The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought
by Richard Weikart
German Studies Review 36.3 (2013): 537–556
© 2013 by The German Studies Association.
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Historians disagree about whether Nazis embraced Darwinian evolution. By examining Hitler’s ideology, the official biology curriculum, the writings of Nazi anthropologists, and Nazi periodicals, we find that Nazi racial theorists did indeed embrace human and racial evolution. They not only taught that humans had evolved from primates, but they believed the Aryan or Nordic race had evolved to a higher level than other races because of the harsh climatic conditions that influenced natural selection. They also claimed that Darwinism underpinned specific elements of Nazi racial ideology, including racial inequality, the necessity of the racial struggle for existence, and collectivism.1
Many historians recognize that Hitler was a social Darwinist, and some even portray social Darwinism as a central element of Nazi ideology.2 Why, then, do some historians claim that Nazis did not believe in human evolution? George Mosse argued that human evolution was incompatible with Nazi ideology, because Nazis stressed the immutability of the German race.3 More recently Peter Bowler and Michael Ruse have argued that the Nazis rejected human evolution, because they upheld a fixed racial type and racial inequality.4 Nowhere is this irony more pronounced than in the work of Daniel Gasman, who claimed that Hitler built his ideology on the social Darwinist ideas of Ernst Haeckel, but simultaneously argued that Nazis rejected human evolution.5
How is it possible to embrace social Darwinism, while rejecting Darwinism and human evolution? Anne Harrington suggests that the Nazis liked some elements of Darwinism, especially the struggle for existence, but not human evolution.6 Robert Richards agrees, claiming that Nazi racial ideas “were rarely connected with specific evolutionary conceptions of the transmutation of species,” even though they bandied about the term "struggle for existence."7 In another essay Richards went further, arguing that Hitler and the Nazis completely rejected biological evolution.8 The notion that the Nazis could embrace racial struggle without believing in evolution seems plausible at first, especially since Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a forerunner of Nazi racial ideology, embraced this position.
However, the claim that the Nazis did not believe in the transmutation of species and human evolution runs aground once we examine Nazi racial ideology in detail. In this essay I examine the following evidence to demonstrate overwhelmingly that Nazi racial thinkers embraced human and racial evolution: 1) Hitler believed in human evolution. 2) The official Nazi school curriculum prominently featured biological evolution, including human evolution. 3) Nazi racial anthropologists, including SS anthropologists, uniformly endorsed human evolution and integrated evolution into their racial ideology. 4) Nazi periodicals, including those on racial ideology, embraced human evolution. 5) Nazi materials designed to inculcate the Nazi worldview among SS and military men promoted human evolution as an integral part of the Nazi worldview.
While examining these lines of evidence, I will highlight the ways that Nazi racial thought was shaped by Darwinism (defined as biological evolution through the process of natural selection). First, almost all Nazi racial theorists believed that humans had evolved from primates. Second, they provided evolutionary explanations for the development of different human races, including the Nordic or Aryan race (these two terms were used synonymously). Specifically, they believed that the Nordic race had become superior because harsh climatic conditions in north-central Europe during the Ice Ages had sharpened the struggle for existence, causing the weak to perish and leaving only the most vigorous. Third, they believed that the differential evolutionary development of the races provided scientific evidence for racial inequality. Fourth, they held that the different and unequal human races were locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence. Fifth, they thought that the way for their own race to triumph in the struggle for existence was to procreate more prolifically than competing races and to gain more “living space” (Lebensraum) into which to expand. Sixth, many argued that Darwinism promoted a collectivist ideal. These six points—derived from the view that humans and human races evolved and are still evolving through the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection—profoundly impacted Nazi policy. They formed the backdrop for eugenics, killing the disabled, the quest for “living space,” and racial extermination.9
Not only will my analysis help us understand better the rationale behind Nazi racial policies, which were intended to improve the human species biologically, but it will also help illuminate the interaction between German science and Nazi ideology. Despite many recent studies showing the close rapport of the Nazi regime and German scientists, and despite many recent works rejecting the notion that Nazi ideology was pseudoscientific, as most historians used to think, even today some scholars are still loathe to entertain the idea that key elements of Nazi ideology could have been in harmony with the thinking of leading German scientists. Indeed the Nazi embrace of Darwinism in their racial ideology demonstrates the influence of science on Nazi ideology. Nazi racial ideology was largely consistent with the scholarship on race taught at German universities. This makes even clearer why so many German anthropologists and biologists supported Nazi racism—they were already committed to it before the Nazis came to power.
