Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (7 page)

THE MONSTERS BEHIND THE HOLOCAUST

It often is assumed that those who carried out the orders to murder over 11 million innocent non-combat men, women and children must have been monsters. This label actually separates these humans from ourselves, causing many to conclude that normal people never would have voluntarily carried out the crimes of the Nazis.

In fact, as we will document, many of the high level Nazi officers were outwardly very normal, family-oriented human beings. Interviews with Himmler’s family show that Himmler and other leading Nazis were in many ways normal, if not exceptional, persons. The story of Joseph Goebbels’ courtship of his wife is suitable for a touching Hollywood story. They were an attractive family that won the hearts of many within in the Reich. According to historians Rochus Misch (
Der Letzte Zeuge
) and Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven (
Mit Hitler im Bunker
), Goebbels and his wife killed their children, then themselves. Magda Goebbels said she could not bear to live in, or to have her children live in, a world without Hitler.

Himmler and the other leading Nazis also travelled fairly freely within both German and European society and were, as a whole, well liked by the German-speaking population.
²³

Himmler’s daughter, Gudrun, his brother, Gebhard, and other family members found it very difficult to reconcile the public post-war image of Himmler as a monster with the kind and affectionate man that they knew and loved for almost five decades. For this reason, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel strove in their research to “try to achieve this reconciliation, to try to understand why this simple, unassuming man became a mass-murderer convinced of the essential rightness of his actions.”
²⁴

As will be documented, the Holocaust was an essential step required “in order to fulfil a false dream of racial purity which obsessed both Himmler and his master” Adolf Hitler.
²⁵
No theme has dominated the Holocaust and the entire Nazi movement more than racism and the quest to achieve a pure superior race, a goal inspired by the eugenic ideas of Darwinism.

This is best illustrated by the fact that, forced to make a choice between winning the war or exterminating the Jews, Hitler chose extermination of the Jews. The fact is, “Hitler believed that killing Jews was more important than winning the war.”
²⁶
Hitler was confident that the world would some day thank him for eliminating this inferior parasitic race, even if Germany lost the war.

THE SLAVIC HOLOCAUST

The Nazi Party’s first priority was the eradication of Jews. Not far behind was the elimination of most of the Slavic peoples, who were seen as an inferior race, and subjugate the rest, or deport them from territory controlled by, and designated for, Aryans.
²⁷
One of the best examples of the Slavic Holocaust was exemplified by the siege of the Soviet city of Leningrad (now called by its original Christian name, St. Petersburg) that occurred from 1941 to 1944, just short of 900 days long.
²⁸

The purpose was not just to level the city, but to murder all of its over 3 million inhabitants by starvation. The Germans surrounded the city, then destroyed most of the food supplies and waited for the residents to starve to death.
²⁹
This clear example of genocide was based squarely on race. As one Jewish writer wrote about the ordeal,

That Social Darwinistic language (“struggle for survival”) showed how theory justified murder. The goal of a typical siege is to make the enemy surrender, but in Leningrad giving up and getting bread wasn’t even an option: Germans set up a minefield outside one area of the city to keep civilians from leaving and stationed artillery at other points with orders to fire on groups trying to surrender. The goal was extermination.
³⁰

In this, the “most murderous siege in world history,” surviving by cannibalism became the “last refuge of the starving.”
³¹
The “racially motivated starvation policy” became an integral part of German plans to exterminate those whom German scientists determined belonged to an inferior race.
³²

One of the next groups the Nazis wanted to exterminate was the Asiatic peoples. Longerich notes that the “murder of ‘Asiatic’ people in the Soviet Union is one of the chapters in the history of the Nazi regime’s policies of racial annihilation that have yet to be written.”
³³
The Nazis had just begun to work on achieving this goal and managed to begin the systematic murder of those people whose “external appearance made them appear to be ‘elements of inferior value with a predominantly Asiatic look.’”
³⁴

THE DARWINIAN JUSTIFICATION FOR WAR

The Nazi motivation for war was also derived from the racism that required the creation of a Great German Empire that extended well beyond the boundaries of Germany to supply

the German
Volk
the “Living Space” supposedly necessary for its survival. The goal of German foreign policy was to be an “eastern policy [
Ostpolitik
], in the sense of obtaining the necessary soil for our German
Volk
[namely] of Russia and the subject states surrounding it.”
³⁵

