The Nazi Party was founded and grew in the 1920s, during which period Hitler and the other senior Nazis came to prominence. Yet the party's ideology definitely had a number of influential predecessors.
The deception of racism was Nazism's basic teaching. Its whole ideology rested on the premise of the superiority of the German race, which was threatened by "inferior races," and in order for that threat to be eliminated, a racist formula needed to be applied. The source of that ideology, in turn, was a 19th-century invention known as "social Darwinism"—nothing other than Darwin's theory of evolution applied to the social sciences. In The Origin of Species, published in 1859, and The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin suggested that living things developed as the result of a "racial struggle," and that nature made strong races superior to others. Darwin rejected the existence of any divine order and harmony in nature, instead advancing the lie that all living things and races were in a constant state of conflict. He also maintained the irrational and illogical idea that the white race, being superior to all others, would soon wipe them off the face of the Earth. Certain circles duly supported that idea for their own ideological reasons, despite the lack of any scientific proof.
Social Darwinism's perverted teachings, which regard human races as different species of animals, consider the use of the tooth-and-claw force seen among animals as entirely legitimate among human beings
In Europe, Darwin's theory led to a sudden resurgence of racism among some intellectual circles, who were generally opposed to people living by religious moral values. The British thinker Herbert Spencer adopted Darwin's theory—which had been expressed in more strictly biological terms—to the social sciences, thus giving rise to "social Darwinism." The most ardent supporters of this mistaken idea were the French writer Arthur Gobineau, widely regarded as the father of modern racism, and the British writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who took Gobineau's racist theories to an even higher level of fanaticism. Despite his being a British subject, Chamberlain was a great admirer of all things German. Also an avowed enemy of the Jews, he maintained the deception that the white Aryan race of Indo-European origin was superior to the Middle Eastern Semitic peoples such as Jews and Arabs. He hated the people of Israel, and saw them as inferior to the Germans' pagan ancestors.
Chamberlain died in 1927, but on his death bed, he had a famous visitor: Adolf Hitler, who had formulated his Nazi ideology under the influence of the mistaken ideas of Chamberlain and of similar social-Darwinist ideologues. He took the title of his book Mein Kampf, in which he set out his racist views, from social Darwinism's thesis of "the fight between the races." In Hitler's wicked logic, all of world history had shaped itself around the German race:
1) He believed in the lie that the German race was physically, mentally and culturally superior to all others, and held the idea that the Semitic and Slavic races were particularly inferior. In his view, the German race needed more room to live, which it needed to acquire by eliminating the Semitic and Slavic peoples to the east of Germany—Jews, Poles, and Russians, among others.
2) Hitler attached great importance to the "purity" of the German race. In his perverse thinking, he thought that to maintain that so-called purity, physical precautions were essential (by preventing Germans from marrying people from other races), as well as cultural ones (all "non-German" ideas and beliefs had to be destroyed).
3) His concept of racial purity included such inhumane acts as "improving" the German race, as if it were a breed of animal. To that end, people suffering from inherited diseases needed to be weeded out of society.
4) The destruction of "non-German ideas" meant, in effect, the elimination of all thoughts and beliefs that failed to conform to Nazi ideology. According to the Nazis' beliefs, devout Christians, liberals and members of other religious sects were elements that needed to be disposed of.
Thus the ruthless, racist ideology of social Darwinism gave birth to the worst genocide and slaughter the world had ever seen.
In the following pages, we shall examine the innocent victims of Nazi savagery—first the Jews, the Nazis' main target, and then those other victims of "forgotten genocides," whose sufferings were no less than those of the Jews, but have been largely ignored.
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