Chapter 3

The Terrible Alliance Between Darwin and Fascism

The Bloody Alliance Between Darwin and Hitler

Nazism was born in the chaos of the Germany which emerged defeated from the First World War. The leader of the party was the angry and aggressive Adolf Hitler. Racism formed the basis of Hitler's world view. Hitler believed that the Aryan race, the fundamental element of the German nation, was superior to all the other races and had to rule them. He dreamed that the Aryan race would found a world empire that would last 1,000 years.

The scientific support Hitler found for these racist theories was Darwin's theory of evolution.

Hitler's most important idea-moulder, the racist German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, was strongly affected by Darwin's theory of evolution and based his racist views on Darwinism. He used to say, "Nations can only develop by violent competition like Darwin's survival of the fittest," and declared that this meant lasting and inevitable war. His view was that, "Conquering by the sword is a way of bringing civilisation to barbarism and knowledge to ignorance." He thought: "The yellow races have no understanding of artistic ability and political freedom. It is the destiny of the black races to serve the whites and to be the target of the whites' loathing for all eternity…"43

While Hitler was developing his theories he drew inspiration, like Treitschke, from Darwin and particularly Darwin's idea of the fight for survival. The title of his notorious book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") was inspired by the idea of this fight for survival. Just like Darwin, Hitler gave non-European races the status of monkeys, and said, "Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of apes."44

In the 1933 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler proclaimed that "a higher race subjects to itself a lower race… a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right," because it was founded on science.45

Hitler, who believed in the superiority of the Aryan race, believed that the superiority of this race was given to it by nature. In Mein Kampf he wrote the following:

Hitler, who thought that human beings were highly developed animals, believed that instead of allowing natural forces and chance, in a word coincidence, to control evolution, it was necessary to take the management of it into his own hands to develop the human race. And this was the ultimate aim of the Nazi movement. In order to realise this aim, the first step was to separate, to isolate, the inferior races from the Aryan race, the race they believed to be superior.

At this point the Nazis moved to the implementation of Darwinism, and took as their example the "theory of eugenics" which itself had its origins in Darwinism.

The Theory of Eugenics Was Based on Darwin's Ideas

The theory of eugenics, which emerged in the first half of the 20th century, meant the weeding out of sick and handicapped people and the "improving" of the human race by increasing the number of healthy individuals. According to the theory of eugenics, in the same way that better kinds of animals can be produced by mating healthy animals with each other, so the human race could be improved in the same way.

As might be expected, those who put forward the eugenics programme were Darwinists. At the head of the eugenics wave in England came Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, and his son Leonard Darwin.

It was clear that the idea of eugenics was a natural result of Darwinism. In fact, this truth was awarded special importance in those publications which supported eugenics, "Eugenics is man's taking charge of his own evolution," it was said.

Kenneth Ludmerer, a medical historian at Washington University, noted that the idea of eugenics is as old as Plato's Republic but he also added that Darwinism was the reason for the rise in interest in the idea in the 19th century: 

In Germany the first person to be influenced by and to spread eugenics was the famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was a close friend and supporter of Darwin. To support the theory of evolution, he put forward the claim "recapitulation," which proposed that the embryos of different living creatures resembled one another. It later emerged that Haeckel had falsified the data when putting forward this claim.

While Haeckel was on the one hand making scientific forgeries of this kind, on the other he was putting forward eugenic propaganda. He suggested that newly-born handicapped children should be killed forthwith and that this would speed up the evolution of society. He went even further, claiming that lepers and people with cancer and mental illnesses should be painlessly killed, or else these people would be a burden on society and would slow down evolution.