If this is so, why have some historians mistakenly argued that Nazis denied human evolution? First, we need to recognize that this issue has not received much attention. Many historians mention the Nazi embrace of social Darwinism, but they do not explore the scientific underpinnings of it. Paul Weindling points this out, stating that “historians have been loath to engage with the biological sciences. Historians of Nazi Germany have curiously not seen race within a scientific framework. . . . The biology of race remains relatively unexamined.”10 This may seem odd in light of a spate of recent works arguing for the primacy of biology and race in the Nazi worldview and the many recent studies of scientists under Nazism. However, even if Weindling is overstating the case a little, he is largely correct: the study of Nazi racial ideology and of German biologists under the Nazi regime have not connected sufficiently.
Nonetheless, some historians have noticed the importance of human evolution in Nazi racial ideology. Christopher Hutton argues that Darwinism was a crucial element of Nazi racial ideology.11 Uwe Hoßfeld’s and Thomas Junker’s important work on biologists and anthropologists under the Nazi regime also helps illuminate the connections between evolutionists and the Nazi regime, though their emphasis is on the scientists more than on Nazi ideology.12
One reason some historians (such as Mosse and Bowler) have erred is because of a mistaken belief that the Nazi insistence on hard heredity entailed a rejection of evolution. Hard heredity—the idea championed by German biologist August Weismann—is the idea that environmental influences cannot affect hereditary traits. Weismann rejected the Lamarckian idea that organisms can evolve by passing on acquired characteristics to their progeny. The Nazis continually insisted that heredity cannot be directly affected by the environment, charging that Lamarckism was a Marxist doctrine. The Nazis’ embrace of hard heredity is not antievolutionary, however, since Weismann was a leading evolutionist.
When the Nazis occasionally claimed that the Nordic race had been unchanged for thousands of years, they were not claiming that it had been immutable over geologic time. Walter Gross, head of the Nazi Racial Policy Office, clarified this point in an essay on “The Racial View of History.” After bashing Lamarckism, he reminded his readers that even though racial traits do not change over historical time, “selection and elimination” (“Auslese und Ausmerze,” a phrase often used by German evolutionary biologists to mean natural selection) do alter racial traits.13 Most Darwinists admitted that as far as we could tell, humans had not changed significantly during the past several thousand years. The evolutionary anthropologist Otto Reche admitted that human races had not changed significantly in the past 20–30,000 years.14 By rejecting Lamarckism and insisting on hard heredity, Nazi racial theorists were consistent with the best science of their day (in this case).
Another reason some historians have erred is because they think Nazis would have rejected a common ancestor for the various human races, because a common origin would imply human equality. This is an anachronistic view, for in the early twentieth century, most German Darwinists emphasized racial variation and inequality, not racial equality. Haeckel and many other Darwinists saw evolution as evidence against human equality, not supporting it. As I will show, many Darwinian biologists, such as Konrad Lorenz and Hans Weinert, argued that Darwinism supports racial inequality. Nazi racial theorists believed that the Nordic race had diverged from other races far enough in the past that it had diverged considerably from other races. They also explained that natural selection was the process driving the evolution of the allegedly superior Nordic race.
I need to stress from the outset, however, that Nazi racial ideology was not derived exclusively from Darwinism or evolutionary biology. Gobineau—who wrote before Darwin published Origin of Species—contributed the idea that the Aryan race was superior to all other races. He also claimed that racial mixing produced deleterious effects, leading many racial thinkers, including the Nazis, to oppose miscegenation. Hatred of the Jews had a long history predating Darwin and has nothing to do with Darwinism. Also, Mendelian genetics played a role in debates over racial ideology— especially about policy relating to miscegenation—within the Nazi regime.
