European Roots of National Socialism:
A contribution to the reflection on the Year of Darwin
CONCLUSION
From Imperialist Colonial Wars to Racial-Biological War of Extermination
In Hitler’s Table Talk (1941-2) with Martin Bormann and others, Hitler often compared the German war on the Eastern Front with the colonial wars. “What India was for England,” Hitler said shortly after the start of the offensive against the Soviet Union, “the eastern area will be for us.”1
Toward the middle of October 1941, Hitler presented his ideas of a German conquest of Eastern Europe, which recall the African fantasies of William Reades: “In twenty years, the territory of Ukraine will include twenty million people. After three hundred years it will be a flourishing landscape park of unusual beauty.” His people would be forced to their knees by destructive methods, such as had been used in former times by other empires. “We will select them (the natives). There is only one task: Germanization by moving in Germans and regarding the natives as Indians.” The “natives” should not be Germanized, but reduced to the condition of slaves. Hitler proposed to teach them a “gesture language,” to outlaw literature, and to prohibit education. The radio would be sufficient for the general public as a means of entertainment. Of course, the colonization of the Slavic world would include the elimination of the intellectual and political elites.2
The Nazis were the first in Central Europe to have led a policy of conquest which also included the destruction of ethnic groups from the ancient world. With that they crossed another threshold: Classical imperialism occupied territories in order to plunder them, to get raw materials and new markets in order to “expand the civilization.” The primary goal of the National Socialist policy of conquest, however, was the biological and racial extension of German rule. It was not just a question of conquering new lands, but above all, of Germanizing them. Therefore, for the Nazis, racism and eugenics were far more than an ideological cover or justification for the policy of conquest; they were their engine. At the center of it was racial and biological anti-Semitism.3
As Goebbels said in July 1941, the soldiers of the Third Reich should be mainly “saviors of European culture and civilization,” which was threatened by a “political undermining following the lead of greedy state capitalists.” Unlike the imperialist assessment of the colonial peoples, the Nazis saw in the Jews not a backward, savage people who could not survive the march of progress, but the enemy of mankind. Their extermination was therefore not instrumental in nature but took the dimension of a struggle for the salvation and renewal of mankind itself. Thus, the destruction of Judaism was planned and organized as a crusade or war of liberation. Eastern Europe was, according to the Nazis, the “Lebensraum” (Living Space) that they wanted to colonize, but this implied the conquest and the destruction of the Soviet Union and of Bolshevism, which was seen by the Nazis as a product of “Jewish intelligence” and “the Slavic, subhuman race.” The Red Army embodied that threatening alliance. To erase it, very different resources from those that had been used in the colonial expeditions of the 19th century were needed: It took a total war in the middle of Europe. This total war was also a war of conquest, a “race war” and a colonial war. The murder of the Jews was a part of it.
Biological Anti-Semitism
In May, 1920 the London Times published an article entitled “The Jewish Peril.” Winston Churchill called Marx, Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg and others a part of a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization.” “Now this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America gripped the Russian people by the collar and has practically become the undisputed ruler of a mighty empire.” The Bolsheviks were in his eyes “enemies of mankind,” “vampires who suck the blood of their victims,” “terrible baboons in the middle of cities in ruins and mountains of corpses”, at the head of Lenin, “a dog’s monster on a pyramid of skulls.”4
The novelty of the Nazis’ anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism was the combination of extreme biological theories and “racial hygiene.” The vocabulary of the pesticides and images from medical pathology were used to characterize the Jews in particular: “the Jew is a deadly cancer that destroys without prejudice to the national body.”5 The destruction of these abnormal cells would therefore be for the Nazis one of the central concerns of their health policy: racial hygiene. Alfred Rosenberg, one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, writes in “The Myth of the 20th Century” that the takeover of Lenin and Trotsky had only “been possible in the middle of a racially and mentally ill body politic, which could practice nothing more than bloodless love.” Even Hitler speaks in Mein Kampf of the “tragedies that Germany could have prevented if it had sent the Jews to the gas.”6
Eugenic Practices and Models
The first step of destruction on biological and racial grounds (for cleansing the “hereditary disposition”) happened with Operation T4, the euthanasia of brainsick and other disabled people, which began in January 1940.
