From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany [ハードカバー]

The review by G. Sherwood is silly.

He criticizes Weikart's book for not showing how the eugenics movement in the United States provided a model for Hitler. But that's not the concern of Weikart's book, which is to provide an intellectual history of the orgins of Nazism in German social Darwinism.

I disagree with Weikart. I think the title of his book should be "From Haeckel to Darwin," because I think Daniel Gasman has shown conclusively that Ernst Haeckel was the primary ideological influence on Nazism and Hitler. Actually, if you look at the index to Weikart's book, you will see more references to Haeckel than to any other person.

But I agree with Weikart that Hitler and his Nazis exploited an ambiguity in Darwinian biology that could be used to promote racism and eugenics. Hitler was able to use the Darwinian language of "survival of the fittest" to promote his own schemes. This is the dark side of Darwinian science.

The problem is that there is little evidence that Darwin himself promoted Nazi eugenics. In fact, the social Darwinists that influenced the Nazi movement often disagreed with Darwin's account of the natural moral sense, as Weikart indicates.

And yet Weikart does show very clearly the intellectual history of Nazi racism as the product of a distorted Darwinian legacy. For that, we should be grateful.

The subject of Nazi Germany still is a very popular topic for books, articles and public discussion. Having read many books and articles on this area of history, I can confidently conclude that this is one of the most important (and one of the best scholarly sources). In contrast to many authors who quote each other (and must rely on secondary sources printed in English), Weikart's work relies heavily on primary sources published in German during the time he is covering. Weikart is fluent in the language (I only studied it to pass my Ph.D. reading exams) and lived in Germany to do his research. As a result, Weikart includes much new material for scholars to mull over for the next century. He covers the basic question asked about this era, namely, why did Nazism start and grow in the most educated nation in the world and why did so many scientists (especially biologists of various types) and medical doctors firmly side with Nazism? Understanding why Nazism happened is critical to insure that it never happens again. This work focuses on the major influence of Darwinism, but also covers in a very balanced way other influences. Like a story, he develops a major point in each chapter, building onto the story and his conclusion. The 42 pages of notes fully document his conclusions. This book is a must for anyone interested in not only Nazi Germany but the whole question of the source of morality and ethics.

This is an excellent overview of late 19th -early 20th century German `Social Darwinism', detailing the widespread politicisation of intellectualism and `science' in Germany, well before the Nazis and Hitler ever came to power. It reveals much of where Hitler and the Nazis actually got their views from; eg ideas on extreme militarism, race superiority and race determinism, human inequality and expendability, `might is right' policies and ideas, and various other extreme forms of eugenic/Social Darwinism, which were widespread amongst German intellectuals. Numerous German intellectuals and their ideas are detailed in his book (eg Forel, Ploetz, H.Chamberlain, Hellward, Schonerer, Haeckel, Dodel, Woltmann, Lenz, Fritsch, Ribbert, Kirchhoff, Peschel, Kaup, Jaeger, Buchner, Lehmann, Schallmayer, Luschan, Tille, and others), in the decades preceeding Nazism, many advocating Nazi-type ideas supposedly based on `science', before Hitler ever came to power, who followed a long trend of data distortion probably derived from the tenuous relationship between German political culture, and German science.

It is very surprising what various, highly respected German scientists/intellectuals of the time, well before the Nazis, actually believed or debated, as being `justified' by biology. Examples include:

-infanticide,
-euthanasia,
-suicide,
-marriage control,
-state-selected abortion,
-utopian societies,
-racial extermination,
-killing the disabled,
-killing off the old or weak,
-capital punishment,
-separation of the `unfit',
-sterilisation of the `unfit',
-`false humaneness',
-equating physical health with moral superiority,
-ascribing physical abnormalities as throwbacks to `lower' animals,
-confidence in the ability of scientists to categorise and physically measure `might', and `value';
- Aryan race ideas, (Nietzsche's `Dionysian'),
-`providence' equating with the `holy law of evolution'; (used by Hitler),
-the `inferior' `parasitising' the `superior',
-parasitic races
-anti-Semitism
-`struggle for space'
-`progress' through destruction,
-`living space' and population expansion with racial struggle,
-blonde hair-blue eye superiority,
-`struggle of annihilation',
-racial purity,
-`Teuton' superiority (Hitler preferred `Aryan' to `Teuton'),
-racial hygiene,
-medical experimentation of the 'unfit',
-the glorification of war for race,

the list goes on and on. All of these ideas, before Hitler and the Nazis ever came to power. This book is an excellent, careful and detailed analysis of the development of these ideas in late 19th-early 20th century Germany.