However, in the decades preceding Hitler’s rise to power, many German racial theorists had synthesized Gobineau, Mendel, and antisemitism with social Darwinism. Nazi racial theory generally embraced this synthesis. Racial thinkers, such as Ludwig Woltmann and Ludwig Schemann, had synthesized Gobineau and Darwin long before Hitler.15 The leading anthropologist Eugen Fischer and the geneticist Fritz Lenz, both influential figures in racial science during the Nazi period, embraced both Gobineau and Darwinism. Hans-Walter Schmuhl perceptively notes that despite some contradictions between Gobineau’s racism and social Darwinism, “Nonetheless toward the end of the nineteenth century formulations of Gobineauism and social Darwinism blended into syncretistic racial theories.”16 Some leading antisemitic thinkers in early twentieth-century Germany, such as Theodor Fritsch and Willibald Hentschel, incorporated Darwinism into antisemitic ideology.17 Thus, many Nazi racial theorists interpreted the opposition between the Nordic and Jewish race as an episode in the Darwinian struggle for existence.
Hitler and Darwinism
In his writings and speeches Hitler regularly invoked Darwinian concepts, such as evolution (Entwicklung), higher evolution (Höherentwicklung), struggle for existence (Existenzkampf or Daseinskampf ), struggle for life (Lebenskampf ), and selection (Auslese). In a 1937 speech he not only expressed belief in human evolution, but also endorsed Haeckel’s theory that each organism in its embryological development repeats earlier stages of evolutionary history. Hitler stated, “When we know today that the evolution of millions of years, compressed into a few decades, repeats itself in every individual, then this [modernist] art, we realize, is not ‘modern.’”18 In his view, then, modernist artists were atavistic individuals who remained at a more primitive stage of evolution.
Evolution plays a central role in the chapter in Mein Kampf on “Nation and Race,” which was the only chapter published as a separate pamphlet, thus circulating widely to promote Nazi ideology.19 In that chapter Hitler explains why he thinks racial mixing violates evolutionary principles:
Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher evolution of organic living beings would be unthinkable.20
A few lines later he continues:
In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher evolution.
Thus, Hitler opposed miscegenation because it hindered evolutionary progress, which for him was the highest good. Since the whole point of this passage is to apply these principles to human racial relations, it is apparent that Hitler believed that humans had evolved and were still evolving. Hitler’s racial policy aimed at advancing human evolution.
Hitler clearly thought the Nordic race had evolved, as he explained in a 1920 speech, “Why We are Anti-Semites.” The Nordic race, Hitler averred, had developed its key traits, especially its propensity for hard work and its moral fiber, but also its physical prowess, due to the harsh northern climate. He was not arguing that climate directly caused a change in biological traits (because he embraced hard heredity). Rather he thought that in the harsh climate only the strongest, hardest-working, and most cooperative individuals could survive and pass on their traits. The weak and sickly, as well as those who refused to labor diligently, perished in the struggle for existence. This struggle made the Nordic race vigorous and superior to races that evolved in more hospitable climes.21 Clearly, then, Hitler did not think the Nordic race had always existed or was created in some pristine, unchanging state.
Darwinism in the Nazi Biology Curriculum
Evolutionary biology had been well entrenched in the German biology curriculum long before the Nazis came to power (this is why it was so influential on Nazi ideologists). The Darwinian explanation for evolution was the most prominent theory taught in German schools, though it was not uncontested. The biology curriculum under the Nazi regime continued to stress evolution, including the evolution of humans and races. The Nazi curriculum and texts espoused Darwinism and rejected Lamarckism, which it sometimes castigated as Marxist, because it flew in the face of the Nazi stress on hard heredity.
