Darwinian
Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism and White Nationalism
Richard Weikart's New Book Cuts Through
Political Manipulation of History
Suffering is a commodity. Two recent
events demonstrated this. On March 27, 2022, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at
the Academy Awards. Many prominent African Americans, including Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar and Wanda
Sykes, condemned Smith's choice to resort to violence. Race hustlers,
though, depicted Will Smith as a victim of white supremacy. The
Guardian ran a piece calling reaction to Will Smith an example of
"downright racist … anti-blackness … inequality in plain sight."
"Race scholar" and Loyola Marymount University Professor Maia
Niguel Hoskin wrote that the slap "is about … White supremacist
culture designed to police the behavior of Blacks." Others focused on Jada
Pinkett Smith as a victim. "How a black woman’s hair grows out of her head
has been a constant battle in this country … while at the same time celebrating
white women for fitting your styles … Humiliating a black woman fighting for
equality is not a ha-ha moment. Making fun of a black woman a week after we saw
Ketanji Brown Jackson’s ambush" proves that "racism always finds a
way," wrote columnist Jeneé
Osterheldt.
A similar process of victim-mongering
occurred after Ketanji Brown Jackson was nominated for the Supreme Court. My
Facebook page was flooded with memes depicting Jackson as a helpless Little
Match Girl facing off against big, scary, white male dragons.
In fact, of course, Smith is worth an
estimated $350 million. He is one of the most profitable and popular film stars
who has ever lived. Jackson is the child of two professionals. She attended
Harvard and married surgeon Patrick Jackson, a Boston Brahmin and descendant of
a Continental Congress delegate and also a relative of Oliver Wendell Holmes
and former House Speaker Paul Ryan. She is a millionaire. White male Joe Biden
guaranteed her elevation by vowing, in a political promise to help him win an
election, to nominate only black women to the SCOTUS. Ilya Shapiro, a white man,
tweeted that Sri Srinavasan, an Indian immigrant, was the best qualified person
to be the next SCOTUS nominee. Shapiro was suspended from his job for this
tweet. Neither alleged "white male privilege" nor the first amendment
guarantee of free speech protected Shapiro from workplace retaliation for
expressing his opinion. Senate questions for Jackson were brief and mild
compared to the trials-by-fire endured by conservative nominees Clarence
Thomas, Robert Bork, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy
are all too real and unspeakably evil. But rushing to attribute criticism of
Will Smith or the Senate questioning of Ketanji Brown Jackson to past evils is
not warranted by the facts. People made those connections because they
commodify suffering to gain political ends. In this approach, suffering belongs
exclusively to African Americans. Race hustlers are currently depicting war-ravaged
Ukrainians as enjoying white privilege, as Joy
Reid did in her
March 7, 2022 broadcast.
Evil, like suffering, is also
commodified. Powerbrokers rush to monopolize the evil Nazis committed to serve
their own narrative ends. This commodification and monopolizing of evil
interferes with our desire to understand.
Americans have been struggling for
ninety years in their effort to tell the Nazi story accurately. This effort is
recorded, inter alia, in Peter Novick's 2000 book, The
Holocaust in American Life, Tom Segev's
The
Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, the This American
Life episode "Before It Had
a Name" and the documentary "Imaginary
Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust." It's hard to believe now, but
there was a time when Hollywood moguls were fearful of making accurate films addressing
Nazism. There was a time when Holocaust survivors and those who recorded their
stories, both in the US and in Israel, were ignored and silenced. In the Soviet
Bloc, the unique victimization of Jews under Nazism was suppressed to near
invisibility. There was a time, even after the publication of Mein Kampf,
when mainstream American and British magazines focused on the
interior decorating of Hitler's homes. In these articles, Hitler was
referred to as "charming."
In much American media produced before,
during, and immediately after World War II, Hitler was seen as a lone madman,
unconnected to previous history or culture, and Nazism almost as a kind of virus
– an alien force that infected otherwise innocent Germans. There was a great
deal of emphasis on depicting "good Germans," so that Americans could
learn to hate Nazis while not hating all Germans, because Germans were an
important part of America's cultural and economic life. This process of
condemning Nazism while shielding German identity from hatred is exemplified by
the 1951 best-picture-nominee, "Decision before Dawn."
See a discussion of how diligently this film works to exculpate "ordinary
Germans" from any guilt, here.
