Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (46 page)

Highly educated people were given a disproportionate responsibility for breeding better Germans, while many people deemed inferior were sterilized. For example, the chief medical officer of the
Lebensborn
organization, Dr. Gregor Ebner, “personally ordered the sterilization of many children and supervised the selection and Germanization of thousands of kidnapped children in the occupied territories.”
²²
When interviewed as an old man, Dr. Ebner stated that he had no regrets about what he had done and still felt that applying science to breed a better race of humans was morally proper.

All of the racial breeding was “supervised by doctors who were experts in ‘racial science.’”
²³
The “race examiners” believed that it was “possible to eliminate all traces of impure blood within a few generations, a century at most.”
²⁴
To do this, Himmler envisaged importing Norwegian girls to Bavaria for the purpose of “rapidly transforming the Dinaric into a pure Nordic race by means of selective breeding.”
²⁵

Dinaric people were tall, mostly of mesomorph bodily build (of medium build and neither thin nor fat), had relatively long legs, medium arm span and a short trunk. This was an imprecise classification that is today regarded as close to worthless, and was most closely associated with the writings of German biologist Hans F.K. Günther and Harvard professor Carleton S. Coon.

KIDNAPPING CHILDREN

To achieve this goal more rapidly, throughout Europe the Germans had “kidnapped thousands of ‘racially valuable’ children, [and had] taken them from their families to Germanize them. That was one of the ways of helping the super-race to” multiply more rapidly.
²⁶
Himmler, on his first tour of occupied Poland was

amazed by the Nordic appearance of many “Slavic” children and decided to kidnap them from their parents and send them to
Lebensborn
foster homes and orphanages in Germany. Two special SS agencies—the
Volksdeutsche
Liaison Office and the Race and Settlement Office—searched Europe for “human specimens considered suitable for Germanization.” They also “cleared” vast areas of land of “inferior” Poles and Jews by killing or enslaving the inhabitants, and put to death thousands of Germans who were considered feebleminded, infirm, mentally ill, or crippled. (The gas chambers were originally invented to weed out “unfit” Germans and were later applied to the genocide of entire “undesirable races,” particularly Gypsies and Jews.)
²⁷

An estimated 250,000 children were forcibly taken away from their parents, most never to return.
²⁸
The Nazis often tried to convince the children that they were abandoned by their birth parents. Although some of the children were successfully adopted by SS families, many adoptions did not work out and these children often ended up in Nazi concentration camps where a large number died.
²⁹
Dawidowicz concludes that in the end, tragically,

Tens of thousands of these children—no one will ever know how many—were murdered, perhaps because it turned out that they had “bad blood,” that is, characteristics that did not fit the stereotype of the “Aryan”—blond hair, blue eyes, and an obedient nature.
³⁰

Only about 25,000 of the children were ever returned to their parents after the war. As German zoologist and geneticist Ludwig Plate wrote at the time, the death of so many children was worth it because “progress in evolution goes forward over millions of dead bodies” of “inferior” humans.
³¹

To justify this cruel policy, Himmler wrote in a speech delivered on October 14, 1943, that in all foreign nations, even in Poland, there are inevitably

some racially good types. In these cases…it is our duty to take their children, to remove them from their present environment, if need be even by stealing them.… Either we bring this good blood home here, use it and integrate it into our people or—gentlemen, you may call this cruel, but nature is cruel—we destroy it.
³²

Soon after the Nazis took over the German government, the racial propaganda machine became active in indoctrinating the general population into the ideal created by the university “race experts” in order to return Germany to the Teutonic ideal, “warning the population against the dangers involved in mixing true Aryan blood with that of inferior races.”
³³
To help achieve this goal, the Nuremburg Laws were passed on September 15, 1935, “to preserve German blood from all [race] contamination and protect the German race to the end of time.”
³⁴

A major means used to achieve this goal was to outlaw marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Aryans.
³⁵
The logic for this law was that the Nazi leadership believed that the “progressive deterioration of the German race” was occurring due to the “inability of twentieth-century man to produce pure-blooded and racially valuable children” for the reason that

inferior races, the Jews in particular, had been permitted to mix with the superior races. Every effort was therefore to be made to reverse this “degeneration of the species,” which was discernible right up to the highest levels of the State. By Himmler’s orders, the RuSHA laid down a series of principles: insistence on racial hygiene, improving the racial stock by means of selection, supervision of the marriages of individuals of pure blood, and the bringing up of children in State institutions.
³⁶

Many German race theorists proposed various means to “purify the German race, but the race experts…relied most heavily on the works of the Bavarian Dr. Wilhelm Schallmayer.”
³⁷
In 1900, he received an award for his book on producing a superior German race titled,
Inheritance and Selection in the Life of Nations
. One subject that Dr. Schallmayer dealt with was: “Racial hygiene and its control in the national interest.”
³⁸
This document listed eight major ways to achieve this goal:

