On Darwinism and Hitlerism

[stephen]

In his most recent book, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Discovery Institute fellow Richard Weikart lays out a historian's case for the proposition that Adolf Hitler's murderous policies arose from a scientific racism inspired by Charles Darwin's most famous ideas.

According to Weikart, Hitler wasn't an amoral monster, but a frighteningly "moral" one -- "moral" in the sense of principled, of course. Principles can be directed to evil or to good. Hitler was an autocrat who aimed to bring about what seemed to him to be a praiseworthy end, a biological utopia forged in the fiery struggle for life. In Hitler's mind, this world-to-come would be the inevitable result of Natural Selection, a blind and unforgiving process he would merely speed along by expansionist warfare, eugenics, and institutional racism. In Hitler's view, evolutionary progress was so great an end that any means used to achieve it would be moral, even programmatic genocide.

The most ghoulish evils of Nazi foreign and domestic policy were made possible in the first place because Hitler sought to apply Darwinian concepts to the world outside the biology lecture hall. Mere ideas are not to blame for mortal suffering, true, but in light of Hitler's Ethic, the exportation of Darwinian ideas outside the confines of biological study merits close watch.

One academic reviewer, Professor Larry Arnhart, has questioned the causal connection between the thoughts of Charles Darwin and those of Adolf Hitler. By fixing on a trivial truth, Arnhart misses Weikart's main point.

As Arnhart rightly points out, the German-reading Hitler probably did not read the original works of the English-writing Charles Darwin. Hitler no doubt learned Darwinian theory through the mediating influences of fellow German-speakers like Ernst Haeckel. But most people who know about Darwinian theory first become acquainted with it through writers or teachers other than Charles Darwin. I know I did. Even Richard Dawkins became a committed Darwinist well before he read Darwin, as he comments [September 20] in the New York Times.

The point is, however and through whomever Hitler imbibed Darwinian notions he clearly applied them outside their proper place to bring about suffering he sincerely viewed as moral by the "light" of those notions. For this, Weikart puts Hitler on trial, leaving Darwin in the dock awaiting prosecution by another.

(Joshua Youngkin, "Richard Weikart on Darwinism and Hitlerism," Evolution News and Views, September 20, 2011)

 

[lokidervish]

In 1933, the Catholic Church had viewed the Nazis as a barrier to the spread of communism from Russia. In this year, Hitler and the Catholic Church signed an agreement that he would not interfere with the Catholic Church while the Church would not comment on politics. However, this only lasted until 1937, when Hitler started a concerted attack on the Catholic Church arresting priests etc. In 1937, the pope, Pius XI, issued his "Mit brennender Sorge" statement ("With burning anxiety") over what was going on in Germany. However, there was never a total clampdown on the Catholic Church in Germany. It was a world-wide movement with much international support. If Hitler had maintained his agreement with the established ruling body of the Catholic church, some speculate he would have had the continued blessing to continue his ambitious plans.

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[David777]

Dear Lokidervish.

What has the Catholic Church in common with Christianity?

 

[stephen]

In 1933, the Catholic Church had viewed the Nazis as a barrier to the spread of communism from Russia. In this year, Hitler and the Catholic Church signed an agreement that he would not interfere with the Catholic Church while the Church would not comment on politics. However, this only lasted until 1937, when Hitler started a concerted attack on the Catholic Church arresting priests etc. In 1937, the pope, Pius XI, issued his "Mit brennender Sorge" statement ("With burning anxiety") over what was going on in Germany. However, there was never a total clampdown on the Catholic Church in Germany. It was a world-wide movement with much international support. If Hitler had maintained his agreement with the established ruling body of the Catholic church, some speculate he would have had the continued blessing to continue his ambitious plans.

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Appreciate the info. Thank you.

 

[brakelite]

In 1933, the Catholic Church had viewed the Nazis as a barrier to the spread of communism from Russia. In this year, Hitler and the Catholic Church signed an agreement that he would not interfere with the Catholic Church while the Church would not comment on politics. However, this only lasted until 1937, when Hitler started a concerted attack on the Catholic Church arresting priests etc. In 1937, the pope, Pius XI, issued his "Mit brennender Sorge" statement ("With burning anxiety") over what was going on in Germany. However, there was never a total clampdown on the Catholic Church in Germany. It was a world-wide movement with much international support. If Hitler had maintained his agreement with the established ruling body of the Catholic church, some speculate he would have had the continued blessing to continue his ambitious plans.