In profound contrast to this approach,
in 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. This book became a bestseller and an
international sensation. The book was accused, by serious scholars, of being
racist against Germans. Goldhagen, his critics alleged, depicted Germanness
itself as the guilty party. "No Germans, no Holocaust," as Goldhagen
put it. While others pointed to a perfect storm leading up to Hitler's rise,
including Germany's defeat in World War I, the violent rise of Communism in
Russia, the Versailles Treaty, the Depression, etc, Goldhagen insisted that
"Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state,
not social psychological pressure," caused Germans to kill, but rather
their own anti-Semitism. Raul
Hilberg, the "founder of the academic field of Holocaust
studies," said that Goldhagen depicted Germans as being possessed of
"a medieval-like incubus, a demon latent in the German mind ... waiting
for the chance to strike out." Hilberg said that Goldhagen is
"totally wrong about everything."
Another big change in how the story of
Nazism has been told is in how various retellings depict Christians and Christianity.
Nazism's ultimate goal was to eliminate Christianity (see here,
here,
here,
here,
here.)
See, for example, this
photo of a Nazi shooting Father Piotr Sosnowski to death, or priests
murdered in Bydgoszcz, here.
In material produced before and during the war, journalists and filmmakers
recorded Nazi persecution of Christians. See, for example, "Nazi
Persecution of the Catholic Church Shows They Fear It," from the June 1,
1936 New
York Times, or "3 Faiths Protest Nazi Persecution: A
Catholic, Protestant and Jew Represent the Conquered Peoples at Meeting
Here" from the November
14, 1941 issue. The Times covered clergy who resisted the Nazis, including
Dutch Archbishop
Johannes de Jong, German Bishop
von Galen, Belgian Cardinal
van Roey, Norwegian Lutheran Bishop
Eivind Berggrav, Serbian Orthodox Patriarch
Gavrilo, and the Swiss Calvinist Karl
Barth.
The 1943 Hollywood feature film, Hitler's
Madman dramatized the real-life assassination of top Nazi Reinhard
Heydrich by Czechoslovak partisans, and the subsequent retaliatory Nazi massacre
of the Czech village of Lidice. In that film, Heydrich plows
his car through a Czech Christian festival, and one of Heydrich's men shoots
the village priest dead. In real life, Heydrich was anti-Christian and he
identified "clerics" as well as Jews as among the German people's
"eternal" "enemies." Heydrich
devised ways to close and limit operation of churches.
Popular attention to Nazi persecution of
Catholics and other Christians changed dramatically after the 1963 play, "The
Deputy." "The Deputy" insinuated that Pope Pius XII shared guilt
for the Holocaust. One
image promoting the work depicts a monstrous face wearing a grotesque
caricature of Catholic vestments. One of the eyes in the face is replaced with
a swastika. Nazism = Catholicism, the image communicates. Playwright Rolf
Hochhuth was a former Hitler Youth member. Hochhuth went on to make other
shocking allegations. For example, his 1967 play Soldiers, An Obituary for
Geneva suggested that Winston Churchill plotted the murder of the Prime
Minister of the Polish Government in Exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski. There
is clearly a pattern here; Hochhuth wrote plays that denigrated WW II heroes of
the Allied side. Hochhuth also praised Holocaust-denier David Irving as a
"fabulous pioneer of contemporary history." Ion Mihai Pacepa, the
highest ranking defector from the Soviet Bloc to the West, and author of the
book Disinformation,
alleged that Hochhuth's play was part
of a KGB campaign. Whether Hochhuth intended it or not, his tarnishing of
Western anti-Nazi figures like Churchill and Pope Pius XII served Soviet
interests.
John Cornwell's 1999 book Hitler's
Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 2003 book
A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its
Unfulfilled Duty of Repair are representational of more recent works
condemning Catholics and Catholicism for Holocaust guilt. Both works were
criticized as severely flawed (see here,
here
and here).
Anti-Semitism from Christians is an
undeniable historical fact, and confronting that fact in an honest way with a
view to repentance and reconciliation is a good thing, and has been pursued by
the Vatican for decades, and, indeed, for centuries. Too many
Christians were at worst complicit in genocide and were at least not as heroic
as, say, Franz
Jägerstätter, Sophie
Scholl, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, or the Ulma Family,
all of whom were martyred for their resistance to Nazism. What is not a good
thing is the distortion of history by politics. "History is politics
projected into the past," said Mikhail Pokrovsky, the Russian Marxist
historian. We deserve a better approach to history.