The presence of so many widespread Nazi-type ideas, well before World War 1 and the interwar years, also helps to explain how many ordinary Germans allowed the Nazis to get into power and get away with so much; the `soil was prepared' by intellectuals in Germany for decades, and Hitler read many of the works of these intellectuals.

However, in his claim that Darwinism led to Hitler and Nazism, one major criticism is that Weikart doesn't spend much time in attempting to make a connection between the actual Darwinian `data', and Nazism/Hitler. Weikart does say that the path from Darwin to Hitler is tortuous and convoluted, but he is of the opinion, that the idea of `Darwinian natural selection' and its implications, even a perverted/distorted form of it, ultimately led, one way or another, to Hitler and Nazi ideology. To repeat, he doesn't spend much time actually investigating the data or its distortions, either psychologically or scientifically, rather, he mostly limits himself to overviews of the development and beliefs of the various eugenicists themselves.

The distortion of biological data into Social Darwinism, eugenics, and ultimately, Nazism in the 19th -early 20th century is an age-old IS/OUGHT issue. Just because something happens in nature, such as lightning, radioactivity, cancerous cells, or wasteful death by `blundering' natural selection (as Darwin himself put it), doesn't mean we humans, or nature itself for that matter, somehow `condones' these things. This issue is barely discussed, but it is the KEY issue. Just because something IS, doesn't mean it OUGHT to be, promoted by humans, or otherwise. This was the mistake of German intellectuals, Weikart barely discusses this process, only describing how intellectuals in late 19th -early 20th century routinely equated `is' with `ought' in their ideology. Perhaps the problem then, was a widespread and accepted, extreme type of socialist-determinism, within both science and culture, rather than a problem with `Darwinism' itself (?).

The German Social Eugenicists infused the scientific data with politics, occasionally overturning the data with politics (eg Haeckel's 12 races diagram p107, which `shows' that `lower' humans are closer to the apes than `higher' humans are to `lower' humans). The data doesn't give any support for many of the ideas eugenicists/social Darwinists advocated, which shows how science can become so infused with the prevailing culture and politics, that it blinds even the best and most influential scientists. Science, with its connections to high culture and politics, its human vanity, its power by default, its need for special funding, and its innate careerism, is VERY susceptible to subtle political distortion and preconceived ideas, especially in cases where it is difficult to disprove or falsify paradoxes and data ambiguities, and society at large invariably suffers from this.

What was perhaps going on in late 19th -early 20th century Europe/Germany, was the development of unrestrained bureaucratic ideologies masquerading as science-a science distorted by prevailing assumptions which supported the interests of the bureaucratic/aristocratic elite. Both Bolshevik-communism, and Intellectual-Social Darwinism/Eugenics were examples of this, and both produced expendable death, since truth, and the individual, were `expended' by intellectuals well before WW1 and 2, and well before the Bolsheviks and Nazis came to power. One could argue, from the writing of the intellectuals themselves, that Nazism (and Bolshevism-which is not discussed here) was born in 19th century bureaucratic/aristocratic `convenient', unexamined, `assumptions'.

If one reads some of the late 19th -early 20th century German views detailed in this book, one shouldn't be all that surprised at what the Nazis eventually did: many of the worst policies of the Nazis were already formulated by intellectuals in the name of `science', dripping with distortion, vanity and expediency.

Overall a very good, detailed and intriguing book, but also a tortuous read, which reflects the very difficult and tortuous subject matter- that is-the intellectual origins of Nazi ideology.