Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (51 page)

30
Jakob Graf,
Biologie für Oberschule und Gymnasium, Band 4, Ausgabe für Knabenschulen
(München: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1942), 320–348. [In English:
Biology for High School and College, Edition for Boys’ Schools
.]

31
Graf,
Biologie für Oberschule und Gymnasium
, 354–355.

32
Graf,
Biologie für Oberschule und Gymnasium
, 372–382.

33
Nicholas,
Cruel World
, 85.

34
Nicholas,
Cruel World
, 85.

35
Wiehle and Harm,
Lebenskunde für Mittelschulen
, 173.

36
Wiehle and Harm,
Lebenskunde für Mittelschulen
, 132.

37
Richard Hesse,
Abstammungslehre und Darwinismus
, 7th ed. (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1936), 48–55. [In English:
Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution
.]

38
Martin Staemmler,
Rassenpflege und Schule
, 3rd ed. (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer und Söhne, 1937), 13, 32–36. [In English:
Racial Care and School
.]

39
Nicholas,
Cruel World
, 85.

40
Cited in Simone Arnold Liebster,
Facing the Lion: Memoirs of a Young Girl in Nazi Europe
(New Orleans: Grammaton Press, 2000), 388–390.

41
Erich Meyer and Karl Zimmermann,
Lebenskunde: Lehrbuch der Biologie für höhere Schulen
, Vol. 2 (Erfurt: Verlag Kurt Stenger, 1940), 333. [In English:
Biology Textbook for Higher Level Technical Schools
.]

42
Cited in Liebster,
Facing the Lion
, 388–390. Italics in original.

43
Cited in Liebster,
Facing the Lion
, 388–390.

44
Cited in Liebster,
Facing the Lion
, 389.

45
Cited in Liebster,
Facing the Lion
, 389.

46
Cited in Liebster,
Facing the Lion
, 390. Italics in original

47
Cited in Liebster,
Facing the Lion
, 388–390.

48
Blackburn,
Education in the Third Reich
, 117.

49
Nicholas,
Cruel World
, 85.

50
Nicholas,
Cruel World
, 85.

51
The term
Erbgesundheitspflege
means “heredity health care,” referring to practical measures to promote hereditary health (
erb
means heredity,
gesundheit
means health and
pflege
means care). It is often translated as “eugenics,” which is derived from the Greek
eugenes
, meaning well-born.

52
Klicka and Harris,
The Right Choice
.

53
Wegner,
Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich
.

54
Wegner,
Anti-Semitism and Schooling under the Third Reich
, 71.

What can be learned from attempts to apply Darwinism to society

D
arwinism, more than almost any other movement since 1850, had a lasting and profound influence on society. As one historian explained, the late nineteenth century

marked the high tide of Social Darwinism. A misbegotten child of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Social Darwinism rendered human life as a perpetual struggle, in which the fit survived and the unfit languished and died. Everything from
laissez-faire
economics to the supposed “vanishing” of Native Americans was cast in terms of these supposedly inescapable “natural” laws. Not surprisingly, African Americans became the object of Social Darwinist speculation, especially after the 1880 U.S. census reported an apparent decline in their numbers.
¹

Furthermore, it is clear “from
Mein Kampf
and Hitler’s speeches that he viewed racial conflict as the determining factor in all of human history. ‘The racial question gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture.’”
²
The specific race Hitler was concerned about first was the Jews, but Negroes and other “inferior races were not far behind in his mind. For proof of his racial theory one only had to look at the German census data. This data was later revealed to be erroneous because other factors had a “dramatic impact on contemporary debates about black [and other] people’s character and progress.” Nonetheless the census data

was seeming proof that proslavery writers had been right, that Negroes were a naturally dependent race, able to survive in the protective custody of whites, but doomed to extinction (as Native Americans were allegedly doomed) once forced to survive on their own in a competitive, Darwinian world.
³

Historian James Campbell adds that these ideas

were not the property of racial extremists but fundamental axioms of late-nineteenth-century American thought, and they had immediate, real-world consequences. White life insurance companies, for example, almost universally refused to sell policies to African Americans on the grounds that they were bad risks, a practice that continued well into the twentieth century.
⁴