In fact the Catholic Church was
notorious among intellectual elites one hundred years ago. It was notorious
because official Catholic teaching insisted on human equality, an insistence
that defied then current scientific racism, that argued against human equality
on scientific grounds. Noteworthy Catholic documents on the equality of humans
include, for example, the 1537 Sublimis Deus, which argues for the full
humanity of the then recently discovered Native Americans; the 1888 In Plurimis,
which argues for the full humanity of enslaved persons; Pius XI's 1938
statement that "Anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are
Semites," as well as his 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. Yes,
Catholics have certainly been bigoted and have committed crimes inspired by
their bigotry. But official Catholic Church teaching has insisted, for
centuries, on human equality, and, again, during the rise of scientific racism
one hundred years ago, this stance was seen as backward and anti-science.
Today, though, it has become
conventional in university classrooms, in the press and in popular books and
films, to conflate Nazism with Christianity. For one example, see this
2022 Reddit thread. An author attributes the Holocaust to an alleged Christian
"two
thousand year hatred" for Jews without which "there never could
have been the Holocaust."
For the "Nazism is Christian"
narrative to work, one must forget that the first and last victims of a Nazi
mass killing campaign were not Jews, but were, rather, handicapped Germans. The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum lists the following numbers for
civilians killed: Jews, six million. Soviet civilians, seven million.
Non-Jewish Polish civilians, 1.8 million. Further down, the list records deaths
of hundreds of thousands of Serb civilians, people with handicaps, Roma, aka
Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, "asocials," German political prisoners,
and homosexuals. Nazis persecuted mixed-race Germans, that is Germans with one
African parent, forcing them to undergo sterilization. Nazis murdered three
million Soviet POWs. Soviet POWs were the first to be gassed with Zyklon B.
They were also shot and starved
to death. German Nazis did not treat American or British POWs this way. If the
death toll includes military deaths, Nazis killed 24 million Soviet citizens. How
to explain these deaths?
No group suffered the same percentage
loss as Jews. Nazis
murdered over
60% of all Europe's pre-war Jewish population. Numbers of Gypsies killed
are uncertain; by
one estimate, half of Europe's Gypsies were killed by Nazis. Most of these
Gypsies were Christian. Even hard-hit Slavic countries like Poland, Belarus,
and Russia did not lose that high a percentage of their non-Jewish populations.
Even so, we are still talking about millions dead. To personalize those
millions of non-Jewish, largely Slavic deaths, think of Czeslawa Kwoka.
This sweet-faced, 14-year-old Polish Catholic girl was imprisoned, beaten, and
died in Auschwitz. Why did Nazis murder Polish Catholic children, not just in
Auschwitz but also in Kinder-KZ Litzmannstadt, a Nazi concentration camp
specifically for Polish, Catholic children, children as young as two years old?
Why did an SS man force children to watch as
he decapitated a 12-year-old Polish Catholic boy? Why did Nazis place
7-year-old Halina Bukowiecka on a train with other Polish Catholic children,
without food or water, for a days-long trip to Germany, where she and others
would be mistreated and sometimes killed? The Nazism = Christianity explanation
fails to explain these atrocities against largely Christian, civilian victims. We
need another explanation.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen exercises
"considerable distortion" to write off the persecution of non-Jews as
"incidental … mere tactical operations." Goldhagen's dismissal is
wrong. Soviet POWs, handicapped Germans, persons with one African and one
German parent, Polish Catholic two-year-olds: what ties all these targeted
populations together is not Christian anti-Semitism, but rather Nazism's
biological focus, a focus sometimes called "scientific racism,"
"social Darwinism," or "eugenics." All of these diverse
populations, in their millions, were deemed "life unworthy of life,"
and a biological threat to Germany.
Nazism advanced a new ethic, a new ethic
that explicitly rejected Christianity and was informed by scientific racism. Germans
should be kind and loving – to other Germans. Germans should ruthlessly exploit
and then mass murder those not conducive to German advancement. SS Reichsführer
Heinrich Himmler, in his speeches, stated this new ethic quite succinctly.
"We
will have to deal with Christianity in a tougher way than hitherto. We must
settle accounts with this Christianity, this greatest of plagues that could
have happened to us in our history, which has weakened us in every conflict …
We shall once again have to find a new scale of values for our people …
everything that we do must be justifiable vis-à-vis the clan, our ancestors. If
we do not secure this moral foundation which is the deepest and best because
the most natural, we will not be able to overcome Christianity on this plane
and create the Germanic Reich which will be a blessing for the earth … We must
be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody
else … Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only
in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture … Whether ten thousand
Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch
interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is
finished."
