Hitler’s Debt to Darwin

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Time magazine and Variety have published the latest attack reviews of Expelled, in advance of opening day this Friday. As with previous hostile responses, the focus of outrage is on the film’s argument that Hitler drew inspiration from Darwin’s intellectual legacy.

In Time, reviewer Jeffrey Kluger fumes: “Theories of natural selection, it’s claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler’s killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.”

As more attacks come in, making either this bewilderingly inane point — or the one made by Scientific American editor-in-chief John Rennie that the role of Christianity in fomenting Nazism should have been discussed in the film — just keep in mind the response to recent books that have put blame for the Holocaust on the churches.

In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”

Or just pick up any standard biography of Hitler.

In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: “The basis of Hitler’s political beliefs was a crude Darwinism.” What Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was its rejection of the conclusions that followed from Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

Joachim C. Fest, in Hitler, describes how the Nazi tyrant “extract[ed] the elements of his world view” from various influences including “popular treatments of Darwinism.” Hitler, like lots of other Europeans and Americans of his day, saw Darwinism as offering a total picture of social reality. In his biography, Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Ian Kershaw explains that “crude social-Darwinism” gave Hitler “his entire political ‘world-view.'”

John Toland’s Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, finally, says this of Hitler’s “Second Book” (1928), never published in his lifetime: “An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right.”

You get the idea. I’ll be blogging every day this week on the Darwin-Hitler connection. Tomorrow we’ll open up Hitler’s own work and see what he said about his philosophy’s grounding, not Christianity, but in modern biology.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

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