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There is much evidence that reveals that those priests who were arrested were in opposition to Hitlers policies...they were true Christians following their concsience. The Vatican however was of a different mind. Thus not the total clampdown. After months of research in secret Vatican archives which he had gained permission to access in order to write a defense against the allegations being made against "Hitler's Pope" as he was being called, The author John Cornwell had the following to say:

Two key officials granted me access to secret material: depositions under oath gathered 30 years ago to support the process for Pacelli's canonization, and the archive of the Vatican Secretariat of State, the foreign office of the Holy See. I also drew on German sources relating to Pacelli's activities in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, including his dealings with AdoIf Hitler in 1933. For months on end I ransacked Pacelli's files, which dated back to 1912, in a windowless dungeon beneath the Borgia Tower in Vatican City. Later I sat for several weeks in a dusty office in the Jesuit headquarters, close to St. Peter's Square in Rome, mulling over a thousand pages of transcribed testimony given under oath by those who had known Pacelli well during his lifetime, including his critics.

By the middle of 1997, 1 was in a state of moral shock. The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment more scandalous than Hochhuth's. The evidence was explosive. It showed for the first time that PaceIli was patently, and by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power and at the same time undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent. And, worse, that he was a hypocrite, for after the war he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazi persecution of the Jews...........
.......After Hitler came to power in January 1933, he made the concordat negotiations with Pacelli a priority. The negotiations proceeded over six months with constant shuttle diplomacy between the Vatican and Berlin. Hitler spent more time on this treaty than on any other item of foreign diplomacy during his dictatorship.

The Reich Concordat granted Pacelli the right to impose the new Code of Canon Law on Catholics in Germany and promised a number of measures favorable to Catholic education, including new schools. In exchange, Pacelli collaborated in the withdrawal of Catholics from political and social activity. The negotiations were conducted in secret by Pacelli, Kaas, and Hitler's deputy chancellor, Franz von Papen, over the heads of German bishops and the faithful. The Catholic Church in Germany had no say in setting the conditions.

In the end, Hitler insisted that his signature on the concordat would depend on the Center Party's voting for the Enabling Act, the legislation that was to give him dictatorial powers. It was Kaas, chairman of the party but completely in thrall to Pacelli, who bullied the delegates into acceptance. Next, Hitler insisted on the "voluntary" disbanding of the Center Party, the last truly parliamentary force in Germany. Again, Pacelli was the prime mover in this tragic Catholic surrender. The fact that the party voluntarily disbanded itself, rather than go down fighting, had a profound psychological effect, depriving Germany of the last democratic focus of potential noncompliance and resistance: In the political vacuum created by its surrender, Catholics in the millions joined the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope. The German bishops capitulated to Pacelli's policy of centralization, and German Catholic democrats found themselves politically leaderless.

After the Reich Concordat was signed, Pacelli declared it an unparalleled triumph for the Holy See. In an article in L 'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican-controlled newspaper, he announced that the treaty, indicated the total recognition and acceptance of the church's law by the German state. But Hitler was the true victor and the Jews were the concordat's first victims. On July 14, 1933, after the initialing of the treaty, the Cabinet minutes record Hitler as saying that the concordat hadcreated an atmosphere of confidence that would be "especially significant in the struggle against international Jewry." He was claiming that the Catholic Church had publicly given its blessing, at home and abroad, to the policies of National Socialism, including its anti-Semitic stand. At the same time, under the terms of the concordat, Catholic criticism of acts deemed political by the Nazis, could now be regarded as "foreign interference." The great German Catholic Church, at the insistence of Rome, fell silent. In the future all complaints against the Nazis would be channeled through Pacelli. There were some notable exceptions, for example the sermons preached in 1933 by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the Archbishop of Munich, in which he denounced the Nazis for their rejection of the Old Testament as a Jewish text.

The concordat immediately drew the German church into complicity with the Nazis. Even as Pacelli was granted special advantages in the concordat for German Catholic education, Hitler was trampling on the educational rights of Jews throughout the country. At the same time, Catholic priests were being drawn into Nazi collaboration with the attestation bureaucracy, which established Jewish ancestry. Pacelli, despite the immense centralized power he now wielded through the Code of Canon Law, said and did nothing. The attestation machinery would lead inexorably to the selection of millions destined for the death camps.