Himmler stated the Nazi ethic explicitly
in recorded speeches. Why, then, does one still encounter, in social media
debates on the internet, in college classrooms, and in high-profile published
books and journalism, so little about the role scientific racism played in
Nazism, and so much about Christian anti-Semitism? Because evil and suffering
are commodities. If one can attribute absolute evil to Christianity, then one
has struck a blow against Christianity, against religious belief, and against
Western Civilization; and one has struck a blow for their competitors,
including scientism, relativism, Marxism, and Atheism.
Atheists like to say that religion has killed
more people than any other cause. This statement is fabricated out of thin air,
but one hears it frequently, without support, of course. Atheists like to
present Atheism as the panacea. If only we could all wise up and acknowledge
that there is no God, war would cease. If only we could replace backward,
superstitious religious belief with scientism, human life would improve
stratospherically.
John Lennon's "Imagine"
encapsulates this approach. "Imagine there's no heaven … No hell below us
… Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too … Imagine all the people
livin' life in peace." Steven Pinker, in his 2011 book The Better
Angels of Our Nature, corelates "The Escalator of Reason," that
is a posited increase in rational thought, to a decline in human violence. The
title of Michael Shermer's 2015 book The Moral Arc: How Science Leads
Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom announces the book's thesis. Oxford
Fellow and atheist Peter Atkins argues in
a 2018 article that "only science can answer all the big
questions" while religion offers only "the sword, the bomb or the
flame." To acknowledge that top theorists justified Nazi crimes with an
explicit rejection of the Judeo-Christian ethic and with reference to science
and rationality is a bridge too far for devout Atheists.
The very best author to read on Nazism's
roots in scientific racism is Richard Weikart. A great place to start reading
Weikart is his brief, accessible, 2022 book, Darwinian
Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.
Richard Weikart has been publishing on Germany, Nazism, and Darwin for over twenty years. His work
has been published by the University of Chicago Press and it has appeared in
peer-reviewed journals. He has presented at numerous academic conferences. He
is an emeritus professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus.
Weikart is fluent in German, was a Fulbright scholar in Germany, and lived in
Germany for five years. His work has been called, by
his fellow scholars, "masterful," "outstanding,"
"sober," " insightful, thoughtful, informative, and highly
readable."
Why, then, has Weikart's work not made
the same splash as work by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen or John Cornwell? Why do some
Amazon readers award Weikart's books one-star, as does this poorly punctuated
three-sentence review: "Hitler was baptized as a Christian and died a
Christian. I would not even give this book 1 star not even worth reading" (sic).
Why does Robert
J. Richards, the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the
History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago, dismiss Weikart
as a "religious conservative" who sees shapes in clouds? Why is
Richards an endowed chair at the prestigious University of Chicago, why is John
Cornwell at Cambridge, and why did Goldhagen teach at Harvard, while Weikart
spent his career at a less prestigious school? Why? Because Richard Weikart
tells unpopular truths. Nazism was inspired by Darwinism. It is simply less
popular to state that basic truth than to pump out yet another trite attack on
Catholicism in particular and religious belief in general.
In his books that I have read, Weikart
never exculpates Christianity, or denies Christian anti-Semitism, or Nazism's
exploitation of pre-existing anti-Semitism to accomplish its evil ends. Weikart
never claims that being a Christian or any other kind of religious believer
exempts one from committing atrocities. He makes clear that Darwin was no Nazi,
and that believing in Darwinism does not turn one into a Nazi. Weikart
emphasizes that many factors, having nothing to do with Darwinism, contributed
to the rise of Nazism. But Weikart is crystal clear and irrefutable on his main
point: Nazis themselves cited a Darwinian evolutionary worldview as
foundational to their ethic and their genocidal behavior.
Nazis rejected the Judeo-Christian ethic
that had been foundational to Western Civilization. Nazis rejected the concept,
unique to the Hebrew Bible's book of Genesis, that all humans were equally
created in the image of God, and that, therefore, unjustly ending any human
life carries an eternal cost. Nazis regarded human beings as comparable to
animals, the very animals we slaughter without much thought. Nazis rejected
Christian concepts of compassion. Nazis embraced the idea that human groups are
arranged on an evolutionary hierarchy, with higher and lower forms. Nazis
enthusiastically embraced the idea of struggle as perfecting the species, of
"survival of the fittest" as the highest and unquestionable good, and
of death as the just destroyer of uncompetitive life. Nazis reduced "life
unworthy of life" to a biological threat to the German species. Jews, handicapped
Germans, Christian Gypsies and Slavs, were biological threats that needed to be
destroyed just as rats or lice are destroyed in order to enable the flourishing
of the desired species. Any "Christian compassion" extended to
non-group members was deleterious and condemnable. Nazis spelled out these
beliefs in document after document, speech after speech, textbook after
textbook. Weikart documents this in exhaustive detail.
