Historian: Darwin's book paved a path to the Holocaust
06-08-2025
Central Europe
Bart van den Dikkenberg, RD
The Nazis wanted to remove all Jews from Europe. This resulted in millions of victims. Photo EPA, Clemens Bilan
Central Europe
Debate erupted immediately after the publication of Darwin’s book “On the Origin of species” (1859). His theory would be disastrous for ethics. The critics were proven right: Darwin planted a seed that would eventually lead to Hitler’s Holocaust.
“Passages in your book greatly shocked my moral sense”, Adam Sedgewick, Darwin’s former mentor at Cambridge University, wrote in 1859. He is not alone in accusing Darwin of undermining morality. A German pastor fears that “an unproven hypothesis (the theory of evolution, BvdD) is in danger of becoming a torch that will reduce to ashes the noblest and highest cultural achievements of the past century”.
What are their fears anyway? Well, this is what these critics see happening with their own eyes. “Many Darwinists in the late nineteenth century began to apply Darwinism to ethical issues, including the value of human life”, Richard Weikart, professor emeritus of modern European history at California State University, writes in his book “From Darwin to Hitler”.
How then? “Man, like every animal species, must reach a higher level of perfection by allowing the destruction of the less gifted individual”, the German physician Robby Kossmann reveals in an essay (1880). With the rise of this social Darwinism, the Christian notion of the immortal human soul was gradually lost.
Kossmann is not the only one who has such ideas about life and death. In the early twentieth century, such views about human improvement are very much present. But how do these eugenicists or social Darwinists intend to implement their ideas? And what does “less gifted” mean; whose life is worth less than someone else’s?
“We cannot close our eyes to the fact that there do exist remarkable parallels between Darwinism and eugenics on the one hand and the later Nazi ideology on the other.”
Most eugenicists regard the disabled and non-Europeans as inferior. They promote measures to eliminate them by allowing forced sterilisation, among other things.
Remarkable parallels
In this social Darwinist climate, an unknown German politician sets out his ideas in a book. His name? Adolf Hitler. His book? “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle). The question is whether Hitler abused social Darwinism for his own political ends or jumped on board the moving train of social Darwinism. Scholars have been arguing about this for years. “But we cannot close our eyes to the fact that there do exist remarkable parallels between Darwinism and eugenics on the one hand and the later Nazi ideology on the other”, professor Weikart believes.
Apart from Social Darwinism, German scientific anthropology also helped the Nazis develop their ideology. German historian Andreas Zimmermann argues in his research that German anthropologists “provided the Nazis with a series of practical tools, theories and ideologies”. German eugenicists Wilhelm Schallmayer and Alfred Ploetz, for instance, classify people into the categories “valuable” and “worthless”. According to them, the government has a duty to favour the valuable. All for the “higher goal” of racial hygiene. For Ploetz, the promotion of the blond, blue-eyed Nordic race is also important.
Several of these ideas end up in Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kampf’ (1925). The influence of this book on Nazi ideology is enormous. But where does Hitler get his ideas from? Who inspires him?
Intense interest
At a young age, Hitler was captivated by books from the German philosophers Herder, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the man who wrote: “The Übermensch stands to man as man stands to ape.” However, according to historian Richard Weikart, he is mainly under the influence of Viennese newspapers he follows with intense interest. Those newspapers are full of racist social Darwinist thoughts.
Any mixing of human races leads to the arrival of “bastards” and a “physical and spiritual decline” of the original Aryan race, according to Hitler.
US historian Daniel Gasman points to one person who is said to have profoundly influenced Hitler’s thinking: the German philosopher and biologist Ernst Haeckel. Parts of their ideologies run virtually parallel. Haeckel was one of the first German thinkers to advocate the extermination of inferior human races by superior Europeans. He also saw no merit in killing the disabled. However, according to Weikart, the historian cannot prove that Hitler ever read any of Haeckel’s books.
Degeneration
Others point to the racist Viennese occultist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels as an inspiration for Hitler. He invents ariosophy, the doctrine of Aryan wisdom. During his Viennese period, Hitler subscribed to Lanz’s racist magazine Ostara, which he regularly bought from a newsstand next to his home.
From Lanz, he adopts Aryan racism and the idea of racial strife as a necessary part of the evolutionary process in which humans find themselves, as well as the idea that the degeneration of a people comes from the mixing of races.
The heroic, morally superior Aryan race is the “ruling people” in Hitler’s thinking; they are morally at the top; they constitute the best and strongest race. They are “the true founders of culture on earth”, Hitler writes in his book. Any mixing of human races leads to the arrival of “bastards” and a “physical and spiritual decline” of the original Aryan race.
Poisonous cocktail
Lanz’s ethics justify immoral acts as long as they are inferior races and as long as they favour the Aryan race. The Viennese racist mainly rails against ‘Negroes’ and Mongols, whom he sees as inferior. He does not mention Jews; he is not an anti-Semite. For this reason, historians doubt whether Lanz was really Hitler’s main inspiration. It is possible that the German dictator cherry-picked from Lanz’s ideas. The term Aryans can probably be credited to Lanz, though.
The ultimate goal of the Thule Gesellschaft is to establish a dictatorship and expel all Jews from Germany.
Another thinker is German Julius Lehmann, a writer with whom Hitler had a lot of contact. Lehmann compiled and combined all kinds of ideas about a Greater German Reich, eugenics and racism and spread that poisonous cocktail through the magazine “Deutschlands Erneuerung” (“Germany’s renewal”).
