The Darwinian roots of the Nazi tree (Weikart review)
by Jonathan Sarfati
How could the horrors of the Holocaust occur in the most civilized country in the
world? The sheer enormity of the killings required a huge network of people, so
how could so many commit such atrocities?
Richard Weikart, professor of modern European history at California State University,
Stanislaus, has thoroughly documented the Darwinian roots of many aspects of the
Nazi terror in his recent book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics,
and Racism in Germany.1
He showed that Darwinism provided many of the foundations for Nazi principles. For
example, Darwinism undermined the uniqueness of humanity, which in turn undermined
the sanctity of innocent life. This by itself is a slippery slope—once society
starts down this path of regarding any class of humans as not worthy of
life, it is hard to stop this extending to other classes, because the door is already
unlocked.
Darwinism also undermined a divine foundation for ethics and morality, so moral
relativism replaced traditional moral codes. Instead, the notion of evolutionary
progress became the highest good (overlooking the contradiction that notions of
‘goodness’ are meaningless when morals become relative). So Christian
ideas of compassion for the sick and handicapped were dismissed as weak. They were
replaced by notions of the strong dominating the weak, even claiming that it was
kind to eliminate the weak.
Hitler photo by NARA, Darwin photo by TFE Graphics
The notion of evolutionary fitness was not only applied to individuals but groups.
Weikart points out that pre-Darwinian racist ideas were usually repulsed by the
dominant Christian worldview that all people come from Adam and Eve. But the German
Darwinian racists dismissed the darker ‘races’ as being closer to the
apes than to the ‘superior’ lighter humans. This had horrifying consequences
in the Herero genocide in Africa in the early 1900s.2
The line from Darwin to Hitler was not straightforward, because it was so highly
branched. Weikart shows that Darwin’s ideas became enormously popular in educated
German circles largely through the writings of Ernst Haeckel, of forged embryo drawing
infamy.3 Haeckel in turn strongly influenced Alfred Ploetz, the founder
of the German Society for Race Hygiene, the world’s first eugenics organization.
This organization included Julius Lehmann as a leading member. He was a racist eugenicist
and major publisher of medical and scientific textbooks, and had extensive contact
with Hitler from 1920.
These ideas were not only widespread in elite academic circles, they had filtered
down into the Viennese press during Hitler’s pre-WWI days. After Hitler’s
rise, Nazi propaganda spread these ideas still further to the masses. One film,
Victims of the Past (Opfer der Vergangenheit, 1937; see below),
showed a disfigured handicapped person and declared:
‘All weak living things will inevitably
perish in nature. In the last few decades, mankind has sinned frightfully against the law of natural selection. We haven’t just maintained life unworthy of life, we
have even allowed it to multiply! The descendants of these sick people look … like
this person here!’
[NB: ‘Sinned’ is a better translation of gesündigt than the subtitle
‘transgressed’.]
Sadly, today, the very philosophy that was foundational to Nazism is taught as fact
in Western media and educational circles. And atheistic philosophers such as Peter
Singer and James Rachels have applied the same reasoning as the Nazis—that
Darwinism has undermined the sanctity of human life, so involuntary euthanasia should
be allowed, e.g. for disabled newborns. This shows that if we don’t learn
from history, we are likely to repeat it.
References
- Palgrave Macmillan, New York, USA, 2004.
- Ambler, M., Herero genocide: Foretaste of the Holocaust, Creation
27(3):52–55, 2005.
- Grigg, R., Fraud rediscovered,
Creation 20(2):49–51, 1998;
Ernst Haeckel: Evangelist for evolution and apostle of deceit, Creation
18(2):33–36, 1996; Q&A: Embryonic
Recapitulation.
(Article available in German and Polish)
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