The American researcher George Stein summed up Haeckel's blind allegiance to the theory of evolution in an article of his in the magazine American Scientist in this way:

Haeckel died in 1919. But his ideas were inherited by the Nazis. Shortly after Hitler came to power an official eugenics programme was initiated. Hitler summed up the new policy in these sentences:

 

Jesse Owens runs for another gold at the Games. Hitler refused to even shake his hand, because he was black

These murders were presented as perfectly reasonable and those who were accepted as genetically inferior were described as "unprofitable" and obstacle to the development of the nation. Groups, including various races and peoples, which were seen as inferior races slowly began to be included. Later again sick elderly people, those with jaundice, those with serious mental defects, the deaf and dumb, and even those with fatal diseases were included. After the black athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler, even though he congratulated all the competitors, refused to congratulate Jesse Owens and left the stadium. Some evolutionists even advocated the view that women were evolutionarily inferior to men. Dr Robert Wartenberg, later a prominent neurology professor in California, tried to prove women's inferiority by arguing that they could not survive unless they were 'protected by men'. He concluded that because the weaker women were not eliminated as rapidly due to this protection, a slower rate of evolution resulted and for this reason natural selection was less operative on women than men. Based on these thoughts, women in Nazi Germany were openly prohibited from entering certain professions.50

Following the development of Darwinism and the idea of eugenics, In Germany, "racial scientists" openly advocated the killing of unwanted members and segments of the population. One of these scientists, Adolf Jost, "issued an early call for direct medical killing in a book published in 1895, Das Recht auf den Tod (The Right to Death). Jost argued that "for the sake of the health of the social organism, the state must take responsibility for the death of individuals." Adolf Jost was a mentor to Adolf Hitler, who showed himself on the political stage nearly 30 years later. "The state must see to it that only the healthy beget children," Hitler said. "It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on."51

Under a law passed in 1933, 350,000 mentally ill people, 30,000 gypsies, and hundreds of black children were sterilised by such methods as castration, x-rays, injection, and electric shocks to the genital area. One Nazi officer said, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology."52

As well as attempting to hasten the development of the German race by the murder of and ruthless policies directed at innocent people, Hitler was also implementing another condition of eugenics. Blond, blue-eyed men and women, accepted as representative of the German race, were encouraged to form relationships and have children. In 1935 special reproduction farms were established for this purpose. These farms, where young girls conforming to racist criteria were installed, were frequently visited by SS units. The illegitimate children born on these farms were to be raised as the soldiers of the intended 1,000-year German kingdom.

The Nazis' Aryan Racial Aberration

All this madness was carried out in the name of implementing Darwinist principles on society. The American historian Michael Grodin, author of the book The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, reveals the reality in this way:

I think what happened was that there was a perfect match of Nazi ideology and Social Darwinism and racial hygiene as it developed in the turn of the 20th Century.53

George Stein explains the subject; 

The author of the book Darwin: Before and After, Robert Clarke, concluded, Adolf Hitler: "…was captivated by evolutionary teaching - probably since the time he was a boy. Hitler reasoned … that a higher race would always conquer a lower."56 The political philosophy of Nazi Germany took shape under the influence of these ideas of Hitler's.

The author of the book Race and Reich, Joseph Tenenbaum noted that the political philosophy of Germany was built on the belief that critical for evolutionary progress were:

Adolf Hitler was not alone among Nazi leaders in his "war of ideological evolution." Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, "stated that the law of nature must take its course in the survival of the fittest." In fact, all of the Nazi leaders were committed both to evolution and Germanic racism, as were most German scientists and industrialists during those dark years.58

Hitler's Hatred of Religion

Whereas those who fear Allah and live by Qur'anic morality always bring peace, calm, security, plenty, and enlightened times to a society. People faithful to the religion of Allah never disturb the peace anywhere in the world, on the contrary they always encourage compassion, pity, friendship, faithfulness, and co-operation.

The Catastrophes Brought About by the Darwinist-Fascist Mussolini

Mussolini was a thorough Darwinist, who believed that violence had been a propelling force in history and that war led to revolution. For him, "the reluctance of England to engage in war only proved the evolutionary decadence of the British Empire."61

At the head of the magazine The People of Italy (Il Popolo d'Italia), which he founded with financial assistance from the French government, he put the phrase, "He who has iron will also have bread." In other words he was telling the people that in order to be able to fill their stomachs they needed the power to wage war. Mussolini chose the axe as the symbol of Fascism and the Fascist Party. Because the axe was the symbol of war, violence, death, and massacre.