Is Weikart threatening Darwinian
evolution as a scientific theory? Not for this reader. I accept Darwinian
evolution and I have never read anything by Weikart that caused me to doubt
Darwinian evolution. But Weikart's work makes plain that powerful people
accepted Darwinian evolution and made the immediate leap into genocide.
One can witness the leap from Darwin to
genocide in German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel's ironically titled 1904 book The Wonders
of Life. On page 121, Haeckel argues strenuously against the
belief in "the immortality of the soul" or in "an all loving
God." How could a human being who was "utterly ruined … born an
idiot" enjoy eternal life in Heaven, Haeckel asks. "Pathology, the
science of the diseased organism" obliterates faith in God. On page 122,
Haeckel argues that "the widespread belief that man is bound under all
circumstances to maintain and prolong life" is a senseless religious
dogma. "Lunatics, lepers, people with cancer" Haeckel protests, are
kept alive "without the slightest profit to themselves or the general body."
"What a huge public and private expenditure!" he mourns, on page 123.
"A dose of morphia" or a "dose of some painless and rapid
poison" "under the control of an authoritative commission" would
solve the problem. Then, just as the Nazis did – see the opening of Leni
Riefenstahl film Olympia
– Haeckel jumps over 2,000 years of Christian influence on ethics and returns
to the ancient, Pagan world, where parents had the good sense to commit
infanticide of their defective offspring. "The ancient Spartans" owed
their "bodily strength and beauty as well as their mental energy and
capacity" to the infanticide of the "weak or crippled."
"Religious journals" protest with "pious indignation"
"as always happens when pure reason" "opposes prejudices and
traditional beliefs" "Religion" is "irrational and superstitious."
Haeckel's argument is not unique.
Similar intellectual journeys were taken by others, including Lothrop Stoddard
and Madison Grant, two big names in American scientific racism. Stoddard's 1922
book, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man,
praises Darwin as making Stoddard's own racist ideas possible. Stoddard positions
Darwin as an authoritative opponent of "The Christian doctrine of the
equality of all souls before God." He blames this doctrine for
"appeals to altruism" which mistakenly encourage efforts to improve
"inferior" lives. Stoddard denigrates the compassion springing from
Christian teachings of "equality" as "emotional"
"mystic faith." To replace these inferior approaches, Stoddard
recommends "science" and "reason" because both inarguably
demonstrate that some human lives are worthless. "During the past ten
years biology and kindred sciences have refuted practically all the
intellectual arguments on which the doctrine of 'natural equality'
relies." Stoddard spent time in Nazi Germany and reported the chummy
conversations he shared with Himmler. He observed Nazi eugenics procedures
and granted those procedures his stamp of approval. Nazis were "weeding
out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly
humanitarian way."
Margaret Sanger, who founded what would
become Planned Parenthood, cited Darwin when, in 1920, she bemoaned
"philanthropies and charities" that "build asylums and hospitals
and keep the medical profession busy preserving those who could not otherwise
survive." Sanger voiced an opinion that would appear again and again in
Darwin-inspired commentary, including that produced by Nazis: that there is a
greater difference between the highest and lowest human and that lowest human
and an animal. Because of this differential between more highly evolved humans
and less evolved ones, Sanger argued, external control of human reproduction is
necessary. In
1916, Sanger wrote, "the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known
species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain
development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents
him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets." Compare this
Sanger statement to one by Ernst Haeckel, "The distance between the
thinking soul of the cultured human and the thoughtless animal soul of the wild
natural human is extremely vast, greater than the distance between the latter
and the soul of a dog." And compare Sanger and Haeckel to this statement:
"The gulf between the lowest creature which can still be styled man and
our highest races is greater than that between the lowest type of man and the
highest ape." The final speaker is Hitler.
In 1916, Madison Grant published The
Passing of the Great Race, a book Hitler called his "bible." Scholar
Jonathan Spiro writes that "Mein
Kampf is riddled with passages that seem directly inspired by The Passing of the Great Race" some
"encapsulate all the aspects of Grantian thought including the primacy of
race" and "the worship of modern science." Grant wrote,
"The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life
is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race … The church
assumes a serious responsibility toward the future of the race whenever it
steps in and preserves a defective strain … A rigid system of selection through
the elimination of those who are weak or unfit – in other words, social
failures – would solve the whole question in one hundred years."