In 1938 the Ministry of Education published an official curriculum handbook for the schools. This handbook mandated teaching evolution, including the evolution of human races, which evolved through “selection and elimination.” It stipulated, “The student must accept as something self-evident this most essential and most important natural law of elimination [of unfit] together with evolution and reproduction.” In the fifth class, teachers were instructed to teach about the “emergence of the primitive human races (in connection with the evolution of animals).” In the eighth class, students were to be taught evolution even more extensively, including lessons on “Lamarckism and Darwinism and their worldview and political implications,” as well as the “origin and evolution of humanity and its races,” which included segments on “prehistoric humanity and its races” and “contemporary human races in view of evolutionary history.”22
The Ministry of Education’s 1938 biology curriculum reflected the biology curriculum developed by the National Socialist Teachers’ League in 1936–37, which likewise heavily emphasized evolution, including the evolution of human races. The Teachers’ League document, authored by H. Linder and R. Lotze, encouraged teachers to stress evolution, because “The individual organism is temporary, the life of the species to which it belongs, is lasting, but is also a member in the great evolution of life in the course of geological times. Humans are also included in this life.” Thus evolution was supposed to support the Nazis’ collectivist ideals—the importance of the species or race over the individual. This biology curriculum called for teaching plant and animal evolution in classes three and four and human evolution in class five. Of the ten topics required for biology instruction in the upper grades, one was evolution and another was human evolution, which included instruction on the origin of human races.23
All the biology texts published in Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s needed official approval of the Ministry of Education, and all provided extensive discussion of evolution, including the evolution of human races. Jakob Graf’s 1942 biology textbook has an entire chapter on “Evolution and Its Importance for Worldview.” Therein Graf combated Lamarckism and promoted Darwinian evolution through natural selection. He claimed that knowing about human evolution is important, because it shows that humans are not special among organisms. He also argued that evolution substantiates human inequality. In the following chapter on “Racial Science” Graf spent about fifteen pages discussing human evolution and insisted that humans and apes have common ancestors.24 Erich Meyer and Karl Zimmermann likewise discuss human evolution in their biology textbook. They state:
In this hard time [Ice Age] humans already lived. In the conflict with nature he improved physically and intellectually more and more. It bred him ever upward. We find him first as a half-animal prehuman, then as a primitive human who lived in caves and knew how to use fire and to make stone tools and hunting weapons.25
As seen in these examples, human evolution was standard fare in Nazi biology texts.
A 1942 biology text by Hermann Wiehle and Marie Harm gave extended attention to human evolution. Of the ten main chapters, two were on evolution generally and another one was devoted exclusively to human evolution. One of the recommended activities for classes was a zoo visit to view the primates: “Since in the curriculum we have covered evolution and the origin of humanity, during a visit to the zoo the primates will especially grip us.”26 As this text and the accompanying activity make clear, German school children during the Third Reich were encouraged to see primates as their evolutionary relatives.
Nazi Anthropologists and Racial Evolution
Germany’s leading anthropologists in the Third Reich, including those in the SS, were uniformly Darwinian in their approach to the evolution of humans and races. The Nazi regime not only appointed many of these anthropologists to professorships, but recruited them to lecture to Nazi organizations and promoted their publications, many of which featured discussions about human and racial evolution. The Nazi regime promoted the work of Hans Weinert, a prominent evolutionary anthropologist who joined the SS. He worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics until 1935, when the Nazi regime appointed him professor of anthropology at the University of Kiel. Weinert published many books and articles during the Nazi period discussing human and racial evolution. In Die Rassen der Menschheit he explained the importance of evolution for anthropology: “Anthropology, however, is the history of all humanity, beginning with its origin from anthropoid ape ancestors and continuing to the dividing and re-mixing of all contemporary human races.”27 He later claimed that the Nordic race had evolved to a higher level than other races, especially the Australian aborigines, whom he considered the lowest race.28 This evolution of races occurred because some races were “eradicated or eclipsed by other races” that were better adapted.29
[T]he progeny of the giants who produced monstra quaedam de genere giganteo, monsters from whence sprang the lower races of men, now represented on earth by a few miserable dying-out tribes and the huge anthropoid apes.
