World War II and the Nazi Holocaust

The massive slaughter that Adolf Hitler caused in Germany and all Europe is well known. His unreasoning and violent hatred of Jews is also well known. The purpose of this chapter is not to describe World War II in detail, nor to describe the Holocaust in detail. The purpose of this chapter is to put German eugenics in context, to see how much evil came of Social Darwinism (in conjunction with other causes), and to understand some of the links between eugenics in Germany and eugenics elsewhere.

One of the bizarre aspects of education in America today is that so many students have heard of World War II, but have not heard of eugenics. World War II was in many ways a continuation of World War I; both wars were started by Germans who believed in a version of eugenics theory, and felt that a racially superior people deserved more land. The most horrifying aspects of World War II were the labor camps and death camps, designed to use and kill people considered to be inferior, particularly Jews. To understand the camps, you must understand Europe's long history of antisemitism -- and also the shorter history of eugenics.

Adolf Hitler hated Jews and tried to exterminate them. Much of his explanation for hatred is based on eugenics. How can anyone begin to understand World War II if they don't understand eugenics?

Further, Hitler and his supporters knew that their ideas about building a better race had support outside Germany. French and British eugenicists did not want a war with Germany, but they understood Hitler's racial goals. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in England, Marshal Philippe PÈtain in France, and the leading advocate of neutrality in the United States, Charles Lindbergh, were all supportive of eugenics and were all members of eugenics societies at some point.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Europe was confidently carving up the globe, establishing empires. There were both winners and losers among the Europeans: Spain's empire had shrunk, Portugal's had shrunk and France's had declined, while the British Empire had grown. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was huge. Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands had ambitions. On the other side of the ocean, America had spread across an entire continent, and had acquired Cuba and the Philippines. But Germany had been left out of the land grabs. Germany had access to the ocean, but had never been a great sea power. When Germans thought about expansion, they did not plan expeditions overseas; they looked at their neighbors. So when they launched World War I, they attacked other European nations.

A mixture of motives drove Hitler and his followers. They wanted land for the German people, land like the colonies that their neighbors had amassed overseas, land to grow into -- lebensraum. They had a lust for power, the desire to establish themselves as the rulers of the continent, imitating the heroic Romans -- and using the title Kaiser, or Caesar. They wanted a rematch to end the humiliation of Versailles, the treaty that ended World War I and imposed crippling conditions on Germany.

Eugenicists in other parts of the world argued that the desire for land was a failure of their movement. They said that a proper regimen of population control would keep people content within their borders, and would make wars of conquest unnecessary. So it may be unfair to charge the eugenics movement with encouraging the Germans to go to war for land. However, Hitler's lust for power was unmistakably a form of eugenics. He believed passionately in improving the human race. His conviction that the Aryans were the peak of evolution, and that the world would be better off if the Aryans controlled more of the world more firmly, were ideas that circulated in the eugenics movement.

It is nonsense to try to understand World War II without looking at the thinking of the man who led Germany to war. To understand how this huge slaughter came about, we must understand the thinking of Adolf Hitler. And his thinking was not hidden.

Ideas Have Consequences Within German society, there were many people who took eugenics into realms not experienced elsewhere. German eugenics was influenced by an aristocratic French writer, Arthur Count de Gobineau (1816-1882). In the mid-1850s, Gobineau had published a racist tome entitled Essay on the Inequality of Human Races. He argued that a tiny fair-haired Aryan aristocracy had always been the flower of Europe, but it had lost its vigor by intermarriage with inferior races. The French generally ignored the book, but Germans loved it. In 1890, the book was revived, and in 1894 admirers founded the Gobineau Association, which included many teachers.           In 1899, an Englishman holding German citizenship, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), published a book building on Gobineau, entitled The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. He argued that the Germans were the purest of the Aryans, and he attacked Jews and blacks. The book was reprinted over and over.           When Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf -- exalting the Aryans, promoting eugenics, and damning the Jews -- his writing was powerful, but not original.

Antisemitism in Mein Kampf

In 1923, Adolf Hitler was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazis. He led an uprising that earned him international attention and a prison term. While he was in the Landsberg prison, he wrote a book about his life and his hopes called Mein Kampf (or My Struggle).