Grant, an environmentalist who cofounded
the Bronx Zoo, played a role in placing Ota Benga, a Pygmy, on display with
primates in 1906. The goal was to demonstrate that Benga was close to a monkey
himself. The Evening Post reported that Benga "has a great
influence with the beasts … including
the orang-outang with whom he plays as though one of them … chattering to them
in his own guttural tongue, which they seem to understand." The Rev. James
H. Gordon said, "The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to
Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be
permitted." The always enlightened New York Times responded
that Ota Benga "belongs to a race that scientists do not rate high in the
human scale…The idea that men are all much alike … is now far out of date."
Benga, being low on the evolutionary scale, was, the Times wrote, not
capable of experiencing "humiliation and degradation." Benga
eventually committed suicide.
Nor did Grant, Stoddard, and other
Darwin-citing, scientific racists limit their disdain to dark-skinned people. Eastern
and Southern Europeans were also deemed racially inferior. America's mainstream
and even scholarly presses – including the New
York Times, The
Saturday Evening Post, The
American Anthropologist, Colliers and The Atlantic were
flooded with inflammatory racist material denigrating Poles, Slovaks, Jews, and
Italians as subhuman. As sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross put it, "A Slav
can live in dirt that would kill a white man." Ironically, Grant, a
self-declared member of the superior Nordic race, but, an arthritic, was too
frail to testify in front of Congress. Even so, through lobbying, Grant
influenced Congress to pass immigration restriction targeting allegedly
racially inferior Eastern and Southern Europeans.
This history violates the monopoly race
hustlers claim over evil and suffering. Eastern and Southern Europeans were
white and largely Christian. These white, Christian peasants were subject to
murderous and hateful racism. They were lynched, exploited at work sites, and
defamed.
In short, those seeking the roots of
Nazism in Christianity are commodifying evil and suffering to serve their own
petty vendetta against faith and to shield science from critique. Those
genuinely about the heartbreaking, demanding work of understanding atrocity
will benefit from reading Richard Weikart.
Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism
Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism, is a must-read intro to Weikart's entire
oeuvre. Though jam-packed with facts and citations, Darwinian Racism is
an easier, quicker read than Weikart's more scholarly works.
Weikart proves that Nazis themselves
believed themselves to be good Darwinians. They got this idea not from fringe
publications or conspiracy theories but from esteemed scientists. Chapter one
of Weikart's book includes Darwin quotes which, even if you have encountered
them in other contexts, are newly shocking in the context of a discussion of
genocide. "We may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of
nature is not incessant … that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive
and multiply … Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most
exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the
production of the higher animals, directly follows" (emphasis added). These
exact words could appear in a Himmler speech justifying the Einsatzgruppen.
Obviously, Darwin and Himmler would apply a different valence to the words. Compare
that quote to this one, "War is thus the unalterable law of all life, the
precondition for the natural selection of the strong … What appears to people
thereby as cruel is from the standpoint of nature obviously wise." The
speaker of this last quote is Hitler.
Weikart shows, in chapter two, that
Hitler held to a Darwinian worldview. In chapter three, Weikart amply
demonstrates that Darwinian evolution was advanced by Nazis in Nazi-mandated
school curricula. "Nature eliminates everything sick and weak. All life is
struggle. The weak perish," reads the captions on a series of drawings
depicting a fox eating a rabbit, a bird falling from the sky, and other
cheerful, very non-Disney themes pounded into the heads of German tots. Catholics
protested; Konrad Lorenz, who would later win a Nobel Prize, countered,
"evolution provided an even more elevated ideal" than Catholicism did.
The elevated ideal the church of Darwin promised was "the higher evolution
of humanity." "For us the race and volk are everything … the
individual person as good as nothing."
Lorenz was a Nazi Party member. His ethic
directly contradicts the Talmud's commentary on Genesis' insistence that we all
descend, not from a plethora of diverse creations, but from one couple, Adam
and Eve. This descent, the Talmud informs us, means that to murder one person
is to murder the entire world. Similarly, the Talmud teaches that after Cain murders
Abel, not just Abel's "blood," but his "bloods," plural,
cry out from the ground. Why is "blood" plural? The
Talmud explains: "This teaches that it was also the blood of his
children and his children’s children, and all his future generations, until the
end of the human line, that would have one day descended from him. They all
stood up and cried out before the Holy Blessed One. (So you learn from this
that one person is considered as important as the entire work of
Creation.)" Clearly, in the ethic of the Hebrew Bible, murder is a big
deal. To the Darwin-inspired Nazi, to kill an individual who is not a member of
one's own volk, "the individual person is as good as nothing."
