Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (17 page)

Nazi Germany, though, was not alone in applying science to government policy. In the United States during the early 1900s, “it came to be a hallmark of good reform government to shape policy with the aid of scientific experts…[and soon eugenic] experts aplenty were to be found in the biology, psychology, and sociology departments of universities or colleges.”
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Significantly, the German eugenics programmes elicited little opposition from the West. The United States policies also worked against saving the lives of those that Germany decided were racially inferior. The implications of its eugenic immigration acts, especially the American Johannson Quota Act of 1924, which was not repealed until 1941, had enormous consequences for human lives:

At least nine million human beings of what Galton and Pearson called degenerative stock, two-thirds of them the Jews…continued to be denied sanctuary at our gates. They were all ultimately herded into Nordic
Rassenhygiene
camps, where the race biologists in charge made certain that they ceased to multiply. And ceased to be.
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The first step in a eugenic programme was to determine which groups were genetically superior, a judgement that was heavily influenced by culture. Many Germans did not accept the American and British conclusions as to which races were inferior, and for this reason the Germans instituted their own programme. This meant that they must first determine what traits were superior. The ideal traits were

a human type whose appearance had been described by the race theorist Hans F.K. Günther as “blond, tall, long-skulled, with narrow faces, pronounced chins, narrow noses with a bridge, soft hair, widely spaced pale-coloured eyes, pinky-white skin-colour.”
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Although superficial observation enabled most people to make a broad classification of race, as the Nazis soon learned when they explored it in depth, race status is by no means easy to determine. Many of the groups that they felt were inferior, such as Slavic peoples (mostly the Poles, Russians and Ukrainians), Jews, Gypsies and others, were not easily distinguishable from the pure “Aryan” race. In grouping people into races to select the “best,” the Nazis measured a wide variety of physical traits including brain case sizes.

The Nazis relied heavily upon the work of Hans F.K. Günther, professor of “racial science” at the University of Jena. Although Günther’s “personal relationships with the party were stormy at times,” his racial ideas received wide support throughout the German government and were an important influence in German policy.
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Günther recognized that, although “a race may not be pure, its members share certain dominant characteristics,” thus paving the way for stereotyping.
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Günther concluded that all Aryans share an ideal Nordic face that contrasted with the Jews, whom he concluded were a mixture of races. Günther stressed that a person’s genealogical lineage, anthropological measurements of his skull, and evaluations of physical appearance were all important. Even though physical appearance was stressed, the Nazis believed, “the body is the showplace of the soul” and “the soul is primary.”
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Females with the traits—such as IQ—that eugenicists judged as superior Aryan race qualities, were even placed in special homes and kept pregnant as long as they remained in a programme called
Lebensborn
. Nonetheless, research on the offspring of the experiment have concluded that, as is now known, IQ regresses toward the population mean and the IQs of the offspring were generally lower than that of the high IQ parents.
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THE BAD BLOOD THEORY

Darwinism was a major influence on the Nazi party’s conclusion that not only were certain races and ethnic groups inferior, but mental patients were also genetically inferior. Part of the reason was because it was then believed that heredity had a major controlling influence on mental illness (or that the mentally ill may have non-Aryan blood in them) and, consequently, those persons with “bad blood” had to be destroyed. Jewish historian Leon Poliakov notes that many intellectuals in the early 1900s accepted
telegony
, the idea that “bad blood” would
contaminate a race line forever
, or that “bad blood drives out good [blood], just as bad money displaces good money.”
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Only extermination would permanently eliminate these inferior genetic lines, thereby furthering evolution. Darwin even compiled a long list of cases where bad blood polluted a white gene line, causing it, he concluded, to produce impure progeny forever.

Numerous respected biologists, including Ernst Rüdin, a professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich and also headed the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, and many of his colleagues—including Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz, Francis Galton and Eugene Kahn, later a professor of psychiatry at Yale—actively advocated this hereditary argument. These scientists either directly or indirectly influenced the German compulsory sterilization laws designed to prevent those with defective or “inferior” genes from contaminating the Aryan gene pool.

Later, when the “genetically inferior” were also judged as “useless eaters,” massive killings became justified. The groups judged inferior were gradually expanded to include a wide variety of races and national groups. Later, it even included less healthy older people, epileptics, persons with both severe and mild mentally defects, deaf-mutes, and even persons with certain terminal illnesses.
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The list of groups judged “inferior” was later expanded to include persons who had Negroid or monogoloid
features
, Gypsies, and those who did not pass a set of ingeniously designed overtly racist tests now known to be worthless. After Jesse Owen won several gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler reportedly chastised the Americans for permitting blacks to enter the contests.
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How the weak were to be “selected” for elimination was not consistent nor were the criteria used to determine “weak.”
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The justification of these programmes was that “leading biologists and professors” advocated them. According to psychiatrist and author Frederic Wertham, Dr. Karl Brandt reasoned that since the learned professors were in support, the programme must be valid and “who could there be who was better qualified [to judge the programme] than they?”
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EVOLUTION AND WAR IN NAZI GERMANY

