as by race. The Nazis…[treated] as dogma their simplified and distorted version of theories put forward in the nineteenth century by such pioneers as Darwin.
⁵¹

ROSENBERG’S END

After being convicted by the Allies at the Nuremberg Trials for crimes against humanity, Rosenberg was hanged on October 16, 1946. A major factor in his guilty verdict was that as Minister of Eastern Occupied Territories during the war, he carried out Nazi policy in the areas where most of the atrocities occurred. His book,
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
, and his anti-Semitic activities were also contributing factors. A witness to his execution called him the “arch-priest of Nazi culture in foreign lands.”
⁵²
Rosenberg hid forty-seven crates of Nazi records in a Bavarian barn that contained “an almost unbelievable admission of systemic killings, lootings, etc.”
⁵³
These detailed records of war crimes were important in the decision to hang him and the other Nazis on trial for war crimes.

SUMMARY

Alfred Rosenberg was a leading Nazi whose writings, primarily his best selling book,
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
, were responsible for influencing many people in Nazi Germany—from those high in the Nazi heirarchy to the wider audience who read his works—to murder so-called inferior races. He also was a vehement anti-Catholic and influenced not only the Jewish Holocaust, but also the Christian Holocaust in Poland and other nations. For these reasons, he was executed by the Allies after World War II.

_______________

1
Oswald Dutch,
Hitler’s 12 Apostles
(New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1940), 80–81; Joachim C. Fest,
The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership
(New York: Pantheon, 1970), 164.

2
Richard Weikart,
Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 14.