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“Hitler believed that the human gene pool could be improved by using selective breeding similar to how farmers breed superior cattle strains.”

—Yes, Hitler believed that through selective breeding that change can be produced within a ‘kind’, but he didn’t believe that speciation could occur. So his beliefs are identical to that of modern Creationists.

“Although it is no easy task to assess the conflicting motives of Hitler and his supporters, Darwinism-inspired eugenics clearly played a critical role.”

—Strange, if Darwinism played such a critical role, one would expect that maybe Hitler would have, you know, mentioned Darwin - at least ONCE - in his book, or one of his MANY speeches, or at one of his MANY meetings - or maybe just in passing (there were so many people recording his words, whether at meetings or just in casual conversations, that several books have been published using the notes, such at “Table Talk”). And yet, no evidence (AFAIK - someone correct me if I’m wrong), that he ever once in his life uttered “Darwin”. And this is from someone who borrowed from everything in culture to try to justify his ideology (even opera - Richard Wagner).

What were Hitler’s beliefs regarding nature and evolution?
First, he believed that we were created - as is:
“For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God’s Creation and God’s Will.” – Mein Kampf

As with Creationists, Hitler argued that the boundaries between species were definite, as opposed to evolutionists who argued that such boundaries were more or less arbitrary and created out of convenience:
“Thus men without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature’s rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth.
Even the most superficial observation shows that Nature’s restricted form of propagation and increase is an almost rigid basic law of all the innumerable forms of expression of her vital urge. Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf, etc.”
-Contrast this with Darwin who said: “It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species’– It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” and “I look at the term ‘species’ as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other.”

And not only are their clear lines of demarcation - but those lines cannot be crossed, creatures can only “multiply their kind”:
‘Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law—one may call it an iron law of Nature—which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind.’...
“The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc.”

A quote I see quite often, and used again in this article is this:
“Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if
such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.”
Read in context the “principle” he’s talking about there isn’t natural selection, but a principle against “race” or “species” mixing, he’s making an argument against miscegenation. Hitler calls miscegenation a “sin against the will of the eternal creator.”

You won’t find Darwin arguing against miscegenation or talking about “racial purity”. And the idea of “higher” and “lower” species in Darwininism is silly - all extant species are equally “evolved” and all are branches that reach the top of the evolutionary tree. No species holds a special place.
An idea that DID rank species is the old Creationist idea of “The Great Chain of Being”, which Hitler expresses here:
“This is only too natural. Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one.” You won’t find anything like this in “Origin”. This is Creationist “Chain of Being” talk.

So where did Hitler get his cruel ideas about “higher” and “lower” species and “racial purity” and rules against “miscegnation”, etc if not from Darwinism?

Actually, from pre-Darwinism Creationists such as Gobineau.

Gobineau isn’t well known today, but he was once quite popular. Chamberlain, for instance, was a loyal Gobineau follower.
Gobineau believed that there were various human races which could be ranked, and that they must remain separate, or in whatever nation they are mixing the nation and culture would deteriorate and fall. It was he who began calling the white, northern europeans “Aryans” (sound familiar?), and claimed that the Aryans were the greatest race and had the highest culture. His most famous book is “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”, from 1855. In it he wrote that the Aryans must actively wipe out, or at least separate, from the “inferior” races before civilization falls.

Here’s Hitler giving Gobinism in a nutshell:
“Human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe. The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.”
Can anyone imagine Darwin saying anything like that?

Here’s more Gobineau, this will all sound familiar to anyone that’s read Hitler:
“A nation does not derive value from its position; it never has and never will. On the contrary it is the race which has always given - and always will give - to the land its moral, economic and political value... The purer a race keeps its blood, the less will its social foundations be liable to attack; for the general way of thought will remain the same.”

“The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit.”

“Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people.”

And here’s Hitler again:
“A people that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood, thereby destroys the unity of the soul of the nation in all its manifestations”.

The Nazis believed that misceganation would combine what God had created separate (the same reason Bob Jones U gave for not allowing interracial dating).

Hitler follows Gobineau to a T. What the Nazis were practicing was not Darwinism - but Gobinism.

Hitler got ideas from other influential Creationists as well - a race must rule or be ruled:
“Nations and races, like individuals have each an especial destiny: some are born to rule, and others to be ruled. And such has ever been the history of mankind. No two distinctly marked races can dwell together on equal terms.”- Josiah Nott “Types of Mankind” 1854

So Hitler was a Creationist who got his ideas primarily from other Creationists.

The above quotes were all Mein Kampf. Let’s try a source that gives more private thoughts, like Table Talk.

“From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.” - Table Talk. (Self explanatory I think)

“A skull is dug up by chance, and everybody exclaims ‘That’s what our ancestors were like.’ Who knows if the so-called Neanderthal man wasn’t really an ape? What I can say, in any case, is that it wasn’t our ancestors who lived there in prehistoric times.”

“Who’s that little Bolshevik professor who claims to triumph over creation? People like that, we’ll break them. Whether we rely on the catechism or on philosophy, we have possibilities in reserve, whilst they, with their purely materialistic conceptions, can only devour one another.”

The name Hitler was looking for there is “Oparin”. He came up with a hypothesis for abiogenesis very similar to what Urey and Miller came up with. The idea of a materialistic beginning of life outraged Hitler. This perhaps gives us an idea of what he may have thought of Darwin (that is, if he ever DID think of Darwin, who, for all we know, Hitler never did think of).

I could bring up many other Creationist sources for Hitler’s ideology (Martin Luther’s “The Jews and their Lies”), but I think this is enough for one post.

I’ll end this with some thoughts that actually ARE from Darwin:
“As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.” - Charles Darwin; The Descent of Man