"How can we sensibly say 'NEVER AGAIN' if we do not know how it happened last time ?"

The central role of Darwinism in the Holocaust

This page fills a gap in the understanding of the roots of the Holocaust of the mid twentieth century, of which I had previously been unaware.

Creation.com published a paper by Jerry Bergman https://creation.com/darwinism-central-in-the-holocaust

The paper is long and exhaustive but is highly recommended reading. I checked with Creation.com that it is a permanent posting on their site and they approve me quoting from it.

I hope my effort is acceptable and will inspire readers to go to the source, as I am only using material from the paper to convey the basic, startling facts.

Excerpts from The central role of Darwinism in the Holocaust

"This paper challenges the common assumption that Hitler was the main driving force behind the Holocaust due to his anti-Semitic beliefs."

It is well-documented that a major driving force was social Darwinism and the belief that the Aryan race was superior and had the right and obligation to prevent deterioration of the superior race by mixing with inferior races, such as Slavic peoples, Jews, Negroes and gypsies.

This race view was widely supported by both the academic and medical establishments, the main groups that designed, implemented, and carried out the Holocaust. In fact, although Hitler played a central role in orchestrating the Holocaust, both the leadership and those who directed and carried out the Holocaust were primarily doctors and academics, including especially anthropologists.

One reason for placing the central blame on Hitler is an attempt by those in the professions that produced the nefarious fruits of eugenics to deny the well-documented record of the past. Placing the blame on Hitler also hides, or denies, the results of eugenics by those who practised these professions.

Adolf Hitler was a voracious reader and owned a large library. At least 19 of his books are known to be on the subject of Darwinism and Eugenics. While incarcerated after the Nazi Party's failed coup in 1924, Hitler read 'Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene' first published in 1921. This book, which almost perfectly spells out the groundwork or fundamentals of the Holocaust, was co-written by three leading eugenicist professors.

Hitler used the eugenics notions developed by Germany's leading scientists to support the ideal of a pure Aryan society in his manifesto, "Mein Kampf" (1928).

The book "Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene" soon became the scientific basis for Nazi Germany's eugenic sterilization programs and the central importance of isolating, and eventually killing, inferior races to ensure the purity of the German race. Its first author, Fischer, was Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and Rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin.

Fischer's ideas were central in the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Law of 1935 that was the first formal step that led to the Holocaust and served to justify the Nazi Party's racial superiority programs.

Decades before then, Germany had already run concentration camps in the German-ruled colony of South-West Africa. These pre-World War I camps, a forerunner of the Nazi death camps, murdered, starved, and experimented on hundreds of native Africans.

Fischer was also featured as a speaker at a population conference organized by the American birth control founder Margaret Sanger.

Eugenic ideas were widely shared among intellectuals of the time. The movement for eugenics, the selective breeding of humans and the sterilization of the mentally handicapped and those otherwise declared unfit, was pioneered by Darwin's half-cousin Sir Francis Galton and supported among others by H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

It was only after the full realization of the horror and scale of the Nazi genocide programs was revealed that these programs were finally rendered morally unacceptable.

In the U.S.A. a Eugenics programme had been well advanced, and the US Supreme Court case titled Buck vs Bell opened the door wide to sterilize mentally deficient persons - some 65,000 citizens. But the true history has been largely forgotten, possibly because many progressive heroes lined up in favour of eugenics in the name of scientific progress, while Catholics and some conservative Christian groups opposed it. Furthermore, the United States contributed both professionally and financially to the racial research that formed the intellectual foundation of the Holocaust.

In Germany about 200,000 people were euthanized, plus many thousands in German-occupied countries.

Centrally planned mass killing operations began neither in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau nor in the mass shooting sites of Ukraine; they began instead in the hospitals of the Reich. The first methods were the sleeping pill, the hypodermic needle, and starvation. The first victims were children. During the war, nurses gave thousands of deformed babies and disabled adolescents overdoses of barbiturates, lethal injections of morphine, and denied them food and water.”

In the late nineteenth century, the modern science of genetics spawned the international field of eugenics, In Germany, eugenics was called 'racial hygiene', and was specifically aimed at increasing the Aryan population. Inherited 'genetic' defects and traits were understood as racial or group manifestations that defined humanity's different civilizations, some deemed more advanced than others, all of them competing for survival. Racism, like nationalism, was viewed positively. Progress, imagined in German ideals of beauty and conduct, could be achieved only by removing humanity's blights. The scientists soon found that even sterilizations were insufficient to achieve the goal of Aryan perfection through social engineering, and segregation was not enough either. The only total, 'final' solution to the problem of racial degeneration was to destroy the contaminant, starting with 'defective' Germans. Misleadingly termed 'euthanasia' or 'mercy killing', the top-secret program was personally authorized by Adolf Hitler and carried out under the cover of war.

"The “Holocaust did not take place long ago and far away”. Rather, it occurred “in the heart of rationalist, post-Enlightenment, liberal Europe

More than half of the participants at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, who planned the 'final solution to the Jewish question' carried the title 'doctor'.

