Another revealing point was the way the Nazi worldview took Darwin's theory of evolution as its intellectual basis.
When putting forward his theory, Charles Darwin had claimed that there was a constant fight for survival in nature, and that some races were especially favored in the fight, while others were doomed to lose and be "eliminated." As one might expect, these views soon came to represent the scientific foundation of racism. James Joll, who spent long years as a professor of international history at Oxford, Stanford and Harvard University, describes the ideological link between Darwinism and racism in his book Europe Since 1870: An International History, which is still used as a college textbook:
Charles Darwin, the English naturalist whose books On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, and The Descent of Man, which followed in 1871, launched controversies which affected many branches of European thought... The ideas of Darwin, and of some of his contemporaries such as the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, ... were rapidly applied to questions far removed from the immediate scientific ones... The element of Darwinism which appeared most applicable to the development of society was the belief that the excess of population over the means of support necessitated a constant struggle for survival in which it was the strongest or the "fittest" who won. From this it was easy for some social thinkers to give a moral content to the notion of the fittest, so that the species or races which did survive were those morally entitled to do so.
The doctrine of natural selection could, therefore, very easily become associated with another train of thought developed by the French writer, Count Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, who published an Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in 1853. Gobineau insisted that the most important factor in development was race; and that those races which remained superior were those which kept their racial purity intact. Of these, according to Gobineau, it was the Aryan race which had survived best... Houston Stewart Chamberlain... contributed to carrying some of these ideas a stage further... Hitler himself admired the author [Chamberlain] sufficiently to visit him on his deathbed in 1927. 3
Cover of the first edition of Hitler's 1925 book Mein Kampf (My Struggle)
Hitler's, and thus the Nazis', ideological devotion to Darwinism was implemented in their policies after coming to power. The Nazis' racial policies, known as "eugenics," represented the theory of evolution as applied to society. Eugenics refers to the weeding out of the sick and handicapped, and the "improvement" of the human race by increasing the number of healthy individuals. According to the theory of eugenics, a race can be improved in the same way that better breeds of animal are formed by the mating of healthy individuals. The theory was proposed by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton and his son, Leonard Darwin. The first person to adopt and spread the theory in Germany was the evolutionist biologist Ernst Haeckel, a close friend and supporter of Darwin. He recommended that handicapped babies should be killed at birth, to accelerate the so-called evolution of society. He actually went even further, and maintained that lepers, cancer patients and the mentally handicapped should also be ruthlessly killed, or else such people would burden society and slow down the process of evolution.
Haeckel died in 1919, but his ideas were bequeathed to the Nazis. Shortly after seizing power, Hitler embarked on an official program of eugenics. His words in Mein Kampf summed up this new policy:
Mental and physical education are of great importance to the state, yet the selection of people is at least as important. The state has a responsibility to declare that it is inappropriate for genetically or clearly unhealthy individuals to reproduce... It must show no sympathy nor wait for others to understand as it fulfils that responsibility... Preventing the reproduction of physically handicapped or unhealthy individuals for a period of 600 years ... will bring about a hitherto unachievable improvement in human health. If the healthiest members of a race reproduce in a planned manner, the result will be ... a race without the deformed physical or mental seeds that we have carried with us so far. 4
As a result of Hitler's philosophy, the Nazis rounded up the mentally ill, the crippled, the congenitally blind and those suffering from inherited diseases and sent them to special "sterilization centers." Under a law passed in 1933, 350,000 mentally ill people, 30,000 gypsies and hundreds of colored children were sterilized by means of castration, x-rays, injections or electric shocks to the genitals. As one Nazi officer put it, "National Socialism is simply applied biology."5
What the Nazis considered "applied biology" was actually Darwin's theory of evolution, itself a violation of the basic laws of biology. It has since been clearly shown that the theory of eugenics and other Darwinist claims are absolutely devoid of any scientific foundation.
Finally, we must emphasize that the Nazis' attachment to evolutionary theory was connected to their hostility to religion as well as to racist policies. As we have already seen, the Nazis bore a great hatred for divine religions. Intending to replace them with pagan beliefs, they sought to carry out anti-religious propaganda and brainwashing and realized that Darwinism was the most effective means of doing so. Daniel Gasman's The Scientific Origins of National Socialism confirms this: "Hitler stressed and singled out the idea of biological evolution as the most foremost weapon against traditional religion..." 6
These same anti-religious and Darwinist ideologies underlay the Nazis' despotic ruthlessness.
Evaluating people according to their ethnic origins and inherited physical characteristics is a perverse practice that reached its peak in the 19th century. The motivating reason behind it was Darwin's theory of evolution, which regarded mankind from a totally racist perspective. Darwin was the behind-the-scenes architect of 19th-century racism and the 20th century's Nazi barbarity. Above: The so-called "racial measurements" performed according to evolutionist criteria. Hitler's devotion to the ideas of Darwin appeared in the title of his own book, Mein Kampf. The struggle in question was, of course, the fight for survival proposed by Darwin.
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