-- The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena P. Blavatsky
In his earlier book, Biologische Grundlagen für Rassenkunde und Rassenhygiene (1934), Weinert had dedicated an entire chapter to human evolution and another to the evolution of human races. After applauding the Nazi Party for introducing compulsory sterilization, Weinert stated, “Today any fear of not being allowed on the basis of national-political considerations to advocate evolutionary theory is completely unnecessary.” In his chapter on the evolution of races he explained that despite common ancestry, “these races also have different value. The scientific theory of the common origin [of races] offers no foundation for a political thesis of the equal value of all humans!”30 The Ministry of Education, the Nazi Racial Policy Office, and Rosenberg’s Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, all commended Weinert’s books on the evolution of human races as important books on racial theory.31
The anthropologist most influential on Nazi ideology was Hans F. K. Günther, who was not trained as a professional anthropologist, but became famous during the 1920s for his books on racial anthropology. When the Nazi leader Wilhelm Frick became Minister of Education in Thuringia in 1930, Hitler urged him to appoint Günther to a professorship in anthropology at the University of Jena. Frick did so over the opposition of the faculty. Hitler attended Günther’s inaugural address, and later the Nazi regime showered Günther with honors, even consulting him in formulating racial policy.32 Günther’s Nordic racism was impregnated with Gobineau, but Darwinism also played an important role. Günther praised as his intellectual forebears Darwin, August Weismann, leading eugenicists, and social Darwinists, such as Ludwig Woltmann. Günther espoused human evolution, and he believed the Nordic race had originated in northern Europe and had spread through conquest. Günther supported eugenics to improve the Nordic race.33
Shortly after Hitler came to power, Günther expressed approval of Nazi eugenics policies in a lecture on the role of heredity and selection in the state. He claimed that Darwin was a crucial influence on the development of modern scientific conceptions of heredity and selection, in part by supplanting Lamarckism. The state, he argued, needed to found its policies on the firm Darwinian basis of selection, rather than the Lamarckian teaching of environmental influence. He stated, “The only way to our goal is the Darwinian way, i.e., selection and elimination: The hereditarily valuable having many children, and the hereditarily inferior having few or no children.” Günther then applauded the social Darwinists Otto Ammon and Alexander Tille for calling for a “social aristocracy.”34
As with Günther, the University of Leipzig anthropologist Otto Reche was a devotee of Woltmann. Reche confessed that he was a zealous disciple of Woltmann, whom he identified as a “bold forerunner of the völkisch and the racial ideology, thus of the worldview that is the foundation of National Socialism.”35 In 1936 Reche republished some of Woltmann’s books to make Germans aware of the contribution Woltmann had made to racial thought. In the foreword to Woltmann’s Politische Anthropologie, he noted that “every page was influenced by the spirit of Darwin.”36 Reche obviously subscribed to Woltmann’s evolutionary view of racial anthropology.
Even before joining the Nazi Party in 1937, Reche lectured to Nazi Party organizations on racial anthropology. Later he eagerly offered his expertise to influence racial policy in the occupied Eastern territories.37 In 1933–34 Reche was an instructor at training seminars at the State Academy for Physicians’ Continuing Education in Dresden, which indoctrinated 4000 professionals in 1933. In these lectures Reche expressed considerable enthusiasm for the Nazi regime, especially its racial ideology. The first of Reche’s three lectures was devoted entirely to human and racial evolution.38
The physician Karl Astel, who joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and the SS in 1934, helped make the University of Jena a bastion of Nazi racial ideology.
HAECKEL, OSTWALD, AND THE MONISTIC RELIGION
Another European movement explicitly designed to be an "anti-Christian" path of Lebensreform was the "Monistic Religion" of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). From his post as professor of zoology at the University of Jena, Haeckel dominated German evolutionary biology in the second half of the nineteenth century and was the most prominent proponent of the social implications of Darwinian theory. Over the years Haeckel made many creative departures from Darwin, so many in fact that the tenets of Darwinism were occluded by the renovations of Haeckelism. Since he was a prolific author, and wrote books and articles for both the scholarly and popular presses, it has been said that he dominated the discussion of evolutionary theory in German Europe by providing "the most comprehensive surveys of the Darwinist position authored by a German." ...