While Eugenics was allowed to flourish in Nazi Germany, the scientists involved were not bizarre and perverse psychopaths. They were very well integrated in German society. They were very good researchers of international standing. People like Josef Mengele were scientific assistants while performing experiments on inmates at Auschwitz death camp, many of them children. Whereas Mengele was sentenced for his crimes after the war his superiors at the Institute for Anthropology were never charged. On the contrary, some of them became professors at universities.

In a review of the many rationalizations that the Nazis gave for their Darwinian eugenic programs, what is striking is not only the specific ideas of social Darwinism — "the strong eliminate the weak", "the Aryan race must be protected against pollution" — but the overwhelming sense of the authority of science, whatever the science”.

Another central factor causing the Holocaust was not only Darwinism but also socialism, both of which influenced the so-called race hygiene movement. Ploetz (1860-1940) enthusiastically read the works of not only Charles Darwin, but also those of Ernst Haeckel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Ploetz was the author of 'The Fitness of our Race" a book that heavily influenced many Nazi leaders and intellectuals. He also founded 'The Journal of Social and Racial Biology'in 1904, which was very influential in both the Nazi movement ideology and in the development of racial anthropological theory, as well as in German academia as a whole.

Darwin's publication 'On the Origin of Species' brought about a great tidal wave of interest in speciation. If animals of other species had varieties within them, why not look for such variation in humans as well? Perhaps all humankind had not evolved from the same sources … polygeneticists believed they evolved through various prehominid species, resulting in different 'kinds' of people. A core Nazi belief that had informed the practice of medicine under Hitler's rule was that, only were all people not created equal but some people were actually not human at all. According to Nazi ideology, Untermenschen—subhumans, as they were called, a designation that included Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Pols, Slavs, Russian prisoners of war, the handicapped, the mentally ill, and others—were no different from white mice or lab rats whose bodies could thereby be experimented on for the advance of the Reich's medical goals.

German citizens were asked to believe this pseudoscience [of eugenics] and millions did not protest. German scientists and physicians used this racial policy to justify torturous medical experiments resulting in maiming and death. In the case of the handicapped and the mentally ill, the Untermenschen theory was used by German doctors and technicians to justify genocide The Nazis “had no difficulty finding physicians willing and enthusiastic to participate in killing the disabled … quite a few leading physicians already had jettisoned the idea that the disabled had a right to live”.

The ideas of the “Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy” were the scientific basis used to justify Nazi Germany's racial policy that ended in the Holocaust. As a result of the strong support of these and other professionals, the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” was promulgated in July 1933 and put into effect by the German government on 1 January 1934. Most of these racist ideas existed even before Hitler became Germany's leader.

For example, Darwinism's spread in Germany was facilitated by an essay competition in 1900 that was sponsored by the head of the powerful Krupp Corporation

Social Darwinists taught that Germany's humanitarian social programs favoured the weak and interfered with the process of natural selection as a healthy regulator of human affairs. Social Darwinists saw it as their task to reverse this 'unhealthy' interference.

Anthropology is a profession that has had every opportunity to know, understand, and value diversity in human life and its cultures, peoples, and habits; yet, in the case of the Nazi anthropologists, it turned against that opportunity. Instead, it measured the value of human beings by fictitious standards of pseudonatural science and pseudosocial science, causing the obliteration of rich cultural traditions as well as death, and destruction to unfathomable numbers of human beings.

It proved difficult to probe the roles of Nazi scientists because many of them retained their positions after the war, and the reluctance persisted long after the first investigations.

Conclusions

The fact is, the many scientists associated with the Kaiser-Wilhelm Society enhanced the credibility of the Nazi state's program of scientific terror and murder”. If it were not for Darwinism, and the application of his theory called social Darwinism, the Holocaust would likely never have occurred in Germany.

Darwin's influence on anthropology, and academia as a whole, was summarized by one historian by noting that “Anthropologists began to link pre-hominid remains with evidence of current human variation, trying to establish lines of heredity. In looking at human heredity and culture in an evolutionary framework, anthropology became a strong force in secularizing society against the power of the church.

German universities were the intellectual fatherland of eugenics and racial science. The universities of Germany and Austria and their constituent faculty played critical roles in the development and advancement of eugenics and racial selection: they enforced sterilization, euthanasia and inhuman experimentation on the living, as well as on the exploitation of the bodies of victims of state terror for the teaching of human anatomy and pathology.”

19/02/18 from a paper on Creation.com

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A final thought . . . The definitions of Eugenics and Euthanasia

https://www.merriam-webster.com › dictionary › eugenics

: the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population's genetic composition In 1883 Francis Galton, in England, coined the term "eugenics" to encompass the idea of modification of natural selection through selective breeding for the improvement of humankind.

https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com › Euthanasia

Euthanasia is generally defined as the act of killing an incurably ill person out of concern and compassion for that person's suffering. It is sometimes called mercy killing, but many advocates of euthanasia define mercy killing more precisely as the ending of another person's life without his or her request.

Created 19/02/18 from a paper on Creation.com

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