Darwinism also had a major influence on Nazi governmental policy and, in the end, resulted in the total destruction of many major European cities and cost over 55 million lives. Many of these deaths were due directly to the racist ideas that were translated into government policies by Hitler and his disciples. How central racism was to World War II is revealed by the fact that “As the war ground on, Hitler believed that killing Jews was more important than winning the war.”
⁵
And, scientists played a central role in killing Jews and other supposedly inferior races. According to Professor Goede, it is

a myth that the Nazis applied force to subdue German scientists and science journalists. Not only did they for the most part voluntarily follow the party line, they even surpassed party officials. More than 60 years after the end of WW II historians are producing new and shocking evidence that…Germans enjoyed more liberties than previously assumed! Why did the scientific community and journalists support Hitler’s ideology, the war and the Holocaust?
⁶

Factors involved in the large number of people that accepted Darwinism in Nazi Germany include forced exposure to his ideas in the German public schools and colleges, the loss of Christian faith and a social environment that supported Darwinism and its offshoot, eugenics.
⁷
Support from leading scientists was critically important as well. On January 30, 1940, Hitler proclaimed,

this war will not end as the Jews imagine, namely, in the extermination of the European-Aryan peoples; instead, the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry.… And the more the fighting expands, the more anti-Semitism will spread—let that be said to world Jewry. Anti-Semitism will be fed in every prisoner-of-war camp, in every family enlightened to the reason why, in the end, it has to make this sacrifice. And the hour will come when the most evil enemy of the world of all time will at least be finished with for the next millennium.
⁸

In short, on September 1, 1940,

a brutal new Darwinism broke over Europe: the Nietzschean triumph of the strong over the weak could at last begin. The weak who could be useful would be brutally enslaved, all others would be murdered. What seemed so offensive to the international community—that Hitler would take the territory of the Polish people by force—was nothing compared to what the Nazis were doing. Their racial ideologies demanded more than territory, Poland must become a giant slave labor camp. The Poles were to be treated as
Untermenschen
(sub-humans). Their lands would not merely be occupied, they themselves would be terrorized and broken into utter docility, would be dealt with as beasts. The Germans would not tolerate the possibility of failure or the slightest manifestation of mercy. Brutality and mercilessness would be aggressively cultivated as virtues.
⁹

Hitler made it clear that his end goal was nothing less than total annihilation of those ethnic groups that he regarded as the enemy of the so-called “Aryan race,” including what he regarded as all “inferior” races—which was every ethnic group but the Aryans. He stated, in regard to ethnic Russians, that the war against them “is a war of annihilation. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but thirty years later we shall again have to fight the Communist foe. We do not wage war to preserve the enemy.”
¹⁰

The best summary of the major cause of Hitler’s race war comes from a young girl who lived through it:

One of the central planks in Nazi theory and doctrine was, of course, evolutionary theory—equally a central plank in Marxist doctrine today. The Nazis were convinced, as are Communists today, that evolution had taken place, that all biology had evolved spontaneously upward, and that inbetween links (or less evolved types) should be actively eradicated. They believed that natural selection could and should be actively
aided
, and therefore instituted political measures to eradicate the handicapped, the Jews, and the blacks, whom they considered as “underdeveloped.” They wanted to raise the Nordic status of the German people by importing Scandinavian girls to breed with the SS (
Lebensborn E.V.
). They wanted to create German
Herrenvolk
to rule over the world.
¹¹

She added,

Christians knew all about this later on.… As soon as Christians became convinced of the real purpose of the Nazi policy, resistance commenced. Hiding of Jews in houses became common, and thousands of both Christians and Jews were thrown into the horrors of the concentration camps.
¹²

The Nazi plan, drafted by agronomists and other scientists, was to

colonize Eastern Europe with the aim of deporting 30 million people. Germans were to settle this region while the local population was to be taken to concentration camps or killed. The scientists developed the plans entirely on their own without any pressure from functionaries.… The prestigious “German Research Society” DFG (
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
) financed this project with 500,000 Reichsmarks—10 percent of its budget.
¹³