In particular it was Haeckel's influential "Biogenetic Law" -- "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- based on the evidence of these historical methods in biology that eventually had profound implications not only for evolutionary biology, but for psychiatry and psychoanalysis, especially Jung's analytical psychology. Haeckel considered this law as a universal truth -- indeed, for much of his early career, perhaps the only universal truth. That the stages of individual development (ontogeny) could be shown to replicate, in order, the states of the development of the human race (phylogeny) was a compelling theory. Each adult human being, then, in both development and structure, was a living museum of the entire history of the species.
Taking this principle as a starting point, as early as 1866 Haeckel proposed a new "natural religion" based on the natural sciences, since "God reveals himself in all natural phenomena." In many later publications he promoted his pantheistic natural religion based on scientific principles -- a philosophy he called "Monism" -- as a way of linking science and religion. Haeckel was interested in theorizing about the driving natural force of life and evolution, which he insisted Darwin left out of his (therefore) incomplete theories. His somewhat quasi-vitalistic descriptions of monism provided that. However, his first specific recommendations for a monistic religion came in 1892 in a speech in Altenburg. He argued fervently for a monism as a new faith founded on a "scientific Weltanschauung," thus going beyond a mere substitution of atheistic materialism for Christianity (as he was generally perceived as doing by his contemporaries and even by many historians today)....
By 1904 groups all over Central Europe had formed and were known as the Monistenbund (the Monistic Alliance), with some trying out rituals based on this new scientific religion. In Jena in 1906, under the guiding hand of Haeckel himself, they were formally organized under a single administrative umbrella, like cells united within the individual identity of a larger body. The ground in German Europe has long been fertile for such ideas to take root, especially among German Darwinians, for "a large number of them had abandoned the Christian religion" and, like Haeckel, spoke out against organized religion. The Monistenbund attracted many prominent cultural, occultist, and scientific celebrities as members, including physicist Ernst Mach and sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies. It also attracted such luminaries as the dancer Isadora Duncan, then-Theosophist Rudolph Steiner, and psychiatrist August Forel (1848-1931). Forel was a former director of the Burgholzli and a dominant figure in Switzerland and in the French clinical tradition at the turn of the century. Although he is best remembered for his contributions to psychiatry (and his influence on other prominent figures, such as Bleuler, Adolph Meyer, and Jung), his Monistic League affiliation and his active promotion of eugenics and Social Darwinism are rarely discussed in the historical literature of psychiatry....
In 1911 Nobel-laureate Wilhelm Ostwald of Leipzig University, a physical chemist, became president of the Monistenbund and founded a "monistic cloister" devoted to initiating Social Darwinian cultural reforms in the areas of eugenics, euthanasia, and economics. An elite devoted to the preservation of the Monistic Religion clustered around the charismatic Ostwald and his volkisch metaphysical works. Indeed, it is these works of speculative philosophy (Ostwald even embraced the term Naturphilosopllie for this exercise) that made him an international figure long before his 1909 Nobel Prize, and many considered him a prophet of the modern age....
Before his death Haeckel himself was briefly a member of the Thule Society, the secret organization of prominent nationalists that included prominent members of the National Socialist movement of the 1920s, such as Rudolph Hess....
Additionally, from 1896 to 1904, the "Eugen Diederichs Verlag: Publishing House for Modern Endeavors in Literature, Natural Science, and Theosophy" was in full operation in Leipzig under the direction of the volkisch pantheist Eugen Diederichs. After moving to Jena in 1904, Diederichs played an important role in the dissemination of occult, mythological, and volkisch literature as well as the finest examples of German "high culture."...