Mussolini's conduct, aggressive and prone to violence like every Fascist, is described in Denis Mack Smith's book. In his book, Smith stated that one of Mussolini's unchanging beliefs was aggression and his fundamental instinct was to resort to violence.62

Like the other Darwinist-Fascists, Mussolini's warlike, aggressive and oppressive policies led to many people being massacred, being left without home and family, and to the country's being left in ruins. Violence and oppression were practised, by means of the Blackshirts, not only in his own country, but in others too. In 1935 he occupied Ethiopia, and by 1941 had had 15,000 people wiped out. He did not delay in backing and justifying his occupation of Ethiopia with Darwinism's racialist views. According to Mussolini the Ethiopians were inferior because they were of the black race, and being governed by a superior race like the Italians should have been an honour for them.

On the other hand he continued the oppression of the Muslims which had begun with Italy's occupation of Libya on Oct. 3, 1911, and actually increased the attacks aimed against Muslims. The occupation only came to an end with Mussolini's death in an agreement made on Feb. 10, 1947. During that period 1.5 million Muslims were martyred and hundreds of thousands wounded.

Mussolini, who has gone down in history for his ruthlessness and oppression, described the Fascism which he supported and put into practice in a speech:

The Fascist Franco and the Oppression He Gave Rise to in Spain

Another of the Fascist oppressors who turned the 20th century into a lake of blood was Franco. He organised the "Falange" movement in Spain with the support of the Darwinist Fascists Hitler and Mussolini, and brought great suffering and oppression to the people of Spain. Franco dragged his people into civil war, turning brother against brother, father against son.

During the Spanish Civil War an average of 250 people a day were killed in Madrid, 150 in Barcelona, and 80 in Seville. Some executions were carried out by driving nails into peoples' heads. Pitiless massacres took place all over the country. In a little mountain village to the north of Madrid, for example, 31 villagers were arrested because they had not voted for Franco, and of these 13 were taken out of the village by lorry and killed by the side of the road. The Fascists entered a town with a population of 11,000 near Seville and killed more than 300 people. As a result of the violent events which went on in this way some 800,000 people were killed in the civil war, and 200,000 more executed by order of Franco. Millions were injured or crippled.

Franco Gave Hitler the Population of An Entire Village to Test His Weapons On!

On the morning of May 5, 1937, the people of the small town of Guernica awoke to the death brought by giant bomber planes and tons of bombs, the new miracles of Nazi technology. The little town had been abandoned by Franco to the Nazi plane tests.64

This event was only one of the products of this twisted philosophy which regarded human beings as laboratory animals. This philosophy, which left thousands of people to die just in order to test the power of its weapons and which crippled, injured, and tortured thousands of others, still lives today under different guises. This will continue for as long as Darwinist philosophy and similar oppressions which see human beings as a species of animal and war as the most effective means of progress are kept alive.

Darwinism's Preparatory Role in the First and Second World Wars

We have seen how Darwinian ideas had a great influence on the ideology of imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century, but it is important to realise how literally the doctrine of the struggle for existence and of the survival of the fittest was taken by the majority of the leaders of Europe in the years preceding the First World War. The Austro-Hungarian chief of staff for example, Franz Baron Conrad von Hoetzendorff, wrote in his memoirs after the war:

Philanthropic religions, moral teachings and philosophical doctrines may certainly sometimes serve to weaken mankind's struggle for existence in its crudest form, but they will never succeed in removing it as a driving motive of the world… It is in accordance with this great principle that the catastrophe of the world war came about as the result of the motive forces in the lives of states and peoples, like a thunderstorm which must by its nature discharge itself."

Seen against this sort of ideological background, Conrad's insistence on the need for a preventive war in order to preserve the Austro-Hungarian monarchy becomes comprehensible.

We have seen too how these views were not limited to military figures, and that Max Weber for example was deeply concerned with the international struggle for survival. Again Kurt Riezler, the personal assistant and confidant of the German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, wrote in 1914: "Eternal and absolute enmity is fundamentally inherent in relations between peoples; and the hostility which we observe everywhere… is not the result of a perversion of human nature but is the essence of the world and the source of life itself."65

Friedrich von Bernhardi, a First World War general and German Social Darwinist, was also one of these leaders. "War" declared Bernhardi "is a biological necessity"; it "is as necessary as the struggle of the elements of nature";it "gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things."66

As we have seen, the First World War emerged because of the European thinkers, generals, and leaders who saw waging war, spilling blood, suffering, and inflicting suffering as a kind of "development" and an immutable law of nature. The ideological inspiration which dragged this whole generation to ruin with these completely false ideas was none other than Darwin's concepts of "struggle for life" and "favoured races." Two years after Bernhardi said those words, the First World War, which was to bring about biological development (!) began, leaving behind it 8 million dead, hundreds of cities in ruins, and millions of wounded, crippled, homeless and unemployed. The roots of the Nazi war, which started 21 years later and left some 50 million dead, also lie in Darwinism.

