Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (23 page)

Some of the most scholarly academic studies that focusing on Darwinism’s influence on Nazi Germany are those of Professor Richard Weikart. Weikart and others have documented that there can be no doubt that a major source of the worst of Nazism was Darwinism. To prevent a repeat performance, we must understand history because, as has often been observed, those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.
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Firmly convinced that Darwinian evolution was true, the German Darwinian scientists saw themselves as modern saviours of humankind, believing society someday would acknowledge that their work was responsible for bringing humanity to a higher level of evolutionary development. If negative eugenics is the means of race improvement as the racial hygienists proposed, the Nazis are our saviour and, as a result of their destruction, the human race will suffer grievously.

If social Darwinism is not true, what the Nazis attempted to do must be ranked among the most heinous crimes ever committed, and Darwinism must be considered the source of one of the most destructive philosophies ever foisted on humankind.
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While Germany was going down in flames, Hitler was “ready in Wagnerian style in the event of ultimate apocalyptic catastrophe, and in line with his undiluted social-Darwinistic beliefs, to take his people down…with him if it [social-Darwinism] proved incapable of producing the victory he had demanded.”
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Furthermore, some of the leading Nazi scientists, such as Professor Konrad Lorenz, have been highly rewarded since the fall of Nazi Germany. This is an important fact because no scientists “were forced to do things against their will. Whoever participated did so voluntarily. More than 50 percent of the biologists employed by the imperial institutions joined the Nazi party.”
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Zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who joined the Nazi Party in 1938, wrote in 1938 that his “whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the National Socialists.” Goede writes in summary that Konrad Lorenz

in 1973 was honored with the Nobel Prize—so much for the memory, conscience and investigative competence of the international science community.… Dr. Susanne Heim, who headed the historical commission summarized her Max Planck study in a single sentence: “Scientists are highly vulnerable to intellectual and moral corruption—opportunities will be used if they promise more influence and success.”
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1
Philip Campbell, “Germany Rising,”
Nature
(September 30, 2010), 467: 499–500.

2
Philip Campbell, “Germany Rising,” 499.

3
Richard Weikart,
From Darwin to Hitler
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);
E. Michael Jones, “Darwin and the Vampire: Evolution’s Contribution to the Holocaust,”
Culture Wars
17 (November 1988): 18–29; Ian Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–45: Nemesis
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

4
William Bell Riley,
Hitlerism: or The Philosophy of Evolution in Action
(Minneapolis, 1941), 3, cited in Ronald L. Numbers, “
Creationism in 20th-Century America,” Science
218 (November 5, 1982): 538–544.

5
Ute Deichmann,
Biologists under Hitler,
trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

6
Martin Gilbert, “Foreword,” in Max Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 1946 ed. (Reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), v.

7
Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 6.

8
Arthur Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), 230.

9
Leni Yahil,
The Holocaust: The Fate of the European Jewry, 1932–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 37.

10
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York: Knopf, 1996), 414.

11
Yahil,
The Holocaust: The Fate of the European Jewry
, 37.

12
Weikart,
From Darwin to Hitler
; George Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,”
American Scientist
76, No. 1 (Jan–Feb 1988): 50–58.

13
Joseph Tenenbaum,
Race and Reich
(New York: Twayne, 1956).

14
Robert Jay Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
(New York: Basic Books, 1986).

15
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 17.

16
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 17.

17
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 17. Emphasis in original. Quotation is from Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf
(Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin/The Riverside Press, 1962), 397–398.

18
Jones, “Darwin and the Vampire: Evolution’s Contribution to the Holocaust.”

19
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 17

20
Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 11.

21
Weinreich,
Hitler’s Professors
, 13

22
Sheila Faith Weiss,
Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

23
John Simmons,
The Giant Book of Scientists: A Ranking of the 100 Greatest Scientists Past and Present
(Australia: The Book Company, 1997), 424.

24
Richard Milner,
The Encyclopedia of Evolution
(New York: Facts on File, 1990), 205.

25
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,” 54.

26
Simmons,
The Giant Book of Scientists,
424–422.

27
Ernst Haeckel,
The Riddle of the Universe
(New York: Harper, 1900); Ernst Haeckel,
Eternity: World War Thoughts on Life and Death, Religion, and the Theory of Evolution
(New York: Truth Seeker, 1916); Ernst Haeckel,
The Evolution of Man
(New York: Appleton, 1920).

28
Stephen Jay Gould,
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 77–78.

29
Erik Nordenskjöld,
The History of Biology
, trans. Leonard Bucknell Eyre (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1935), 27.

30
Milner,
The Encyclopedia of Evolution
, 207.

31
Ernst Haeckel,
The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes
(New York: Appleton, 1876), 434.

32
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 441–442.

33
Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, 441–442.

34
Haeckel,
The History of Creation
, 10, 321.

35
Ernst Haeckel,
The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy
(New York: Harper, 1905), 390.

36
Haeckel,
The Evolution of Man
, 431.

37
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,” 56.

38
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,” 56.

39
Haeckel,
The Evolution of Man
, 412–413. Emphasis added.

40
Lifton, T
he Nazi Doctors
, 424.

41
Simmons,
The Giant Book of Scientists,
424.

42
Paul Weindling,
Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

43
John Cornwell,
Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact
(New York: Viking, 2003), 78.

44
Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism,” 57.

45
Karl A. Schleunes,
The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 30

46
Schleunes,
The Twisted Road to Auschwitz
, 30

47
Vernon Kellogg,
Headquarters Nights: A Record of Conversations and Experiences at the Headquarters of the German Army in France and Belgium
(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1917), 28–30.

48
Stephen Jay Gould,
Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
(New York: Norton, 1991), 424.

49
Kellogg,
Headquarters Nights
, 28–30.

50
Kellogg,
Headquarters Nights
, 28–30.

51
Richard Grunberger,
The 12-Year Reich: A Social History Of Nazi Germany, 1933–1945
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 298.

52
Robert N. Proctor,
Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 39.

53
Weindling,
Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism.

54
Proctor,
Racial Hygiene
, 291.

55
Proctor,
Racial Hygiene
, 291.

56
Not to be confused with Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy.

57
Rudolf Höss,
Commandant of Auschwitz: Autobiography of Rudolf Höss
(Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1959).

58
Raymond Rudorff,
Monsters: Studies in Ferocity
(New York: The Citadel Press, 1969), 240.

59
Richard Breitman,
The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991), 35.

60
Daniel Gasman,
The Scientific Origin of National Socialism
(New York: American Elsevier, 1971).

61
Jacques Barzun,
Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage
(New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), xx.

62
Weikart,
From Darwin to Hitler
.

63
Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz,
Human Heredity
(New York: MacMillan, 1931), 628–629.

64
Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari,
Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); Earnest Albert Hooton,
Why Men Behave Like Apes and Vice Versa; or, Body and Behavior
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941).

65
Daniel J. Kevles,
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
(New York: Knopf, 1985).