Hitler’s eugenic goals Nazi policies resulted less from a ‘hatred’ toward Jewish or other peoples than from the idealistic goal of preventing ‘pollution’ of the superior race. Hitler elaborated his Darwinian views by comparing the strong killing the weak to a cat devouring a mouse, concluding that ultimately the Jews must be eliminated because they cause: ‘ … peoples to decay …. In the long run nature eliminates the noxious elements. One may be repelled by this law of nature which demands that all living things should mutually devour one another. The fly is snapped up by a dragon-fly, which itself is swallowed by a bird, which itself falls victim to a larger bird … to know the laws of nature … enables us to obey them.’ 32 Hitler then argued that for this reason, governments must understand and apply the ‘laws of Nature’, especially the ‘survival of the fittest’ law which ‘originally produced the human races and is the source of their improvement’. The government must therefore aid in the elimination, or at least quarantine, of the inferior races. Hitler argued: ‘If I can accept a divine Commandment, it’s this one: “Thou shalt preserve the species.” The life of the individual must not be set at too high a price. If the individual were important in the eyes of nature, nature would take care to preserve him. Amongst the millions of eggs a fly lays, very few are hatched out — and yet the race of flies thrives.’33 Hitler was especially determined to prevent Aryans from breeding with non-Aryans, a concern that eventually resulted in the ‘final solution’. Once the inferior races were exterminated, Hitler believed that future generations would be eternally grateful for the improvement that his programs brought to humanity: ‘The Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the Jews should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature’s efforts “to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile” (Mein Kampf).’ 20 Individuals are not only far less important than the race, but the Nazis concluded that certain races were not human, but were animals: ‘The Jews, labelled subhumans, became nonbeings. It was both legal and right to exterminate them in the collectivist and evolutionist viewpoint. They were not considered … persons in the sight of the German government.’ 34 As a result, the Darwinist movement was ‘one of the most powerful forces in the nineteenth–twentieth centuries German intellectual history [and] may be fully understood as a prelude to the doctrine of national socialism [Nazism]’.35 Why did evolution catch hold in Germany faster, and take a firmer hold there than any other place in the world? Evolution used to justify existing German racism Schleunes noted, rather poignantly, that the reason the publication of Darwin’s 1859 work had an immediate impact in Germany, and their Jewish policy, was because: ‘Darwin’s notion of struggle for survival … legitimized by the latest scientific views, justified the racists’ conception of superior and inferior peoples and nations and validated the conflict between them.’ 36 The Darwinian revolution and the works of its chief German spokesman and most eminent scientist, Professor Haeckel, gave the racists something that they were confident was powerful verification of their race beliefs.37 The support of the science establishment resulted in racist thought having a much wider circulation than otherwise possible, and enormous satisfaction ‘that one’s prejudices were actually expressions of scientific truth’.36 And what greater authority than science could racists have for their views? Konrad Lorenz, one of the most eminent animal-behavior scientists then, and often credited as being the founder of his field, stated that:
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 01:13:13 +0000