SUN WORSHIPERS IN GERMAN EUROPE
Eugen Diederichs and the "Sera Circle"
The best documented neopagan cult devoted to sun worship was that of Eugen Diederichs (1867-1930) of Jena, a prominent publisher of volkisch material in books and his journal, Die Tat ("The Deed"), although apparently he was not politically attracted to anti-Semitism or Nazism. Due to his keenly felt calling to resurrect German culture through publishing German mystics such as Meister Eckhardt, Angelus Silesius, and Jacob Bohme, works on Germanic folklore (including fairy tales and mythology), and a wide variety of theosophical, anthroposophical, and mystical "nature religion" or pantheistic tracts, after establishing the Eugen Diederichs Verlag in 1896 he became perhaps the most highly influential aristocratic patron of the neo-Romantic and volkisch pantheistic elements in Central Europe. To be published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag was to be accepted in intellectual circles in a way that publishing perhaps the same occultist material by the Theosophical Society would not be, although the publications of the Theosophical Society were nonetheless also widely read. Although other neoconservative publishers also helped to legitimize the ideas that laid the groundwork for the rise of National Socialism in the 1920s, the Eugen Diederichs Verlag was the highly respected voice of neopaganism and the religious -- not the political -- arm of the great volkisch movement.
-- The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, by Richard Noll
In 1933 he was appointed head of the Thuringian Office for Racial Affairs, and the following year he became professor of human genetics at the University of Jena. As rector from 1939 to 1945 he aspired to build an “SS university.”39 While in Jena, Astel held a number of Nazi Party and governmental positions, including head of the regional Racial Policy Office. His inaugural address at the University of Jena dealt with racial ideology and was published in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte. This lecture explained the intersection of Darwinian evolution and Nazi racial ideology. Astel claimed that one of the greatest achievements of Nazism was its recognition that humans are subject to natural laws and can thereby further biological evolution. He stated that the Nordic race had evolved through the struggle for existence and intense selection caused by the Ice Age. The harsh conditions had caused the weak to perish, leaving only the more robust to reproduce.40 Non-Nordic races, he maintained, were inferior because they had not endured as stringent a struggle.
Astel wrote to Himmler in 1937 to solicit help in recruiting Gerhard Heberer, an evolutionary anthropologist, to Jena. Himmler responded affirmatively, and Heberer was appointed associate professor of biology and human evolution in 1939, two years after he joined the SS Race and Settlement Main Office.
Mengele began his career as a doctrinaire Nazi eugenicist. He attended Rudin's early lectures and embraced eugenic principles as part of his fanatic Nazism. Mengele became a member of the SA, also known as the Storm Troopers, in 1934. His first academic mentor was the anti-Semitic eugenicist Theodor Mollison, a professor at Munich University. Just as Goddard claimed he could identify a feebleminded individual by a mere glance, Mollison boasted that he could identify Jewish ancestry by simply examining a person's photograph. Under Mollison, Mengele earned his Ph.D. in 1935. His dissertation on the facial biometrics of four racial groups -- ancient Egyptians, Melanesians and two European types -- asserted that specific racial identification was possible through an anthropometric examination of an individual's jawline. Medical certification in hand, Mengele became a practicing doctor in the Leipzig University clinic. But this was only temporary. Mengele's dream was research, not practice. In 1937, on Mollison's recommendation, Mengele became Verschuer's research assistant at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. Here Mengele's eugenic knowledge could be applied. Some of Mengele's work involved tracing cranial features through family trees....
By June of 1940, when Germany was advancing on Western Europe, Mengele could no longer wait to enter the battle. He joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to the Genealogical Section of the SS Race and Settlement Office in occupied Poland. He undoubtedly benefited from Verschuer's March 1940 letter of recommendation averring that Mengele was accomplished, reliable and trustworthy. At the SS Race and Settlement Office, his mission was to seek out Polish candidates for Germanization. He would perform the racial and eugenic examinations. Eventually, in 1941, he was transferred to the Medical Corps of the Waffen SS, and then to the elite Viking unit operating in the Ukraine, where he rendered medical assistance under intense battlefield conditions. He was awarded two Iron Crosses and two combat medic awards. The next year, 1942, as the Final Solution was taking shape, Verschuer arranged for Mengele to transfer back to the SS Race and Settlement Office, this time to its Main Office in Berlin.
