Hitler and his God

Social Darwinism

Racism found itself justified by Darwin’s theory of evolution published in 1859 under the title The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The racism deduced from Darwin’s revolutionary view of nature was that all life is a continuous struggle for existence in which the fittest (strongest, cleverest) win the upper hand and survive, and that their position has to be defended against constant challenge. Thought through, Darwinism declared nature to be the playground not of Life but of Death; in the words of a French biologist: “Life is the totality of functions which resist death.”

The racial egoism of the time, however, took a positive view of Darwinism as a daring, manly, quasi aristocratic attitude towards life. “To understand the obsession with war in Darwinian sociology, one has to know to what extent and in which way Darwinism influenced biology towards the end of the nineteenth century.” 415 As Poliakov mentions: “Max Nordau noted already in 1889 that Darwinism was becoming the supreme authority of the militarists in all European countries: ‘Since the theory of evolution has been promulgated they can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and give free play to their bloodthirsty instincts as their being the last word of science’ … The gospels of power were preached above all in imperial Germany and in the Anglo-Saxon countries. In the latter too ‘Social Darwinism’ was easily combined with the Germanic-Aryan idea, also called ‘theory of the Teutonic origins’.” 416 In fact, some biologists, and not only those of Anglo-Saxon origin, put the British side by side with the Germans, if not above them, at the top of the tree of humanity.

Darwinism was taken for granted as solid science – which it was not. André Pichot, a French epistemologist and historian of the ideas underlying science, shows in his essay La société pure – de Darwin à Hitler that Darwin’s evolutionary theory, based on his observations of nature, did not have a scientific leg to stand on. The reasoning supporting the theory was borrowed, he says, from British sociologists and economists, especially from Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and Francis Galton. How the species evolved, which was the process of the changes and the mechanism of the mutations within the cell, Darwin simply could not know.

“His Origin of Species dates from 1859, and Darwinism took more than fifty years to work itself out, finding its definitive formulation only in the years 1900-15, after the rediscovery of the laws of Mendel and the beginnings of genetics. Before 1900, lacking a theory of heredity worth its name, and lacking a theory of variation (a mutation was then considered an exceptional perturbation without importance), Darwinism was a badly confirmed and formless theory. The only point on which there was a real agreement and some constancy was natural selection … Between 1900 and 1915 genetics gradually comes into its own … and agrees well with Darwinism … Thanks to this, Darwinism takes on a form which is somewhat more convincing and scientific. This is the form it has kept until now and which owns, all in all, rather little to Darwin himself.” 417

Darwin’s theory of evolution, contrary to what is often thought, became an instant success and “the idea of applying Darwinism to society and politics was immediate”. “As soon as The Origin of Species had been published, perceptive thinkers understood that not only the ideas about history and the evolution of the human societies but even the bases of morals and politics could no longer be as they had been before … Darwin, by formulating the principle of the struggle for existence and selection, did not only revolutionize biology and natural philosophy: he transformed political science. Possessing this principle enabled to get hold of the laws of life and death of a nation, laws which had escaped the speculation of philosophers”, wrote Vacher de Lapouge. 418 The application of Darwinism to society and politics, to which Darwin himself might not have agreed, is called “Social Darwinism”.

According to Social Darwinism the human being is no longer created directly by God: it did and does belong to the animal kingdom and is the result of a long evolution. The human being is a higher animal, but still an animal. Linnaeus had been the first, in 1751, to determine the three kingdoms of nature: mineral, vegetable and animal; he classified man in the animal kingdom, in the order of primates, together with the apes. This idea was extremely controversial in a world still dominated by the Christian religion, and some biologists proposed a fourth kingdom reserved specifically for man. It was not Darwin but Lamarck who, in 1809, following the way shown by Linnaeus, made man descend from the ape. Darwin, shocked by the logical implications of his scheme of nature, did not write upon this subject in his Origin but waited till the publication of The Descent of Man, in 1871, when the animal origin of man had already been extrapolated from his thesis and become accepted knowledge among the general public.