The Nazis believed that this central “goal could be realized only through a war—of that, Hitler and the other National Socialists had no doubt.”
³⁶
The reason only war could realize this goal was because

[the] racism of National Socialism was permeated…by a primitive Darwinism—the idea that “the most universal, implacable law of life” was the “struggle (of a people) for its existence…if necessary, with other peoples who stand in the way of its own development as a people.” The war of conquest to acquire “living space” for the German
Volk
was further intended to gain mastery by the “Aryan” German
Volk
and its state over the racially “inferior” Slavic peoples and states of eastern and east-central Europe, and ultimately would lead to German World hegemony.
³⁷

Racism was even involved in the “living space” (
Lebensraum
) ideology because National Socialists believed that territorial expansion was

implied in the geopoliticians’ Social Darwinist schemes.… According to them, it fell to a “master race” to promote the subjection and “displacement” of lesser nationalities and races, even to the extent of extermination. In Hitler’s view, the Bolshevik Revolution had been nothing more than a Jewish takeover in Russia. But since Jews could never build a state, “the giant empire in the East was ripe for a collapse,” which would become the “most powerful confirmation of the correctness of the
völkisch
racial theory.” The Final Solution of the Jewish question was thus an integral part of the war for Living Space, which, in February 1945, Hitler was still calling “the holy mission of my life” and the “reason for my existence.”
³⁸

SUMMARY

The Holocaust progressed from living restrictions to genocide over a ten-year period, partly because no other way existed in a highly educated, advanced, industrialized nation to murder over 11 million people without problems from Christians and others. The Nazis had to take one step at a time to achieve this goal, which included the systematic annihilation of what their scientists judged as inferior, sub-human, less evolved races, including almost all peoples in the world except Aryans.
³⁹

Lastly, it is now well documented that Darwinism was a critical part, not only of the Holocaust, but also of World War II and the quest for
Lebensraum
, which translated into conquering nations and either expelling the people living on the land or murdering them to enable the “superior” race to repopulate the land.
⁴⁰

_______________

1
Wallace Deuel,
People under Hitler
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), 180.

2
Peter Longerich,
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 241.

3
Jerry Bergman, “The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Experience in the Nazi Concentration Camps: A History of Their Conflicts with the Nazi State,”
Journal of Church and State
38, No. 1 (Winter 1996): 87–113.

4
Christian Zentner and Friedemann Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 86.

5
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 488.

6
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 192.

7
Ronald L. Numbers,
Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 53.

8
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 339–340.

9
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 192.

10
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 426–427.

11
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 426–427.

12
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann,
The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 92–96.

13
Douglas Brinkley,
World War II, 1939–1942: The Axis Assault
(New York: Times Books, 2003), 54.

14
Louis L. Snyder,
Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
(New York: Paragon, 1989), 201.

15
Mitchell Geoffrey Bard, ed.,
The Complete History of the Holocaust
(San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001), 67.

16
Ronald Rychlak,
Hitler, the War and the Pope
, rev. ed. (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor Books, 2010), 17.

17
Detlef Garbe,
Between Resistance & Martyrdom: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich
, trans. Dagmar G. Grimm (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).

18
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 111.

19
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 111.

20
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 111.

21
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 429.

22
Zentner and Bedürftig, eds.,
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich
, 429.

23
Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel,
Heinrich Himmler: The Sinister Life of the Head of the SS and the Gestapo
(New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007), xi-xii.

24
Manvell and Fraenkel,
Heinrich Himmler
, xiii.

25
Manvell and Fraenkel,
Heinrich Himmler
, xiv.

26
Max Domarus,
The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary
(Wauconda: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2007), 412.

27
Richard Weikart, “Hitler’s Struggle for Existence against Slaves: Racial Theory and Vacillations in Nazi Policy toward Czechs and Poles” in Anton Weiss-Wendt, ed.,
Eradicating Differences: The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi-Dominated Europe
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 61–84.

28
John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich,
Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941–44
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Harrison Evans Salisbury,
The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1969).

29
Leon Goure,
The Siege of Leningrad
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1981).