Wrong, facts that few people know.
Nazi racial theories were based on Darwin's "struggle for existence". His book was entitled My Struggle. "The preservation of favored races in the struggle for life" was Darwin's theme in the Descent of Man .... and the essence of Nazi racial science. Hitlerism was Darwinism applied.
From wikipedia:
“The worst danger is that we are interrupting the natural selection process ourselves (by caring for the sick and the weak). ... The most far-sighted racial state in history, Sparta, systematically implemented these racial laws.”[25]
25.^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Heinsohn, Gunnar (November 2000). "What Makes the Holocaust a Uniquely Unique Genocide". Journal of Genocide Research 2 (3): 411–430. doi:10.1080/713677615. migs.concordia.ca.
The racial laws to which Hitler referred resonate directly with his ideas in Mein Kampf. In his first edition of Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that the destruction of the weak and sick is far more humane than their protection. However, apart from his allusion to humane treatment, Hitler saw a purpose in destroying "the weak" in order to provide the proper space and purity for the strong.[26]
26.^ A. Hitler. Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1930), pg 478
And from:
migs.concordia.ca
....
In the first edition of Volume I of Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler
had written: “The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, i.e. their annihilation, was in reality a thousand times more humane than the deplorable lunacy of our present-day time.”29
Where, for example, infanticide is replaced by prophylactic birth control, and every child born is thus a wanted child, the “obsession” emerges of “saving” even the weakest, even the sickest, at all costs. […] A stronger race will banish the weaker ones, for in the end the instinct to survive will always break the ridiculous bonds of a so-called humanity of the individual, allowing the humanity of nature to take
its place, a humanity which destroys the weak to provide space for the strong. Therefore, he who wants to ensure the existence of the German nation through a self-limitation of its
reproductive process is depriving it of the future.30
At the 1929 party convention in Nuremberg, Hitler publicly opposed the “Jew’s train of thought,” citing an older—Indo-Germanic—right:
If one million children were born in Germany per year and 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest eliminated, the final result might possibly even be an increase of strength. The worst danger is that we are interrupting the natural selection process ourselves (by caring for the sick and weak). … The most far-sighted racial state of history, Sparta, ystematically implemented these racial laws.32
When the killing of the handicapped was fully under way, on December 4, 1940, a High Consistory of Stuttgart, Reinhold Sautter, engaged, in a private discussion Eugen Staehle, Hitler’s official in charge of the gassing facilities in
the psychiatric clinic of Grafeneck, Wuerttemberg. Staehle reprimanded Sautter urging him to stop the transgression of a divine law, saying “The fifth commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ is not a commandment of God at all but a Jewish invention.”33
Basically, Staehle let Sautter know that the clergyman— though probably not a friend of the Jews—was verjudet, like all the churches, a victim of Jewification.
Hitler’s people knew about the “Jewish invention” of the prohibition of killing, no less than the Bishop of Muenster. There was an indirect dialogue going on between the two sides. Of course, we cannot prove that Staehle’s statement was made according to highest orders. Yet, we know that he himself
is not on record for having carried out investigations on the history of the Occidental code. We know, however, that he hit upon a correct observation—the civilization of the world did indeed receive its law forbidding murder from Judaism: “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17).
Pagan authors of antiquity already reported on the extensive elaboration of this Judaic law. It is the first to comprise protection of the newborn, whose killing was allowed in the Greco-Roman cultural complex when called for by considerations of birth control or health. In 300 BCE, for example, the Greek philosopher Hecateus of Abdera was positively astounded by the fact that the Jews raise all of their children. 34 In the first century CE, the major historian of the Roman empire, Tacitus, wrote of the Jews, “It is a mortal sin to kill an unwanted child” (Histories Vol 5).35
.....
Not until the year 318 CE was the Judaic prohibition against infanticide enacted by the Roman empire under Constantine the Great, never again to be formally expunged from the criminal statutes of the Occident and the Europeanized nations.36 India, under the British, outlawed infanticide in 1839.37 In
about 1900 Japan had done the same.38 In 1949, China followed suit.39 Hitler’s circle had fully understood that the prohibition of infanticide is not a law of nature but a moral principle created by man—by “the Jews”—and, therefore,
also abolishable by man.