Euthanasia, as a means of social prophylaxis, was specific to the politics of the Nazis; there is nothing comparable in the history of the 20th century. The roots of this practice, however, are found in the Western world. Racial anthropology and eugenics were subjects that, since the end of the 19th century, were taught in every Western university. The term “eugenics” was first coined in 1883 by a cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton, who summed up his hopes for mankind in the sentence: “If it is possible to breed by a careful selection of dogs or horses with specific properties, then it should be possible to create a highly gifted race of men.”7
Eugenics had a great influence from 1905-1940, in which it officially became the policy of a number of countries. The sterilization of inmates of asylums and prisons was practiced. In the US there were, by the year 1958, thirty states with legislation about such practices, and nearly 61,000 persons had been sterilized against their will. By the year 1932, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and two Canadian provinces had adopted sterilization laws.8
A little later, Hitler issued his infamous sterilization program.
The Nazis especially admired the work of the American eugenicist Madison Grant. They published a German edition of his book The Passing of the Great Race (1916) in 1925. The 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica claimed, in the article “Civilization,” that the future of mankind would likely bring “the biological improvement of the breed, thanks to the application of inheritance laws.” This article, which was removed only after 1945, shows both the legitimacy which eugenic theories enjoyed in the scientific community, as well as its distribution in public opinion. In Italy and France, where the Catholic Church was against forced sterilization, the theories of eugenics had nevertheless found a widespread distribution. In 1924, the first Italian Congress for “social eugenics” was held. Five hundred physicians there discussed the “biological improvement of the breed.” In France the main propagandist of eugenics was Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who championed, in the 1890s, a campaign of mass sterilization in order “to prevent chaos and barbarism in democratic societies.” In Selections Sociales (1896), he sketched the outlines of his project of producing a more elevated humanity by artificial insemination. This would be the replacement of spontaneous animal reproduction by “zootechnical and scientific reproduction.”9
The theory of eugenics fell on fertile ground in Germany. Since the end of the 19th century, several anthropologists such as Ernst Haeckel proposed euthanasia as a social therapy, a kind of synthesis between eugenics and Nordic racism. In 1905 the physician Alfred Ploetz founded the Society for Racial Hygiene in Berlin. In the Weimar Republic, eugenics caused strong economic growth through the creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, which planned the first projects for the sterilization of mentally ill people, criminals, and “morally” retarded individuals. The Rockefeller Foundation made substantial funds available and recognized the scientific value of the Institute. Initially less ideologically oriented, the Institute after 1930 increasingly began to implement a synthesis of theories of eugenics and racial thought; some of its employees were openly racist.
For most of Western public opinion, the German race policy was moving along the lines of a widespread positivist logic until the end of the thirties. It is noteworthy that eugenics was widespread and well received especially in countries with a Protestant tradition, while the predominantly Catholic countries were less enthusiastic. In fact, in the Catholic countries of Europe, there was, under fascism, virtually no eugenics.10
One of the few formal condemnations of eugenics in all its forms was by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Casti Connubii in 1930. The fact is that eugenics and “racial hygiene” were widespread in the West and had found enthusiastic supporters. From this “tradition,” National Socialism, moreover, drew its “scientific” language, through which it formulated its “biological” new anti-Semitism: Now, the Jews were a “virus” that caused “disease” and its “eradication” a measure of purge or “hygiene.”
The condemnation of the eugenic theories which were partly at the root of the crimes of the Nazis happened only after the discovery of Nazi crimes: Until the war, the eugenics of the Nazis were not considered to be inhumane or insane or an obstacle to international research, in spite of the mass emigration of Jewish scientists. Only the unanimous condemnation of the Nazis after 1945 overshadowed these good relations. Mengele had indeed no counterpart in any other country, but his practices were only the radical culmination of a eugenic ideology which was widespread in the West. Thus several German doctors did not miss the chance, at the Nuremberg trials in 1945, to refer to similar experiments that other democratic countries had done before them.