The book includes Hitler's well-known hatred of Jews, or antisemitism. He wrote, for example: "Was there any form of filth ... without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light -- a kike!" His language was inflammatory and insulting, appealing to gutter instincts.

He described a time of "the greatest spiritual upheaval" when he "had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite." He brought the fervor of a convert to the cause of antisemitism, and described it as a spiritual question. Characterizing hatred as the requirement of religious faith may seem bizarre to many people, but Hitler was vehement about it: "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

One of the curious aspects of Mein Kampf is that a casual reader who had never heard of the Jews might well come away from the book with a great desire to meet these remarkable people. Hitler hated them, and blamed them for a variety of things, including pornography, prostitution and syphilis. But he also blamed them for Communism and for its opposite, capitalism. He blamed them for democracy: "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight." Hitler said that the Jews ran everything, and that unless there was a change, the Jews would one day "devour the other nations and become lords of the earth." If a Martian dropped in and read Hitler's book, he might catch on that Hitler was consumed by hatred and set aside all the criticisms of Jews, and hope to meet one of these powerful lords.

Eugenics in Mein Kampf

The antisemitism in Hitler's book is well known, but the eugenics is less familiar.

He described the Jews as the best example of eugenics at work: "The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew. In hardly any people in the world is the instinct of self-preservation developed more strongly than in the so-called 'chosen.' Of this, the mere fact of the survival of this race may be considered the best proof. ... What people, finally, has gone through greater upheavals than this one -- and nevertheless issued from the mightiest catastrophes of mankind unchanged? What an infinitely tough will to live and preserve the species speaks from these facts!" And yet, in the name of eugenics, Hitler set out to wipe them off the face of the earth.

Hitler's book makes the Jews sound like fascinating and in many ways attractive people. However, the hatred in the book cannot be treated as a joke. Hitler and his Nazis drove the Jews into work camps and death camps, where about six million Jews were killed. Millions of other people died in the war, including other targets of Nazi eugenics -- Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill. But the Jews were particular targets, and the Nazis caught and killed about one third of all the Jews in the world.

One of the great puzzles about the Nazi Holocaust is its horrific efficiency. Europe has a long and shameful history of antisemitism. Why was the Nazi assault so much worse than anything before? Part of the explanation is that the Germans are efficient, taking pride in "getting the job done," whatever the job is. But part of the explanation, surely, is that Nazi antisemitism was mixed with eugenics.

Throughout most of the history of Christianity, there has been antisemitism. The scripture read by Christians has passages that say "the Jews" did various things. These passages can be taken out of context and used to stir up antisemitism. This has happened many times in the history of Christianity. But the texts are being abused, and read in ways that the author did not intend. The passages would not be changed much (if at all) if you said instead that "all the people there" or "the crowd" did these things. St. Paul's letters report various times that "the Jews" undercut his work, but the modern reader would probably understand the passages better if we substituted the phrase "our own people" for "the Jews." That is, Paul is eloquent about his disappointment in many of his own people (the Jews). The use of scripture as a basis for antisemitism has been common in history, but it requires ignorance.

Antisemitism based on the Gospel has another problem, a built-in contradiction: Jesus was Jewish, along with all of his apostles. And still further, Jesus commanded solemnly that we love each other.

Christians must admit that there has been a long history of antisemitism, but antisemitism among the followers of Jesus the Nazarene is obviously wrong. In Nazi Germany, on the other hand, the seeds of antisemitism were planted in the soil of eugenics. Eugenics tends to increase one's contempt for other individuals or other nations.

To take a single example, look at the words of the first man chosen for the chair of eugenics established by Francis Galton at London University. Karl Pearson, a pre-eminent eugenicist, wrote that the evolutionary progress of the human race requires warfare. He argued that war was necessary to get rid of inferior humans. He wrote: "This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal. [When wars cease] mankind will no longer progress [for] there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock; the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection."

Pearson also wrote: "History shows me one way and one way only, in which a high state of civilisation has been produced, namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race." That is different from Christianity, even from Christianity tainted with the evil of antisemitism.

Mein Kampf: Eugenics and Antisemitism Together

Hitler echoed standard eugenics thought about miscegenation: "Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel ..."