The strife, no longer of individuals but of groups of humans – tribes, classes, races, nations – became now a “scientifically founded” and justified phenomenon, easy to accept because history had little else to show. Just as the fittest individual won the upper hand over the weaker one, so the stronger group of individuals would and should conquer the weaker group. This “law of nature” was universally applicable; not to follow it, for instance by letting the weaker compassionately survive and even procreate, would mean tampering with the order of nature, whether or not created by a God. (Eugenics – and ultimately the eradication of a people that was supposed to be harmful, like the Jews – was therefore a development in the logical order of things.) Such reasoning left no longer any possibility open for an upward evolution beyond animal man, into a future where the human being might rise above his animal characteristics. In a materialistic era Social Darwinism, however ramshackle the scaffolding of the science supporting it, won the day. It is still very much alive in some of its variants, e.g. socio-biology, and even recent philosophers and sociologists felt the inclination to submerge the individual into the mass, asserting that the individual is nothing but a cell in a social organism. (Yet, it is never social organisms which put together philosophical or scientific theories, or which write books.)

“Racism and Darwinism enter into a symbiosis in Hitler’s Mein Kampf”, writes Christian Zentner. 419 Some of the sources of Hitler’s book are now familiar to us, and we know that it became gospel truth in Nazi Germany, where it moulded the thinking of millions through political propaganda, education and the media. Moreover, its fundamental Social Darwinism struck a chord with contemporary German thought. The following sayings of Hitler will speak for themselves.

In Mein Kampf he writes: “Nobody can doubt that this world will one day be the scene of dreadful struggles for existence on the part of mankind. In the end the instinct of self-preservation alone will triumph. Before its consuming fire the so-called humanitarianism, which connotes only a mixture of fatuous timidity and self-conceit, will melt away as under the March sunshine. Man has become great through perpetual struggle. In perpetual peace his greatness must decline.” 420 At the end of Hitler’s Table Talk, Henry Picker has included a secret speech by Hitler, delivered in May 1942 to 10 000 young lieutenants, “his military successors”, to whom he said: “A deeply meaningful sentence by a great military philosopher [Clausewitz] says that struggle, which means war, is the father of all things. He who has a look at nature, seeing who she actually is, will find that these words apply to all living beings and to all that happens, not only on this earth but far beyond it. The whole universe seems to be dominated by this thought alone: that an eternal selection takes place in which the stronger keeps the right to remain alive and the weaker succumbs. Therefore some say that Nature is cruel and without mercy, but others will understand that Nature, in so doing, only obeys an iron law of logic.” This was the lesson Hitler had learned, and which he worded rather civilly in one of his nightly monologues: “One must not take pity on people who are marked by destiny to perish … One must in no way take pity on whoever lacks the necessary hardness in life.” 421

“Life is cruel”, reflected Hitler, deep in the night reclining in a comfortable chair at his eastern field-headquarters. “To become, to be and to stop being: everything always means to kill. All that is born must die, whether because of illness, accident or war, it is all the same. Yet those who have been struck down by the war can find solace in the fact that their sacrifice has been made for the future of their people.” For he reasoned as follows: “If some reproach me that one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand people have died because I wage this war, then I can answer them: because of what I have done until now the German nation has increased by more than two and a half million people. If I demand ten percent of them to be sacrificed, then I have given them ninety percent. I hope that in another ten years there will be ten to fifteen million Germans more in the world – men or women, I don’t care: I create the necessary conditions for life.” 422 “War is what is most natural, most common. War is always, war is everywhere. There is no beginning to it, there is no peace, ever. War is life. War is in every contest, war is the primeval state”, said Hitler to Hermann Rauschning. And also: “Nature is cruel, that’s why we may be so too.” 423

And yet Hitler did not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the composite arrangement of his mind the most irrational and contradictory ideas existed side by side (as they did in the ideology called “Nazism”); he accepted the practical interpretations of Darwin’s vulgarizers, but not the theory as such. For if Darwin had it right, all human beings originated from a common ancestor; how then could one justify the existence of superior and inferior people? In addition, Darwin had never said that natural selection would lead to a race of superior people; according to Darwin the mass of living beings was quite undifferentiated, and to be the fittest on a certain occasion did not imply any permanence of that status. Furthermore, Darwin’s theory applied only to individuals; its extension to social bodies was not of his doing and constituted in fact a distortion from the original theory.

In 1942, after having gone through “a book about the origins of the human races”, Hitler therefore said: “From where do we get the right to believe that man has not been what he is today from his very beginnings? The study of nature teaches us that in the kingdoms of plants and animals changes and developments occur, but we find nowhere within a species a change as big as the jump man must have made if he had to develop from the ape-like state to his present state.” 424 Ultimately he found a satisfactory explanation in the bizarre “World Ice Theory” of Hans Hörbiger, which held that the universe resulted from a battle between fire and ice, that the solar system was created by the explosion of a big cosmic body, and that the geological periods were to be explained by the crashes of successive moons upon our planet Earth.