Chapter four of Weikart's book records
the many other Darwinian Nazi scientists at work during the Third Reich. Hans
Weinert, one of the scientists Weikart discusses in chapter four, was a
university anthropologist. In the interest of advancing Darwinian science, Weinert
proposed inseminating a chimpanzee with sperm from a Pygmy. Such hideous
proposals are not limited to Nazi scientists from decades ago. In 2001, Richard
Dawkins, arguably the most famous, celebrated, and charismatic atheist and
Darwinian in the world today, encouraged
his fellow scientists to use genetic engineering to create a "missing
link" between apes and humans. "The same benefits in moral education
would be delivered by a successful hybridisation of a human and a chimpanzee …
it would shatter our speciesist illusions very effectively." Dawkins goes
on to compare aborting a human fetus to eating beef, using that as an
illustration of "speciesism." Himmler similarly complained of
"speciesism." "Man is nothing special at all … He has no idea
how a fly is constructed – however unpleasant, it is a miracle," Himmler
said, in one of his speeches justifying the genocide of human beings.
In chapter five, Weikart covers eugenics
and euthanasia. Those adopting these policies believed themselves to be
Darwinists. They cited Darwin's statements like, "Hardly anyone is so
ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed." Weikart quotes Darwin
contrasting the "hard reason" that might encourage callous treatment
of handicapped persons with "sympathy." In the Christian worldview,
"sympathy" is not the opposite of "hard reason." Rather,
Christians like the geophysicist and Catholic Xavier le Pichon, regard
handicapped persons as necessary
and beneficial parts of God's creation.
Chapter six documents Nazi propaganda's
promotion of Darwinism. Nazi propaganda did "not just mention Darwinism in
passing, but accorded it a prominent place in Nazi racial ideology." Chapter
seven charts Nazi Germany's treatment of German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel. The
above-mentioned Robert J. Richards claims that Nazi Germany rejected Haeckel.
Weikart proves Richards' claim false. Heinz Brucher was a world class botanist,
a Nazi Party member, an SS Sammelkommando – that is, one who stole seed
research from the Soviet Union – and, after the war, a biology advisor to
UNESCO. Before Nazis began their T4 euthanasia program, "Heinz Brucher was
publicly lauding Haeckel for advocating the killing of disabled people." Heinrich
Schmidt, Haeckel's protegee and director of the Haeckel house, wrote in 1934
that, "In the new Reich, his [Haeckel's] ideas about biology … are
celebrating a surprisingly powerful resurrection. The religious trajectory of
the present is often traveling in the course of his simple, yet sublime nature
religion."
In chapter eight, Weikart lists American
neo-Nazis and white supremacists who embrace Darwinism. He cites the 1896 book Might
is Right, which repeatedly cites Darwin as the new gospel. The book is
available for free at white supremacist websites. "As Darwin commands, let
the strongest live," author Ragnar Redbeard writes. No longer should
humanity follow the "hypnotic myth that centers around the execution of a
Hebrew slave." "Christ was a pariah Jew." "Darwinism is the
mortal foe of Hebraism." We must reject "the Gospel of
Ineffectuality." Our heroes must be "brutal," made so through
"brutal warfare, brutal personal encounters, brutal thoughts."
"A man is brutal who will not turn the other cheek." Redbeard
parodies the Christian beatitudes. He writes, "Cursed are the unfit for
they shall be righteously exterminated." Like the Nazis, Haeckel, and many
New Atheists today who regret the Judeo-Christian influence on Western
Civilization, Redbeard wishes to turn the clock back to Ancient Paganism,
focused, as it was, on amoral beauty, strength, health, youth, selfish desires,
and raw power. Redbeard writes, "In ancient Rome, it was considered the
height of impiety, heresy, and treason, for free born citizens to adore a
circumcised Asiatic [Jesus], but in America it is considered pious and
fashionable and highly commendable to do so." Redbeard also bemoans
Christianity's negative influence on manly Nordic Pagans. Christians banned the
"holmgang," a one-on-one fight to settle disputes. "When
Clericalism abolished the holmgang the pride of Norland silently waned away …
when it banned gladiatorial contests, the Eternal City had its day."