Like eugenicists from the Greeks on, he used animal models in an attempt to clarify his thinking about humans: "The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice." In other words, it is permissible for Germans to kill the unfit, because the Germans belong at the top, and the way to get there is to kill, and we should not be sentimental about such natural events.

In his understanding of eugenics, evolution justified or even demanded violence: "Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development."

Like other white supremacists, he was extremely concerned about the possible damage to evolution that miscegenation could do: "No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow."

Like white supremacists in the United States, he took it for granted that the history of North and South America proved the importance of opposing miscegenation. "Historical experience ... shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood."

Hitler's ideas about miscegenation were the same as the white supremacist ideas in America, but the application was different. In America, racists feared contamination from blacks. By contrast, Hitler's principal fear was contamination from the Jews.

He considered the Jews to be the threat to Aryan success, but also saw them as the source of arguments against eugenics. After laying out his view of eugenics, he turned to the critics: "Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! 'Man's role is to overcome Nature!' ... Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense."

When Hitler said, "All who are not of good race in this world are chaff," the thought was not original, nor specifically Nazi. It was simple eugenics.

Cooperation with Hitler, Support for Eugenics

Hitler's main opponents were France, Russia, England and the United States. But in three of these nations, he found national leaders who were ready to get along with him. These three men were all eugenicists.

Henri Philippe PÈtain (1856-1951) was a French hero in World War I who is credited with holding Verdun against the German assault. But he did not like parliamentary governments, and preferred dictatorships. After Hitler's armies defeated France in 1940, he led the French government. His admirers say that he protected France as well as possible after a military defeat, but others consider him a traitor who cooperated with the Nazis. After the war, the French government put him on trial for collaboration with the enemy; he was convicted and imprisoned for the rest of his life. PÈtain was a member of a French eugenics society.

Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940) was the British Prime Minister just before World War II. He is remembered chiefly for his policy of "appeasement" toward Germany. He tried to negotiate with Hitler, rather than go to war. To be fair to him, it is important to say that his policies were popular in Britain at the time. However, on September 30, 1938, he agreed to let Germany take over most of Czechoslovakia in order to satisfy the Germans and prevent war. This ill-fated decision, called the Munich agreement, has become a byword for naivete, retreat and cowardice in the face of an unscrupulous and greedy enemy. Hitler took what he was given in peace, then launched a war to take some more. Chamberlain was a member of the Eugenics Society.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902-1974) was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris. The flight made him an international hero. However, he later used his fame to oppose America's entry into World War II, and his arguments were extremely disturbing.

Between 1931 and 1935, Lindbergh worked with Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) on an artificial heart, and the two men deserve great credit for it. However, during this same period, Carrel was working on the book Man, the Unknown, published in 1935. He suggested building euthanasia institutions for killing the mentally ill with some suitable gas. Lindbergh did not break off his relationship with Carrel because of this savage proposal; in 1938, they coauthored a book, The Culture of Organs.

In 1938, Lindbergh visited Germany, and accepted a medal from Hermann Goering, a Nazi official. This caused an outcry in the United States.

In 1939, Lindbergh returned to the United States after years in Europe, and immediately began speaking out against America's entry into the war. He made arguments echoing eugenics themes, that the war would kill the wrong people. He charged that America was being dragged into the war by Jews (among others).

In 1940, Hermann Goering, Air Minister and chief of the Luftwaffe, launched the "Battle of Britain," bombing the British in preparation for an invasion across the English Channel. This included bombing civilians, to terrorize them. Nevertheless, in 1941, Lindbergh became a leading spokesman for a newly founded peace group called the America First Committee.

Lindbergh was later a Director of the American Eugenics Society.

excerpt from "Social History and the Eugenics Societies" by Katharine S. O'Keefe Research on the history of eugenics and the eugenic societies could affect our understanding of crucial events in this century. For example, Neville Chamberlain was a member of the English Eugenics Society in 1935 while Chancellor of the Exchequer; and Marshal PÈtain, who led the Vichy government in France, was a member of the French eugenic society in the 1930s. Charles Lindbergh, the leading exponent of appeasement in America in 1940, was a director of the American Eugenics Society in the 1950s. To write the history of the period of appeasement while not knowing that the architect of appeasement in England (Chamberlain), the would-be architect of appeasement in America (Lindbergh), the architect of the Vichy government (PÈtain), as well as the architect of the Nazi party (Hitler), were all eugenicists, is as if we were to write post-war history without mentioning that Stalin, Tito and Mao TseTung were all Communists. Similarly, we will never understand population control, if we do not know that the main agent of this biopolicy, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), spent the first seventeen years of its existence in rent free quarters at the headquarters of the English Eugenics Society and even was a member of that Society in 1977.

