From Darwin to Hitler
An interview with author Richard Weikart
By Jayson Whitehead
05/16/05
As soon as World War II ended and details of the German Holocaust emerged, the world began to search for answers to explain the Nazis’ motivations for the systematic eradication of millions of Jews. Since then, Adolf Hitler has come to be recognized as the embodiment of evil and is frequently depicted as an amoral, bloodthirsty devil. Yet, as Richard Weikart explains in his recent book From Darwin to Hitler, Germany’s dictator in fact hewed to a strict, if pernicious, moral code, “an evolutionary ethic that made Darwinian fitness and health the only criteria for moral standards. The Darwinian struggle for existence, especially the struggle between different races, became the sole arbiter for morality.”
Where did Hitler appropriate his belief system from? As Weikart demonstrates, Hitler and his cohorts were the beneficiaries of a new world view that had cropped up in Europe and America shortly after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Published in 1859, Darwin’s chief thesis that organisms gradually evolve through natural selection galvanized the European intellectual community by providing a rational explanation for the development of biological life sans God. As important as The Origin of Species was to science, its impact was equally felt in the field of ethics where it provided the groundwork for a new belief system that eschewed divine creation for Darwinian natural selection. The ripple effect was almost immediate. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the father of modern eugenics, argued for the practice of artificial selection—weeding out the “unfit” of the human race—only a few years after The Origin of Species’ advent in 1959.
Germany-Austria was especially fascinated with the ethical connotations of Darwin’s ideas, and its intelligentsia quickly integrated them. The result was that twenty years after its debut, The Origin of Species was the force behind a burgeoning eugenics movement. In an 1880 essay, German zoologist Robby Kossman laid down its ethos, proclaiming
that the Darwinian world view must look upon the present sentimental conception of the value of the life of a human individual as an overestimate completely hindering the progress of humanity. The human state also, like every animal community of individuals, must reach an even higher level of perfection, if the possibility exists in it, through the destruction of the less well-endowed individual, for the more excellently endowed to win space for the expansion of its progeny…. The state only has an interest in preserving the more excellent life at the expense of the less excellent.
By the turn of the century, declarations like Kossman’s were a common part of any German intellectual’s vernacular. Delivered dramatically, they often took on characteristics similar to those of the biologist Arnold Dodel. “The new world view actually rests on the theory of evolution,” he wrote in 1904. “On it we have to construct a new ethics.… All values will be revalued.” Ernst Haeckel was the most renowned German Darwinist (many of his books went through several reprintings) and perhaps its most passionate defender. Stressing that natural selection be applied to humans, he argued for its extension to all areas of life. He and fellow social Darwinists vehemently opposed any belief system that advocated the existence of a soul, instead holding that man had no free will; biology dictated everything, even morals.
As a result, notions of good and bad were shattered. Under the social Darwinist model, whatever facilitated the biological improvement of the human race was good, anything that hampered its development evil. As eugenics arguments gained traction, groups like the Society for Race Hygiene were formed to disseminate Darwin’s ideas and often ended up advocating artificial selection. Most eugenics arguments focused on how to keep the weaker elements of society—the disabled, the mentally retarded, repeat criminals and alcoholics—from reproducing (all were considered hereditary traits). Only by purifying the higher evolved, the social Darwinists argued, could the human race properly evolve. Of course, the white German was assumed to be the most evolved. As a result, most eugenicists had a harsh view of other races, believing them to be a less evolved form of human. Many argued that other ethnicities—aborigines, native Americans, blacks, East Asians—were in fact closer to the ape than to their level of human. Haeckel explained in The Natural History of Creation that “between the most highly developed animal soul and the least developed human soul there exists only a small quantitative difference, but no qualitative difference….” The social Darwinists had turned the traditional ideal of the sanctity of life upside down.
As bold and brash as the social Darwinists were in their rhetoric, they were less certain in how to execute their proposals. While some argued for compulsory sterilization of the “unfit” (a practice adopted in Sweden, America and other countries), others simply maintained that the weaker elements should be encouraged to refrain from reproducing. Darwinists were equally torn on topics such as war and abortion, some contending that they disproportionately reduced the able-bodied population while others believed them to be effective abettors of the evolutionary process. The one thing all social Darwinists agreed on was that whatever aided the fit and suppressed the unfit was moral and proper.
Into this environment stepped the Austrian-born Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf (1925): “A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong.” Subjugating all of humanity to the evolutionary process, he took the next step of arguing that the destruction of the weak by the strong was humane. When he set up the “Aryan” German as the exemplar of the most highly evolved and the Jew as its weakest, or most immoral, the Nazis were born.
In From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart, an associate professor of modern European history at California State University, documents the tremendous rise of Darwinian ethics in Germany. By demonstrating the depth of its reach in German society, he makes a compelling case that social Darwinism laid the basis for Hitler’s extreme moral code. Weikart also points to elements of Darwin that continue to affect today’s culture. oldSpeak recently interviewed the author by e-mail...contin...
https://www.rutherford.org/Oldspeak/Articles/Interviews/Weikart.html
Dehumanization (babies are clumps of cells) is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy (thee and me), making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. It leads to human rights violations, and genocide.
Eugenics and Other Evils
by G.K. Chesterton - 1922
PART ONE: THE FALSE THEORY
I What is Eugenics?
II The First Obstacles
III The Anarchy from Above
IV The Lunatic and the Law
V The Flying Authority
VI The Unanswered Challenge
VII The Established Church of Doubt
VIII A Summary of a False Theory
PART TWO: THE REAL AIM
I The Impotence of Impenitence
II True History of a Tramp
III True History of a Eugenist
IV The Vengeance of the Flesh
V The Meanness of the Motive
VI The Eclipse of Liberty
VII The Transformation of Socialism
VIII The End of the Household Gods
IX A Short Chapter
TO THE READER
I publish these essays at the present time for a particular reason connected with the present situation; a reason which I should like briefly to emphasize and make clear.
Though most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, are conceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk of preliminary notes about the science of Eugenics were written before the war. It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies -— not visibly very distinguishable from other babies -— sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilization, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses. It may therefore appear that I took the opinion too controversially, and it seems to me that I some times took it too seriously. But the criticism of Eugenics soon expanded of itself into a more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialism and strict social organization.
And then the hour came when I felt, not without relief, that I might well fling all my notes into the fire. The fire was a very big one, and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries. And, anyhow, the issue itself was being settled in a very different style. Scientific officialism and organization in the State which had specialized in them, had gone to war with the older culture of Christendom. Either Prussianism would win and the protest would be hopeless, or Prussianism would lose and the protest would be needless. As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, it grew more and more plain that the scientifically organized State was not increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishmen would ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So I thought all I had written irrelevant, and put it out of my mind.
I am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It has gradually grown apparent, to my astounded gaze, that the ruling classes in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia is a pattern for the whole world. If parts of my book are nearly nine years old most of their principles and proceedings are a great deal older. They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the same bullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors that have led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumph. For that reason, three years after the war with Prussia, I collect and publish these papers.
G. K. C.
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Eugenics.html