As Nazi anti-Semitism mounted in Germany during the 1930's, Pacelli failed to complain, even on behalf of Jews who had become Catholics, acknowledging that the matter was a matter of German internal policy. Eventually, in January 1937, three German cardinals and two influential bishops arrived at the Vatican to plead for a vigorous protest over Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church,
which had been deprived of all forms of activity beyond church services. Pins XI at last decided to issue an encyclical, a letter addressed to all the faithful of the world. Written under Pacelli's direction, it was called Mit Brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), and it was a forthright statement of the plight of the church in Germany. But there was no explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism, even in relation to Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Worse still, the subtext against Nazism (National Socialism and Hitler were not mentioned by name) was blunted by the publication five days later of an even more condemnatory encyclical by Pins XI against Communism.

The encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, though too little and too late, revealed that the Catholic Church all along had the power to shake the regime. A few days later, Hermann Göring, one of Hitler's closest aides and his commander of the Luffwaffe, delivered a two-hour harangue to a Nazi assembly against the Catholic clergy. However, Roman centralizing had paralyzed the German Catholic Church and its powerful web of associations. Unlike the courageous grass-roots activism that had combated Bismarck's persecutions in the 1870s, German Catholicism now looked obediently to Rome for guidance. Although Pacelli collaborated in the writing and the distribution of the encyclical, he quickly undermined its effects by reassuring the Reich's ambassador in Rome. "Pacelli received me with decided friendliness," the diplomat reported back to Berlin, "and emphatically assured me during the conversation that normal and friendly relations with us would be restored as soon as possible."

In the summer of 1938, as Pius XI lay dying, he became belatedly anxious about anti-Semitism throughout Europe. He commissioned another encyclical, to be written exclusively on the Jewish question. The text, which never saw the light of day, has only recently been discovered. It was written by three Jesuit scholars, but Pacelli presumably had charge of the project. It was to be called Humani Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race). For all its good intentions and its repudiation of violent anti-Semitism, the document is replete with the anti-Jewishness that Pacelli had displayed in his early period in Germany. The Jews, the text claims, were responsible for their own fate. God had chosen them to make way for Christ's redemption, but they denied and killed him. And now, "blinded by their dream of worldly gain and material success," they deserved the "worldly and spiritual ruin" that they had brought down upon themselves.

The document warns that that to defend the Jews as "Christian principles and humanity" demand could involve the unacceptable risk of being ensnared by secular politics--not least an association with Bolshevism. The encyclical was delivered in the fall of 1938 to the Jesuits in Rome, who sat on it. To this day we do not know why it was not completed and handed to Pope Pius XI. For all its drawbacks, it was a clear protest against Nazi attacks on Jews and so might have done some good. But it appears likely that the Jesuits, and Pacelli, whose influence as secretary of state of the Vatican was paramount since the Pope was moribund, were reluctant to inflame the Nazis by its publication. Pacelli, when he became pope, would bury the document deep in the secret archives.
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[Mr. Traverse]

I don't believe the point is whether or not Hitler based his persecution on the ideas of Darwin's "Natural Selection". The point is that Darwin was attempting to explain what "is", not what "ought" to be.

So to hold Darwin at fault for Hitler's ideas, (assuming, for the sake of argument, that your assertion is correct regarding Hitler's views), would be odd, to say the least. Darwin was not in any way advocating a moral standard based upon "natural selection". He was formulating a scientific theory based upon his observations of reality.

Also, the theory of evolution doesn't assert that the process is "perfecting" the organism in question, only changing it.

Respectfully,

Traverse

 

[JonahofAkron]

I don't believe the point is whether or not Hitler based his persecution on the ideas of Darwin's "Natural Selection". The point is that Darwin was attempting to explain what "is", not what "ought" to be.

So to hold Darwin at fault for Hitler's ideas, (assuming, for the sake of argument, that your assertion is correct regarding Hitler's views), would be odd, to say the least. Darwin was not in any way advocating a moral standard based upon "natural selection". He was formulating a scientific theory based upon his observations of reality.

Also, the theory of evolution doesn't assert that the process is "perfecting" the organism in question, only changing it.

Respectfully,

Traverse

Although I am not an advocate of evolutionary biology, I have to agree with your conclusion. I don't think that the point of Darwin's material study was to point to a 'new world order', as the Nazi organization patently desired. It would be most beneficial for us to to see the Nazis in light of the general historical context of an era that believed that eugenics would solve many of the world's woes by using the age-old scapegoat: the Jews. I assume that the belief had have been akin to 'if it worked in the middle ages, it should be fine for now'.