The Machinery of Death

Hitler's writing was not original. He took the ideas of others and applied them effectively, without mercy. The machinery of death begins with an ideology that permits or encourages killing, and the murderous ideology of eugenics took root in Germany before Hitler.

As we saw above (see chapter two), in 1922, before anybody had ever heard of Adolf Hitler, Hoche and Binding published a book calling for the destruction of lives that were not worth living.

Two of the chief architects of the racial policies of the Nazis were Dr. Alfred Ploetz and Dr. Ernst R¸din. In 1904, Ploetz founded the journal Archiv f¸r Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (or Archive for Racial and Social Biology to publish articles about eugenics. The following year, Ploetz and R¸din founded a society to promote eugenics, called the "Gesellschaft f¸r Rassenhygiene" (or Society for Racial Hygiene). They understood term "racial hygiene" to be a German translation of the English word "eugenics," but they also used the phrases "racial biology" and "social biology" to refer to the same collection of ideas. Their ideas did not become the foundation of public policies until Hitler came to power. But by that time, they had already been thinking for three decades about how to use sterilization and euthanasia. They were ready to act.

Just a few months after Hitler came to power, Germany passed the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Disease in Posterity," the Sterilisation Law. The chief architect of the law was R¸din, who had pushed his ideas in a variety of posts, including Professor of Psychiatry at the Munich University, Director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography, and Director of the Research Institute for Psychiatry.

Others who had pushed for eugenics before Hitler came to power were Professors Dr. Erwin Baur, Dr. Eugen Fischer, and Dr. Fritz Lenz. In 1921, the published a textbook that was used around the world: Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene.

In 1923, Munich University established a chair for racial hygiene. The first Professor for Racial Hygiene was Dr. Lenz. He called for the introduction of racial hygienic education into high schools and universities, saying: "As soon as racial hygienic conviction has become a living ideology, then the racial hygienic organisation of life, even public life, will happen by itself."

Baur and Fischer also worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Eugenics. The KWI was a hotbed of eugenics.

Another man who worked at the KWI was Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. In 1934, Von Verschuer was invited to take the ideas from the KWI to a new university, to be the founder and first director of the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Research at Frankfurt University. There, von Verschuer trained an assistant named Josef Mengele. When Fischer retired as the head of the KWI, von Verschuer returned from Frankfurt and took over the post.

Mengele went on to the Auschwitz camp in Poland. Originally, Auschwitz had been planned as a slave-labor camp, to provide workers for IG Farben (a company that produced Zyklon gas, for the gas chambers), but it was turned into a death camp. When Mengele arrived at the camp, there was a typhoid epidemic that required his immediate attention. He selected out hundreds of the sick immediately and sent them to the gas chamber.

He conducted experiments that still horrify the world, including some experiments on living and fully conscious prisoners. But he was not isolated in his barbarity: he sent data and even body parts back to the KWI, where various people wrote papers based on what Mengele had done. Von Verschuer was particularly interested in Mengele's tuberculosis experiments, injecting the bacteria into identical twins and watching the course of the disease.

After the war, Mengele fled to Argentina and lived for some years on gold and jewelry taken from prison inmates, including gold fillings. Von Verschuer was rehabilitated. He was not able to return to Berlin, but he founded a new genetics institute in Munster, and worked there until his death in 1968. He did not turn away from his old ideas. When a white supremacist journal, Mankind Quarterly, was founded, he was on the masthead as an advisor. He was a member of the American Eugenics Society in the 1950s.

Mein Kampf is available on line at http://www.alpha.org.

Discuss: What are the ingredients necessary for war or other massive violence? Which ingredients did anti-Semitism supply in World War II? Which ingredients did eugenics

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