Charles Darwin and Adolf Hitler
Charles Darwin was by no means the first scholar to propose a theory of evolution, which he acknowledges and outlines in the section entitled An Historical Sketch on the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species (3rd edition, 1861). Immanuel Kant (1755) viewed the cosmos as a continuously changing dynamic system and Lamarck (1809) suggested that the mechanism by which organisms changed slowly over time into new species could be attributed to an innate capacity within to evolve from simple to complex structures.
Another publication which prepared the groundwork for the reception of Darwin’s publication was the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Darwin’s Historical Sketch had this to say about the work:
“The work, from its powerful and brilliant style, though displaying in the earlier editions little accurate information and a great want of scientific caution, immediately had a very wide circulation. In my opinion it has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.”
Darwin and Russel Wallace were the first scholars to put forward a theory of evolution which relied upon natural biological processes rather than on innate capabilities or divine interventions in whatever form. Moreover, Darwin’s Origins of Species (first published in 1859) demonstrated how natural selection and evolution explained the known data in biogeography, comparative morphology and embryology, taxonomy and systematics, and palaeontology.
Today, evolution operates as the framework for all biological sciences. As neatly summarised by Milford Wolpoff (Paleoanthropology, 1999: 31-2):
Evolution is defined as "the genetic transformation of populations through time, created by alterations in the genetic makeup of populations from generation to generation. The consequences of this process are changes in the adaptations and diversity of populations. This mechanism of descent with modification is responsible for the pattern and variety of life on earth: a tall order for so simple a concept. The theory part of the "theory of evolution" is concerned with how these changes in genetic makeup occur and what effect they have on populations. Evolutionists have critically examined the mechanisms causing genetic change, the problem of whether these mechanisms need to be viewed at the level of the gene, the individual, or the species, the issue of whether changes are gradual or episodic, and the extent to which evolution is directional. However, these is no question about two facts:
1. The process of evolution is an actuality, a hypothesis more than 100-years old that has not been disproved. For there to be no evolution, every generation would have to be exactly the same genetically as the previous generation.
2. Evolution if the singular explanation for the history of life on our planet. It is not a hypothesis about how life came to be, but rather an explanation and description of the processes governing its changes over time."
Therefore, despite the fact and theory of evolution being about biological processes, imagine the incredulity of scientists when they hear about various creationist attempts to link Darwin’s legacy to the atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler before and during the Second World War. Richard Weikart, a Fellow at the Intelligent Design creationist Discovery Institute (with whom Truth in Science has much in common), wrote a book entitled From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary ethics, eugenics and racism in Germany. There is even an accompanying website: http://www.darwintohitler.com/ . As stated on the website, “Weikart concludes that Darwinism played a key role not only in the rise of eugenics, but also in euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination, all ultimately embraced by the Nazis.”
How does this shape up against what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf? An online translation of Mein Kampf is available (http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf). All translations here come from Pimlico’s reprint of Ralph Manheim’s classic translation.
(Volume 1, Chapter 2, p. 60)
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
(Volume 1, Chapter 8, p. 195)
What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfilment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.
(Volume 1, Chapter 11, p. 260)
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:
(a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;
(b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.
To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.
(Volume 2, Chapter 1, p. 348)
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 the globe.
The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the 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.
One of the key roots of Hitler’s extreme anti-Semitism and subsequent programmes of action are, instead, to be found in Vienna’s Catholic anti-Semitic publications (see Manheim’s Introduction for full details):
“The anti-Semitic side of his theories were easily come by in Vienna. The Social Catholic journal, Deutsches Volksblatt, edited by Ernst Vergani, offered a constant crop of anti-Semitic stories, mixing the crudest kind of sex and anti-Semitic with popularization of the racial theories of the nineteenth-century French writer, Count Gobineau. The Catholic paper Das Vaterland under its highly successful editor, Vogelsang, who died in 1890, was peddling the argument that Jewish advances came only because of Christian spinelessness even before Hitler’s birth… Hitler was a self-taught man and his system was his own, concocted piecemeal from the leavings of others, filtered at third- and fourth-hand through the cheap pamphlet and leaflet literature of Viennese politics and elaborated in the endless arguments on the Meldeannstrasse, arguments which nearly brought about his permanent exclusion from the hostel on the complaints of the other inmates. Moreover, the section of Mein Kampf which sets out Hitler’s ideas on racial issues are couched in historical rather than biological-mystical terms and they represent only a section of his total ideological structure. His ideas on the primacy of race…came much more from Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the German nationalists, such publicists as F. Lange and Klaus Wagner, for example.”
Hitler's racism was a perversion of racist religious doctrines with a depth stretching back many centuries, of social Darwinism and his own warped ideologies born out of World War I. It is clear then, once again, creationists such as Richard Weikart have opted to flog a dead horse and to ignore documented, historical facts such as these documented by Hector Avalos (Professor of Religious Studies,
Iowa State University) in an article on the talkreason website.