Darwinism not only offered the Germans a meaningful interpretation of their recent military past, but also justification for future aggression: “German military success in the Bismarckian wars fit neatly into Darwinist categories [and in]…the struggle for survival, the fitness of Germans had been clearly demonstrated.”
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In other words, war was a positive force not only because it eliminated the weaker races, but also because it weeded out the weaker members of the superior races. Hitler not only unabashedly intended to produce a superior race, but he openly relied on Darwinian thought in both his extermination and war policies.
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Partly for this reason, Nazi Germany openly glorified war because it was an important means of eliminating the less fit of the highest race, a step necessary to “upgrade the race.” Clark concludes, quoting extensively from
Mein Kampf
, that

Hitler’s attitude to the League of Nations and to peace and war were based upon the same principles. “A world court without a world police would be a joke…the whole world of Nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness—an eternal victory of the strong over the weak. There would be nothing but decay in the whole of nature if this were not so. States which [violate]…this elementary law would fall into decay…. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.” To think otherwise is to “insult” nature. “Distress, misery and disease are her rejoinders.”
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German greatness, Hitler stressed, came about primarily because Germans were jingoists, and had been eliminating their weaker members for centuries.
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Although Germans were no strangers to war, this new justification gave powerful support to their policies. The view that eradication of the weaker races was a major source of evolution was well expressed by Wiggam when he said the human race

had scarcely more brains than his anthropoid cousins, the apes. But, by kicking, biting, fighting, outmaneuvering and outwitting his enemies, and by the fact that the ones who had not sense and strength enough to do this were killed off, man’s brain became enormous and he waxed both in wisdom and agility if not in size and morals.
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In other words, war is positive in the long run because only by lethal conflicts can humans evolve. Hitler even claimed as truth the contradiction that human civilization as we know it would not exist if it were not for constant war. Furthermore, many of the leading scientists of his day openly advocated this view:

Haeckel was especially fond of praising the ancient Spartans whom he saw as a successful and superior people as a consequence of their socially approved biological selection. By killing all but the “perfectly healthy and strong children” the Spartans were “continually in excellent strength and vigor.” Germany should follow this Spartan custom, as infanticide of the deformed and sickly was “a practice of advantage to both the infants destroyed and to the community.” It was, after all, only “traditional dogma” and hardly scientific truth that all lives were of equal worth or should be preserved.
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The common assumption that European civilization evolved far more than others, primarily because of its constant warmongering in contrast to other nations, is false. War is actually typical of virtually all peoples except certain small island groups who have abundant food, or peoples in very cold areas.
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Historically, many tribes in Africa were continually involved in wars, as were most peoples in Asia and America.

Ironically, Hitler, as well as Haeckel, Ploetz and others, recognized that war also killed the strong and most fit simply because those unfit for military service were not drafted and consequently were less likely to die in combat and more likely to have families.
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This was only one of many contradictions in the Nazi movement.

NAZISM IS APPLIED EVOLUTION

From our modern perspective, many people have concluded that World War II and its results ensued from the ideology of an evil madman, and his equally evil administration. Hitler, though, did not see himself as evil, but as humanity’s benefactor. Richard Weikart concluded that Hitler was inspired by Darwinism to pursue a utopian project of biologically improving the human race, and this evolutionary ethic influenced most every major feature of Nazi policy including eugenics, racism, offensive warfare, racial extermination and even population expansion.
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Putting members of these inferior races in concentration camps was not so much an effort to punish but, as his apologists repeatedly claimed, was a protective safeguard similar to quarantining sick people to prevent contamination of the rest of the community.
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The Nazis believed that eliminating Jews and other “inferior races” was a scientific and rational way of serving an objectively greater good.
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Hitler felt that the world would eventually be grateful to him and his programmes that lifted the human race to genetically higher levels of evolution as a result of reducing race pollution by preventing marriages of Aryans with inferior races:

Hitler was influenced above all by the theories of the nineteenth-century social Darwinist school, whose conception of man as biological material was bound up with impulses towards a planned society. He was convinced that the race was disintegrating, deteriorating through faulty breeding as a result of a liberally tinged promiscuity that was vitiating the nation’s blood. And this led to the establishment of a catalogue of “positive” curative measures: racial hygiene, eugenic choice of marriage partners, the breeding of human beings by the methods of selection on the one hand and extirpation on the other.
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As Höss adds, “such a struggle, legitimized by the latest scientific views, justifies the racists’ conceptions of superior and inferior people and nations and validated the conflict between them.”
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Many in Germany, early on, recognized the harm of Darwinism, and the Prussian Minister of Education for a time in 1875 forbade the “schoolmasters in the country to have anything to do with Darwinism…with a view of protecting schoolchildren from the dangers of the new doctrines.”
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A significant question is this: Would the Nazi Holocaust have occurred if this ban had remained in effect? At the entrance of this struggle was Haeckel who garnered much support from free thinkers and others who

gathered around him in spite of his many delusions, when such measure as the school regulations mentioned above were adopted…. All the more so as the outcome proved Haeckel’s justification; Darwinism might be prohibited in the schools, but the idea of evolution and its method penetrated everywhere…. And to this result, Haeckel has undeniably contributed more than most; everything of value in his utterances has become permanent, while his blunders have been forgotten, as they deserve.
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