Hitler often used to link his policies of war and genocide to Darwinism. He saw war as not only for eliminating weaker races, but also as a force for disposing of weaker members of the master race. Nazi Germany praised war partly for this reason, because in their twisted thinking war was an essential step for the progress of the race.

The evolutionist A. E. Wiggam explained "the belief that war develops men," on which Hitler based his policy, in a book published in 1922:

With the Darwinists' claims that the strong remained after the fight for survival and that species developed by this means being adapted to human societies, wars also began to be viewed as a necessity for the development of mankind. For example, Hitler ascribed Germany's greatness to the elimination by war of its weaker members over the centuries. Although the Germans were no strangers to war this new "scientific" justification was a force to back up their warlike policies.

Elsewhere, Hitler had claimed, "human civilization as we know it would not exist if it were not for constant war"69

Haeckel proposed, on the subject of war, that the savage methods of the Spartans, one of the city states that made up Ancient Greece, should be implemented. He wrote that "by killing all but the 'perfectly healthy and strong children' the Spartans were 'continually in excellent strength and vigor'."70

War was viewed as "an indispensable regulator" of populations all over Europe, and not just in Germany. "If it were not for war," German Social Darwinist Friedrich Von Bernhardi writes, "we should probably find that inferior and degenerate races would overcome healthy and youthful ones by their wealth and their numbers. The generative importance of war lies in this, that it causes selection, and thus war becomes a biological necessity."71

As we have seen from our account so far, Hitler and the Nazi ideologues who supported him saw war as a necessity with the inspiration they drew from Darwinism. And by implementing this necessity they visited various miseries on their own people, and on the other peoples of the world. From this point of view it will therefore be absolutely correct to identify Charles Darwin as one of those primarily responsible for the sufferings experienced in World War II.

Professor Dr. Jerry Bergman demonstrates the effect of Darwinism on the Second World War:

It was no coincidence that the 20th century should see the bloodiest wars the world has known, coming as it did after the 19th century, which was formed by the ideas of such materialist ideologues as Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Darwinism had prepared the theoretical and so-called scientific ground which would end in war, and the despots who saw war as indispensable for the growth of humanity killed a total of 60 million people in both world wars. 

The Neo-Nazis

The Neo-Nazis consist of unemployed hooligans, drug addicts, and bloodthirsty types, and possess all features of the Fascist mentality. One news article about the Neo-Nazis shows how attracted they are to blood and violence:

The Neo-Nazis have been influenced by the same Darwinist understanding as their "greats," Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. On the Internet pages which they set up for Nazi and racist propaganda it is possible to come across Darwin's words and praise for Darwin, because Darwin gives support to all the Neo-Nazis' movements and ideas. In their pages, therefore, they put Darwinism forward as a theory which must be accepted, without feeling the need for any evidence.

The attacks and murders the Neo-Nazis carry out are completely ruthless. Neo-Nazis take pleasure in burning people to death, frightening them, and torturing little children, and Turks are one of their main targets. Neo-Nazis reveal their hatred and enmity of Turks in every corner of their Internet sites, and show this hatred in action. This statement about Turks appeared in one Neo-Nazi site:

Neo-Nazi violence against Turks and other peoples has recently been on the rise. The Turkish daily Sabah dated August 12, 2000 gave a list of Neo-Nazi attacks during the summer of 2000:

These incidents are just a few of the racist attacks against Turks. Attacks and murders by these Fascist groups, the inheritors of Darwin and Fascists such as Hitler, still continue. Legal measures will not be enough to stop these inhuman groups' attacks. The sure way to put an end to them is to wage a serious ideological war alongside the legal measures. The outrages perpetrated by these people who see racism as a law of nature will not come to an end so long as Darwinist ideas are not knocked down as science.