By 1942, an aging Fischer was preparing to retire from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. His replacement was a major source of debate within eugenic and Nazi Party circles. By this time, Hitler's war against the Jews had escalated from oppressive disenfranchisement to systematic slaughter.
Fischer had emerged as a major advocate of "a total solution to the Jewish question." His view was that "Bolshevist Jews" constituted a dangerous and inferior subspecies. At a key March 1941 conference on the solution to the Jewish problem held in Frankfurt, Fischer had been the honored guest. It was at this meeting that Nazi science extremists set forth ideas on eliminating Jews en masse. A leading idea that emerged was the gradual extinction (Volkstod) of the Jewish people by systematically concentrating them in large labor camps to be located in Poland. Later, Fischer specified that such labor must be unpaid slave labor lest any "improvement in living standards ... lead to an increase in the birth rate."
Given Fischer's high profile in Nazi Party extermination policies, his successor would have to be selected carefully. Lenz was considered for the job, but Fischer worked behind the scenes with the Nazi Party to have Lenz passed over. Fischer thought Lenz was too tutorial, and not bold enough for the challenges ahead. Instead, Fischer's hand-picked successor would be Verschuer -- something Fischer had actually planned on for years.
In 1942, Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt that Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem." He wrote a friend, "Many important events have occurred in my life. I received an invitation, which I accepted, to succeed Eugen Fischer as director of the Dahlem Institute [Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics at Berlin-Dahlem]. Great trust was shown toward me, and all my requests were granted with respect to the importance and authority of the institute .... I will take almost all my coworkers with me, first Schade and Grebe, and later Mengele and Fromme." Even though Mengele was still technically attached to the Race and Settlement Office, he was still Verschuer's assistant. Mengele's name was even added to the special birthday list for the institute's leading staff scientists.
In January 25, 1943, with Hitler's extermination campaign in full swing, Verschuer wrote to Fischer, "My assistant Mengele ... has been transferred to work in an office in Berlin [at the SS Race and Settlement Office] so that he can do some work at the Institute on the side."
On May 30, 1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz.
-- War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black
Heberer gave lectures on evolution to various Nazi organizations.41 The Nazi Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, considered this professor of human evolution so important to the Nazi cause that in 1943 he implored the Nazi Minister of Education not to allow Heberer to be called to another university, because “I have fixed the goal of building the University of Jena to a National Socialist center of the first rank.”42 Heberer abetted Nazi racial ideology by being one of the most vocal proponents of Nordic racism. In a 1943 booklet he explained that the Indo-Germanic people were identical with the Nordic race, and they originated during the Ice Ages in north-central Europe, just as the human species had earlier. Heberer clearly promoted the idea that races, including the Nordic race, had evolved.43
Heberer was a pivotal figure in Germany in the development of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, the theory that synthesized Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics while rejecting Lamarckism. He edited what some historians consider the most important work on evolutionary theory during the Nazi period, Die Evolution der Organismen (1943). Four of the eighteen essays were on human evolution by the anthropologists Christian von Krogh, Wilhelm Gieseler, Reche, and Weinert (all but Reche were in the SS).
Gieseler’s contribution to Heberer’s anthology was on “The Fossil History of Humans.” His vision of evolutionary history was consistent with the newly forming neo-Darwinian synthesis, since he explained that the most important mechanisms of evolution were mutations, selection, and isolation.44 Gieseler, whom Junker calls one of the leading paleoanthropologists in the world from 1930–1970, was appointed by the Nazi regime to a professorship at the University of Tübingen, first in 1934 as associate professor of anthropology and racial science and four years later as professor of racial biology.45 Gieseler served as an SS officer in the Race and Settlement Main Office. He also held a local leadership position in the Nazi Racial Policy Office, for whom he sometimes lectured on human evolution.46 In 1936 Giesler wrote an entire book on human evolution, Abstammungskunde des Menschen. In sum, then, many of the leading evolutionary anthropologists in Germany were feted by the Nazis—they were given professorships, advanced in SS rank, and regularly lectured on racial ideology for Nazi organizations and training courses.