Lehmann, a prominent member of the secret nationalist, anti-Semitic Thule Gesellschaft, emerges as an opinion leader on eugenics, racial theories and human genetics in the 1920s. Hans Günther, also a member of the Thule Gesellschaft, develops an anti-Semitic theory as well. According to “Rassengünther”, the Nordic race is the most creative and refined; anti-Semitism is in the “boreal Nordic race’s” blood. A struggle between the Aryan and Jewish races is inevitable.
The Thule Gesellschaft turns out to be a breeding ground for the Nazi nationalist ideology of “Blut und Boden” – freely translated: racial purity and patriotism. This sinister club also devises the swastika and the Nazi salute “Sieg heil” – salvation to victory. The ultimate goal of the Thule Gesellschaft is to establish a dictatorship and expel all Jews from Germany. It is known that Hitler had Günther’s handbook’ Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes’ in his cupboard. That book became the basis of Hitler’s racial politics.
Evolutionary ethics
That Hitler, like most scientists of his time, was a social Darwinist pur sang, is beyond doubt for Weikart. However crooked the path from Darwin to Hitler, together Darwinism and the eugenics movement pave the way for Nazi ideology, the American historian concludes.
But what makes Hitler especially dangerous is his evolutionary ethics: racial purity and health determine his morality; the battle between the races decides who is the strongest, Weikart writes in his book “Hitler’s Ethic”. Humans, according to Hitler, are, by definition, not equal. He does not want to do anything with Christian virtues like mercy and compassion for the weak: anyone who goes against nature only weakens a race, Hitler argues in ‘Mein Kampf’. In his eyes, the destruction of the weak by the strong is a virtue.
“With disgusting slurs, he tries to get close to governments, makes his money work for him, and in this way always permits himself to be able to plunder his victims again.”
Inferior races abound in Hitler’s view: Negroid people, Slavic peoples, Asians and Jews. Although Hitler refers to a “Negro” as a “half ape”, “the Jew constitutes the very greatest contrast to the Aryan”. In Hitler’s view, the Jew is everything immoral. In his thinking, this Jew is the model for “a selfish people”, who only band together when their survival is threatened. “Were the Jews alone in the world, they would choke on dirt and filth as much as they would try to depose and exterminate each other in a battle full of hatred.”
He accuses the Jews of greed, cheating and sexual deviations. The Jew is “a parasite in the body of other peoples”, “an eternal leech”, a “usurer”. “This inferior race is destroying the health and vitality of the Germanic people”, he said. “With disgusting slurs, he tries to get close to governments, makes his money work for him, and in this way always permits himself to be able to plunder his victims again.”
In ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler rants on that way for a chapter about “the Jew” enslaving the Aryan with his money and polluting Aryan blood through mixed marriages.
Healthy women
To make the Aryan race stronger, Hitler follows two evolutionary tracks, Weikart observes. One leans on artificial and natural selection. That includes a eugenic programme in German society to improve the health and genetic purity of the Aryan race. Hitler promotes sterilisation for the inferior, abortion and euthanasia as a humane death for the weak and sick, and fights homosexuality because it does not produce offspring. He also encourages large German families and prohibits healthy Aryan women from having abortions.
“Those who are not mentally and physically healthy and dignified should not have their suffering immortalised in the body of their child.”
“What is a good reason against hindering the reproductive capacity of syphilis sufferers, tuberculosis patients, hereditarily burdened, deformed and idiots?” And elsewhere, he writes: “Those who are not mentally and physically healthy and dignified should not have their suffering immortalised in the body of their child.”
According to Hitler, the state must facilitate this racial hygiene; after all, the state is meant to “maintain and promote a community of physically and spiritually similar beings.” And: “The people’s state must gear its entire educational task to the rearing of healthy bodies.”
The other track is the race war: everything that is not Aryan must be destroyed. Weikart: “That idea is based on his belief that Germans are morally superior to all other races. When he exterminates other inferior races and replaces them with Germans, it brings moral improvement to the whole world.”
Disinfection
Germans take this view, posited by their Führer in 1925 in “Mein Kampf”, very seriously after taking power in 1933. They regard it as “applied biology”. As a first step, Jews are stripped of their German citizenship; they are declared outlaws. Progroms on Jews are encouraged. The Aktion T4 programme provides for euthanasia on feeble-minded and psychiatric patients from 1939.
This preparatory work finally led to slave labour and massacres in concentration camps.
Fifteen high-ranking Nazis decide on 20 January 1942 at the infamous Wannsee Conference, within ninety minutes, on a “necessary process of disinfection”, the “final solution to the Jewish question”. That decision should lead to the systematic annihilation of European Jews. Half-Jewish “bastards” must be sterilised or be considered Jews too. This preparatory work finally led to slave labour and massacres in concentration camps.
The president, SS General Reinhardt Heydrich, announced at the conference that he wanted to comb Europe from east to west, starting in Germany and Austria. Countries occupied by Germany must also be made “Judenfrei”. The Nazis produce lists showing that some 11 million Jews live in Europe, half of them in occupied territory. That this eventually led to the Holocaust that took the lives of millions of Jews needs no further explanation.
Finally, the key question is: Is there a direct line between Darwin and Hitler? American historian Richard Weikart is nuanced on this: “No, Darwinism does not automatically result in Hitler’s worldview, and yes, it would be foolish to deny the influence of Darwinism on Hitler. Social Darwinism and eugenics provided Hitler and the Nazis with the necessary scientific foundation to justify the Holocaust.”
This article was translated by CNE.news and published by the Dutch daily Reformatorisch Dagblad on July 8, 2025
This article is the third part of a series on Mein Kampf
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