.....
How does one have to read statements like these or the passage reported by Rauschning—“The Tables of Mount Sinai have lost their validity, Conscience is a Jewish invention./In earlier ages there existed the good right of the victor to
exterminate entire tribes, entire nations”? On December 5, 1940, Hitler approved the plans of the Wehrmacht to attack Soviet Russia and to annex it up to the Ural Mountains, i.e. up to the border of Asia.49 From different sources it becomes
clear what Hitler meant with his announcement from November 5, 1937: “I am not dealing with winning new people but with agriculturally usable space.”
....
Admiral Canaris, the chief of German intelligence (Abwehr), had conveyed this to the British:
Genghis Khan drove millions of women and children to their death, consciously and light-heartedly. […] I [Hitler] gave the order—and I will have anyone who utters even a word of criticism shot—that the war aim does not consist of reaching certain lines but of the physical destruction of the enemy. It is for this purpose that I have assembled my death’s-head squads, for the time being only in the East, with the command to send [every] man, woman and child of Polish descent and tongue to their death, mercilessly and pitilessly. Only by these means can the Lebensraum we require be gained.50
Note: The Nazis recognized Genghis Khan as a fellow freethinker.
After Germany’s own mentally handicapped and the seriously wounded German soldiers, the Polish elite became—in late September 1939—the third group to be exterminated by Hitler-Germany: “There must be [Hitler on October 2, 1940] no Polish members of the elite in occupied Poland. Where they exist they have to be killed—even if this may sound hard.”51 His party’s race-political of? ce [Rassepolitisches Amt der Reichsleitung der NSDAP] had already demanded in Autumn 1939: “In the long run the complete deletion of the Polish
nation [Polentum]”52 must be achieved.
.....
‘A ridiculous hundred million Slavs’,” Hitler proclaimed [on August 6, 1942], “will we absorb or expell?”56 Already in June 1940, Heinrich Himmler, chief of SS and police, had informed twelve leaders of the SS that “30 million of the Slavic population” 57 of the Soviet Union were to be killed outright. “Twenty-nine million”58 were to be worked to death to lay the infrastructure for some 20 million German settlers. The remaining 30–40 million were to be expelled to Siberia—with a killing rate of such deportations reaching some 30 percent or 10–13 million. The expelled were even to keep their leader, Stalin, whom Hitler characterized, on July 11, 1941, as one “of the most extraordinary ? gures of world history.”59
Hitler shows grudging respect for his fellow freethinker, Stalin.
.....
Cleansing the Germans from Judaism’s principle of the sanctity of life by eliminating the Jews
In hindsight, we know a lot about the crimes of the Wehrmacht and not only of the SS. But Hitler was worried to the end that he would fail in his re-education of the average German male. After all the purges of his of? cers’ corps it still did not function as ordered. General Blaskowitz—chief of staff in occupied Poland, a devoted German nationalist and soldier—did not only show a lack of ruthlessness. He collected information on the atrocities of the SS units and the Einsatzgruppen killing the Polish elite and sent it—on November 27, 1939—to his superiors in Berlin. On February 2, 1940, he demanded—together with General Ulex—to use the Wehrmacht to round up the SS units and remove them:69 They wrote to Berlin:
The army views the SS and the police [under SS command] with abomination and hatred. Every soldier feels disgusted and abhorred by these crimes committed in Poland by citizens
of the Reich and representatives of the state. He does not understand how such atrocities— taking place, so to speak, under his protection—can go unpunished.70
Hitler had prepared himself for his soldiers’ “pangs of consciousness” and, therefore, had kept his genocidal policy a secret—as he had done with “euthanasia” within Germany. Other than with “euthanasia,”71 however, there was—very much like in the Holocaust—no order signed by Hitler himself to eliminate Poland’s elite.72 The orders came from the SS to whom Hitler had given verbal orders. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS-police, wrote on July 2, 1940:
The orders for the police were so radical—e.g., the order to liquidate many Polish elite circles amounting to the thousands—that, of course, could not be conveyed to the commanding officers in the field or to their superior staff [in Berlin].73
The Germans—as Hitler saw it—were still in the grip of the Jewish code of ethics or Jewified Christianity. On January 20, 1940, his adjutant reported him saying:
The Wehrmacht is still running to the drumhead services. […] But, at the same time, the education of the SS points to the right direction. It would prove that—with the right