1.   girls should be made to realize that no nobler career exists for them than that of wife and mother;

2.   a woman’s social position should depend on the number of children she has borne;

3.   a cult of the family should be created and developed;

4.   women should marry young;

5.   the inheritance laws should be reformed to conform with the population policy;

6.   work by women outside the home must be reduced to a minimum;

7.   sexual disease must be fought; and

8.   special homes should be created for returning soldiers, by which preference was to be given to those against whom there were no objections on the grounds of racial hygiene and from whom an improvement of the birth rate was to be expected.
³⁹

Dr. Schallmayer “was responsible for not only the
Lebensborns
but also the concentration camps as a result of his stressing that science has proved ‘an essential part of any breeding policy was to insure that the most unsuitable heritable variations were not reproduced.’” These ideas were all taught in the German biology textbooks to reinforce Nazi racial ideals. For example, one biology book stated that it is “the SS man’s duty to choose a biologically flawless wife and, moreover, [the Nazi party] has constantly reminded him of his obligation as a member of an elite formation to have a large number of children.”
⁴⁰

It was no easy task to persuade German men to select Nordic ideal women for brides. In fact, Himmler was puzzled “by the problem of why men fell for the non-Nordic, more sexy type of girl, and right up to the collapse of Nazi Germany the problem of recruiting the right type of future mother was one of his major preoccupations.”
⁴¹

Himmler felt that the
Lebensborn
system could solve this problem. Consequently, on July 3, 1944, Himmler issued the following order: “no more applications to marry women who do not comply in every respect with the racial criteria in force.” Himmler actively tried to sell his idea to his military officers by preaching the law of Darwinism:

Nature teaches us…that the principle of selection rules over it, that the stronger remains victor and the weaker succumbs. It teaches us that what often appears to an individual as brutality, because he himself is affected or because through his education he has turned away from the laws of nature, is nonetheless fundamentally necessary, in order to bring about a higher evolution of living organisms.
⁴²

In the end, the experiment failed and no evidence exists that superior people resulted from the experiment. Furthermore, after the war, the Race and Settlement Main Office, including its spin-off
Lebensborn
, was brought to trial before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1947–1948.
⁴³

Compared to the crime of genocide against the Jews, the
Lebensborn
did not appear to reach the level of evil that resulted in the Holocaust. Dawidowicz concluded that when

assessing the accomplishments of
Lebensborn
and the SS’s related racial eugenics programs, it is clear that “positive” racial eugenics in Hitler’s Germany failed to attain its goals. In dramatic contrast, Germany’s “negative” racial eugenics—the murder of the crippled, the sick, the insane, the Gypsies, and the Jews—succeeded beyond belief. The Germans found it easy to organize and carry out mass murder, to take life. They never discovered how to organize mass procreation, to make life.
⁴⁴

SUMMARY

The Nazis established the
Lebensborn
programme to produce racially superior children more rapidly than could be achieved in an open society. Women judged to be racially superior were selected to produce babies often fathered by Nazi officers judged to be racially superior. Furthermore, close to 250,000 children were kidnapped from occupied nations and sent to Germany to be “Germanized” in
Lebensborn
institutions.

The
Lebensborn
, although supported by many, if not most, of the leading biologists in Germany and other nations, produced a tragedy that caused enormous suffering and failed for reasons that we understand very well today. These reasons include the realization that hereditary diseases and medical conditions are far more complex than the scientists infatuated with Darwinism dreamed possible.
⁴⁵

Both the environment and epigenetics are now recognized as critically important, as well as the fact that genes form an enormously complex system whose interrelations still elude scientific researchers. In the end, the
Lebensborn
was “one of the most horrifying programmes instituted by the Nazis.”
⁴⁶
The few informal attempts to follow up on the children born from the programme indicate that, as a whole, they were in almost every way close to average. Unfortunately, as yet no comprehensive scientific medical study has been completed on the children of the
Lebensborn
. The information we do have indicates that, in the end, the experiment failed horribly.
⁴⁷

_______________

1
Meaning “well of life.”

2
Larry V. Thompson,“
Lebensborn
and the Eugenics Policy of the
Reichsführer-SS
,”
Central European History
, 4, No. 1 (March 1971): 54–77; Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry,
Of Pure Blood
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 22, 45.

3
Hillel and Henry,
Of Pure Blood
, 35.

4
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “The Failure of Himmler’s Positive Eugenics,”
Hastings Center Report
, Vol. 7, Issue 5 (October 1977): 43.

5
William Montgomery McGovern,
From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy
(Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1941), 449.