Robert J. Richards has written "Was
Hitler a Darwinian?" a 2013, 54-page rebuttal to Richard Weikart's
work. Richards repeatedly resorts to ad hominem commentary, referring to anyone
who mentions Darwinism's influence on Nazism as a "conservative"
"religious" thinker; in fact Richards does this in his first
sentence, and repeats the ad hominem comment four times; "religious"
is also used to dismiss other "constricted" "thinkers" four
times, as in "a myriad of religious and politically constricted
thinkers." Such thinkers are not "reputable." Richards explicitly
blames Christianity for Nazism. Richards claims that Hitler admired
Christianity's "greatness." Richards draws a straight line from
Martin Luther to Nazism.
In 1919, Julius Streicher helped to
found the Deutschsozialistische
Partei a nationalist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic party. Soon
thereafter he joined the Nazi party. In 1923, he began publishing Der
Sturmer, an anti-Semitic and also an anti-Catholic
newspaper. In 1937, Streicher was given a copy of Martin Luther's "The
Jews and their Lies" for his birthday. Many authors cite this as
Streicher's first encounter with Luther's work. Streicher was 52 at the time.
He had been a leading German anti-Semite for at least 18 years. He had been
publishing the most notorious anti-Semitic newspaper in history for 14 years. Streicher
is not alone. Johannes Wallmann
argues against the idea that Luther's sixteenth-century tract was continuously
influential in Germany. In any case, Luther raged violently against the
Catholic Church, and his Reformation was followed by two centuries of vicious blood-letting
by Catholics and Protestants on each other. The Nazis did not oppose
Catholicism because of Martin Luther. The Nazis opposed Catholicism for their
own reasons.
The most notorious Nazi anti-Semitic
film, The Eternal Jew, conflated Jews and rats. It depicted Jews as
biological and economic threats. The most successful Nazi propaganda film, Jud
Suss, relied on images of Jews as middleman minorities who manipulated the
powerful to their own economic enrichment and the impoverishment of the German
middle and lower classes. Nazis did not choose Luther's tract as their primary
propaganda instrument. They choose biological and economic imagery. Aligning
their anti-Semitism most significantly with Christianity did not meet Nazi
ideological ends. Presenting their anti-Semitism as rooted in biology,
economics, and culture did.
Richards mentions only Jews as victims
of the Nazis, and anti-Semitism as the only Nazi hate. Richards thus never has
to address why Nazis murdered handicapped Germans, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals,
Polish children, and why Nazis sterilized Germans of African descent. Richards
creates a strawman, insisting that Weikart cannot prove Darwinian evolution to
be incorrect. I don't think Weikart ever attempts to do that, certainly not in
the book under review here. Richards writes that Haeckel's "own moral
theory certainly did not abandon Judeo-Christian precepts." In fact, as
the above quotes show, it certainly did exactly that. Richards makes a mistake
many invested in the "white privilege" assumption about racism make.
Only whites are racist; only non-whites are victims of racism. Richards
identifies Madison Grant as prejudiced against Slavs – he was – but Richards
inexplicably calls "Poles, Czechs, and Russians" "swarthy."
In other words, because Grant denigrated Slavs, Slavs must be dark-skinned.
Most Slavs are in fact quite pale. Richards claims that "nowhere does
Hitler even use" "any word that obviously refers to evolutionary
theory." In fact Hitler does, and he also refers to the "struggle for
existence," for example, "the natural struggle for existence which
allows only healthy and strong individuals to survive is replaced by a sheer
craze to 'save' feeble and even diseased creatures at any cost." I asked
Weikart about the specific term "evolution" in Mein Kampf in
the original German. Weikart wrote back that Richards "argued that the
German term 'Entwicklung,' which can be translated as 'development' or
'evolution' was no longer being used by biologists during Hitler’s time to
refer to biological evolution. This is completely false. Biologists during the
entire twentieth century used the term 'Entwicklung' to mean
evolution."
As I write this, Russians are committing
atrocities in Ukraine. In one intercepted phone call,
a laughing Russian woman tells her man to wear a condom when raping Ukrainian
women. A Russian soldier has been arrested for filming assaults on babies. He
apparently hoped to market the videos. Commodifying evil and suffering to
insist that white skin or Christianity explains wrongdoing, and even reactions
to Will Smith's Oscar slap, is abhorrent. The Judeo-Christian tradition insists
on a different approach. We are all culpable – white, black, rich, poor,
believer, Atheist – "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of
God." We must all monitor our behavior in order to comply with God's
commands based on the premise that we are all made in the image and likeness of
God.
We may never be fully able to get into
the minds of individual Nazis who committed atrocities. But we can read, in
clear prose, their justifications for genocide. Those justifications were, more
often than not, written out in the logic of scientific racism and a rejection
of the Judeo-Christian ethic.
Danusha Goska
is the author of God
through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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