ideological education—one can be courageous without God.74
The SS education especially assaulted the Jewish commandments pertaining to charity and the protection of life. In the place of love, honor was demanded; in the place of sympathy, duty.75 The removal of Jewish ethics from Christianity was, however, estimated to be a tremendously difficult task, for from the beginning this religion was “subjected to decomposition/destruction [Zersetzung] by the Jews.”76
There can be no doubt that this education went back to Hitler’s own ideas. On February 17, 1942, at his headquarters, he lamented that:
The same Jew who once smuggled Christianity into the world of antiquity and destroyed it, that wonderful thing, has now found another weak spot: the dazed conscience of our present generation. […] Peace can only come by way of a natural order. The order demands that the nations merge in such a way that those who are capable lead. He who is inferior thus obtains more than he could ever achieve on his own. This order is being destroyed by the Jews.77
.....
Hitler’s evaluation of the concept of conscience most probably transforms ideas originating with Friedrich Nietzsche. He had studied parts of his writings in Landsberg prison in 1923. Nietzsche had written in 1882:
Sin is a Jewish feeling and a Jewish invention, and in view of this background to all Christian morality, Christianity was in fact out to “Jewify” the entire world.78
migs.concordia.ca
The "Aryan" supremacist and anti-Semite, Ernst Haeckel, was the greatest promoter and popularizer of Darwin's theories in Germany. Haeckel learned his Darwinism directly from the Master himself when he journeyed to England as a young man to meet him and study under him, staying in Darwin's house while there. Haeckel was highly esteemed by Darwin as a fellow scientist - note this glowing tribute to Haeckel from the introduction to 'The Descent of Man':
" ... and especially by Häckel. This last naturalist, besides his great work, Generelle Morphologie (1866), has recently (1868, with a second edit. in 1870), published his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, in which he fully discusses the genealogy of man. If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine.
pages.britishlibrary.net
Historian Daniel Gasman's book, ''The Scientific Origins of National Socialism" (available online at helsinki.fi reveals the formative influence of evolutionary theory taught by Haeckel on the development of Nazism in Germany:
". ... Haeckel was one of the most vociferous opponents of the Jews, and his importance for the history of anti-Semitism in Germany is that he did much to bring the Jewish question into the realm of biology. As in all questions the Jews were subjected by Haeckel to 'scientific' analysis and he, along with his other anti-Semitic contemporaries, discovered that the Jews possessed inborn racial characteristics which apparently were resistant to change."
Gasman goes on to reveal that "... a number of Hitler's conversations and the content of some of his writings emerge as an extended paraphrase and at times even plagiarism of Haeckel's Natiirliche Schöpfungsgeschichte and the Welträtsel."
Note that this Natiirliche Schöpfungsgeschichte is the same work Darwin praised so highly: "If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by this naturalist, whose knowledge on many points is much fuller than mine."
Thus we see there was a direct intellectual connection between Darwin and Haeckel, who shared the same scientific racial ideas, and a similar connection between Haeckel and Hitler.
The relationship between Darwinism and Nazi racial science was not always a matter of embarrasment as shown by the following qutoes from evolutionist Arthur Keith's (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons) Evolution and Ethics:
"The leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice." (p.10)
"We see HITLER devoutly convinced that evolution provides the only real basis for a national policy." (p.27)
"The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution." (p.230)
Additional references on the subject:
Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism
George Stein, Biological science and the roots of Nazism
E. Jackel, Hitler’s Weltanschauung
K. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz
In regard to eugenics, again, Darwin was the intellectual originator. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man:
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that [altruistic behavior toward the weak and infirm] must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race [of animals]; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
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Connecting Hitler and Darwin
By: David Berlinski
discovery.org
Don't Doubt It
An important historic sidebar on Hitler and Darwin
By: David Klinghoffer
discovery.org
What’s wrong with uttering “Darwin” and “Hitler” in the same breath?