The War as a Means of Salvation and Hygiene
Together with Social Darwinism, eugenics was ultimately the justification for the war. Thus Hitler emphasized, in his secret speech before the “junior military leaders” of May 30, 1942:
A deeply serious saying of a great military philosopher is that struggle and war is the father of all things. The whole universe seems to be dominated by this one idea that there exists an eternal selection, in which the stronger survives at the end and the weaker dies....This struggle consequently leads to an incessant selection of the better and harder ones. We therefore see in this fight an element of all living and of life in general....We know that this battle will always remove the weak and will strengthen and make harder the strong, and that therefore the individual organisms themselves are enabled to undergo a development of progress.11
This ideological consideration of war was not specific to National Socialism. Around 1900, the German eugenicist Otto Ammon taught that war would assure “the higher and more intelligent peoples of the superiority which they deserve.” Three years earlier, in 1897, Field Marshal Lord Wolseley opened a congress of the Philosophical Society of London with a speech on “War and Civilisation” which presented war as a tool for identifying the best from mankind.12
And in 1911, on the eve of World War I, the British military specialist Sir Reginald Clare Hart developed a biological theory of war in which he considered war as an instrument of progress and renewal of the human race. In his conclusion Hart calls even for a relentless war to destroy lower people and nations.13
Shortly before the outbreak of World War I the renowned British weekly Nineteenth Century printed an article of the well-known journalist Herold F. Wyatt, with the title “War as a Test of God.” In some passages it recalls Hitler’s secret speech of 1942 (above):
If you now dream of short-sighted and superficial sentimentalists–if war on earth could be made impossible–then one would destroy the mechanism which punishes the corruption of a nation and rewards national virtue. The better ones would no longer replace the inferior, and the process of human evolution would come to a halt....Victory is the crown of moral quality, and therefore, as long as nations fight each other, the survival of the fittest is the survival of the physically best....The real judgement, the only judgement which decides in questions of nations, is the decision of God, and that judgement is war.14
That Wyatt’s declarations are not an extreme example can be proved by a number of similar statements in popular newspapers and magazines, especially in the period between 1880 and 1914. War was referred to as “a religious crusade to destroy the evil which threatens the welfare of humanity and which is an obstacle to the march of the kingdom to salvation” (Hans Kohn, 1939).15
The Warning of History
National Socialism and its crimes was, without any doubt, an event without historical precedent. However, its ideology and its inhuman crimes did not simply fall from the blue; they have substantial roots in the cultural and scientific landscape of the West in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, the idea that civilization makes necessary the conquest and destruction of “inferior” or “bad” breeds or the biological anti-Semitism of the Nazis were not invented. Almost all the basic elements of Nazi ideology, such as biological racism, anti-human social Darwinism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, colonial conquest and destruction, including war as an instrument of selection and progress, could be found in the context of Western Civilization at the time of imperialism and colonialism and in the context of the First World War and its revolutionary upheavals. The French historian André Pichot goes probably too far when he says: “Hitler did not invent much. Most of the time he did simply collect ideas that were in the air and put them into action.” National Socialism was indeed something unique. Its singularity lay above all in its ability to meld those elements and ideas into a unique synthesis that was so terribly radical and new, that for most of his contemporaries it was inconceivable and incomprehensible.
1 Enzo Traverso, Modernity and Violence (Cologne, 2003), pp. 69-78.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 105f.
5 Eberhard Jackel, Hitler’s Weltanschauung (Stuttgart, 1973), p. 69.
6 Traverso, Modernity and Violence, p. 108.
7 Ibid., p. 124.
8 Jean-Claude Guillebaud, The Principle, p. 38-39 E.
9 Traverso, Modernity and Violence, pp. 125-127.
10 Guillebaud, The Principle, p. 306.
11 Hitler’s Table Talk at the Driver’s Head-quarters, ed. Henry Picker, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart, 1973), p. 464f.
12 Hanns Joachim W. Koch, Social Darwinism (Munich, 1973), p. 109.
13 Traverso, Modernity and Violence, p. 126.
14 Koch, Social Darwinism, p. 104f.
15 Traverso, Modernity and Violence, p. 147.
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