William Dembski
uncommondescent.com
darwindayinamerica.com
Darwin and the Nazis
By: Richard Weikart
discovery.org
evolutionnews.org
evolutionnews.org
CommentsDarwin and Hitler: In Their Own Words
by Benjamin Wiker
humanevents.com
The Darwin/Nazi Connection
Jack Cashill discusses the connection between Darwin and Nazi racial ideology here:
Darwin critics know Ernst Haeckel as the German philosopher whose faked embryo drawings helped generations of clueless students accept Darwinism--“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and all that.
But there is still another problem with Haeckel, a darker one than mere fraud. Critics of the Ben Stein film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, apparently do not know this.
If they had, they would not have savaged Stein for daring to connect Adolph Hitler to Charles Darwin . In Scientific American, for instance, editor John Rennie describes this connection as “heavy-handed.” In Reuters, Frank Scheck calls it “truly offensive.”
It reality, it is neither. If anything, Stein and the makers of Expelled understate this historically irrefutable link, and the key to understanding it is Haeckel.
Born in Potsdam in 1834, Haeckel read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in the summer it was first published in German, 1860, and fell immediately under its sway. He could see straight off that Darwin offered a useful exit strategy from a God-dominated cosmos.
Once liberated, Haeckel created his own secular religion called “Monism.” Not lacking for confidence, he imagined Monism as nothing less than a unified, naturalistic understanding of the entire universe.
“The modern science of evolution has shown that there never was any such creation,” claims Haeckel of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “but that the universe is eternal and the law of substance all-ruling.”
In his 1971 book, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, Dr. Daniel Gasman of John Jay College shows the “decisive” role that Haeckel played in the development of the German “Volkish” movement, a revival of pre-Christian German culture and spiritualism that found its eventual ecological outlet in the Holocaust.
As it happens, many of the most influential Volkish spokesmen were tied in with either Haeckel or his Monist followers. These were the semi-respectable zanies that found common cause in National Socialism, and they were problem enough.
But it was in the field of eugenics and racial science that Haeckel had the most direct and lethal impact. Germany’s leading advocates of racial anthropology and eugenics, notes Gasman, “were deeply and consciously indebted to Haeckel for many, if not for most, of their ideas.”
Otto Ammon, (1842-1916), a Haeckel disciple, went public with what many Darwinists prefer to keep private, and that is the oddly spiritual nature of the Darwinian experience.
“In obvious imitation of Haeckel,” writes Gasman, “Ammon taught that Darwinism had to become Germany’s new religion. It had to be accepted as a complete Weltanschauung and its ideas had to be encouraged in every facet of life.”
Haeckel’s co-editor at the leading Darwinian joumal Kosmos, Ernst Krause, introduced still another unhinged idea, one that proved to have serious geo-political consequences.
It was Krause who transformed Germans into “Aryans.” In his two influential books, he labored to trace the origin of his imagined Aryan race back to classical Greece and to show the natural fitness of this race of people over time.
When the Nazis came to power, their narrow reading of just who was and who wasn’t an Aryan might have even seemed comic were it not so catastrophic.
I would recommend that you go and read it in full. It makes a nice companion piece to my discussion of American scientists writing about evolution, racism, and eugenics.
If evolutionary theory was misused for genocidal purposes, that doesn't make evolution false. But let's not pretend, as the National Center for Science Education does, that there was no substantial connection--and a perfectly logical connection at that. Ideologies that lead to forced sterilization, genocide, and suppression of alternative viewpoints in the sciences (such as the denial of "Jewish physics" by the Germans) should make their proponents at least a little embarrassed when the connections are pointed out.
Labels: history, intelligent design
posted by Clayton
claytoncramer.com |
