Historian Agrees: Darwin and Eugenics Led to the Holocaust

Historians Are Finally Coming Clean About How
Darwinism Birthed Eugenics which
Spawned the Holocaust

 

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

I have been publishing articles and books on the relationship between Darwinism and the Holocaust for over 40 years.[1] A common response to my writing is to either deny the clear evidence of the relationship between Darwin and the Holocaust, or to downplay it. A few examples from Amazon reviews of my book on Darwin’s influence on Hitler and the Nazi Movement[2] include the following one-star reviews (which were only 5 percent of the total reviews) out of a total of 78 global ratings. I doubt if any one of these “reviewers” had bothered to read the book they “reviewed.” According to Amazon, most of the one-star reviewers did not even bother to buy my book, and likely wrote their review from reading about the book.

The Negative Reviews (Note: The many typos and grammatical errors have been corrected.):

• “Anti-evolution propaganda: The author of the book is a noted creationist and anti-evolutionist. He is basically trying to slam Darwin and Evolution by tying it to the worst people in history, the Nazis. Hitler did have Darwinian beliefs but they were very misguided and misunderstood. Darwin never was a “social Darwinist” and never even wrote or uttered the phrase “survival of the fittest.” This book is a hit job against Darwin and evolution. Hitler was also a vegetarian so does that mean vegetarianism is evil?”
• “Social Darwinism isn’t Darwinism but a perversion of Darwin’s premise of natural selection: I won’t read a book in which the author believes that Social Darwinism exists; it is nothing less than a perversion of true Darwinism and is misused as a metaphor for ‘the survival of the fittest’, another great heresy.”
• “A lot of fact but the narrative is tightly controlled; Jerry is prosecutor, judge, and executioner: I have given a low rating because Jerry tries to arrive at a specific conclusion. He does lay out the facts so, but it would have been better if he was not consumed by his own agenda but allowed the reader the room to decide. When dealing with WW2 stories, writers must allow the readers the latitude to make their own conclusions.”
• “Biased book written by an anti-evolution creationist: This is not a normal scholarly book about the Nazis; apparently it’s written by some sort of creationist who hates evolution. Evidently the purpose of the book is to undermine the theory of evolution.”
• “Conflicted man: While I think the author has done a good job of providing evidence for the case of Hitler’s heathenism, true scholars know the evidence is more complicated. Take the following facts: Adolph Hitler’s mother was a devout Catholic. He was baptized, had communion, and confirmation.”
• “Anybody have any tin foil?: This book was referred to me by a good friend who happens to be very anti-evolution. We talk about not talking about it. I have been reading books on WWII and the Nazis for 54 years. There was so much in this book I have never seen before. I was first stunned and then amused. The author blames everything that ever happened bad on old Charles Darwin. I found [this] book much more amusing than informative. I won’t comment on the credibility but the book, well, never mind. Let’s just say that by the time I had waded through this, I would not have been surprised to see that a tree fell on some guy’s house, and it was due to ‘DARWINISM.'”

Now, the Evidence

One of the most recent books that does not shy away from discussing the influence Darwinism had on Hitler is by British geneticist Adam Rutherford, who documented “how eugenics, ‘Darwin’s monster’, took over the world.”[3] The book documented how

in the shadow of Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution, a sinister ideology took root — eugenics. … The idea, which enjoyed popular support among scientists, politicians and the general public for 60 years in Europe and the U.S., later became a cornerstone of Hitler’s Third Reich, taking the world on a horrific journey from forced sterilizations to the mass murder of millions in concentration camps such as Auschwitz.[4]

This review of Rutherford’s new book by Turner[5] is actually a good summary of my book, which the Amazon reviews above naïvely lambasted. In an interview with Rutherford, Turner writes about Rutherford that the

British geneticist and science writer time travels to the very beginning of what he calls “a defining idea of the 20th century” to explain its persistent hold on our present. His starting point is his own university, University College London, where Darwin’s younger half-cousin, the polymath Francis Galton, first coined the term 140 years ago.[6]

The problem, Turner opines, is that remnants of the now-discredited practice still haunt us today. Examples he lists include involuntary sterilizations of Uyghurs in China, claims made by new biotech companies to successfully screen human egg cells for traits like intelligence to select the better embryos, and the controversial creation of gene-edited twins by biophysicists in China.

How Charles Darwin and Francis Galton Contributed to the Start of Eugenics

In answer to how Charles Darwin and Francis Galton contributed to the creation of eugenics, Rutherford mentioned the ideas of natural selection and evolution. In 1859, Darwin had “demonstrated that the behavioral or physical characteristics of any species can be changed over generational time by selection, either natural or artificial… in 1871, he published the ‘Descent of Man’ which is the application of evolutionary theory to humans.”[7]  Rutherford adds that Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who “was very enamored with the work of his relative [Darwin] and his [Darwin’s] celebrity status,” applied the principles of artificial selection to human populations in order

to craft better societies, better cultures, filled with people with more “desirable” characteristics.  Galton wrote about the inheritance of genius in 1869 and he …. believed that the characteristics of humans are determined much more by biology than they are by environment… By 1883, he had come up with a term for this attempt to alter humans physically or behaviorally by changing their social structures: eugenics. It provided a scientific scaffold to the ancient idea of reshaping populations according to biological means.[8]

Rutherford admitted that Darwin “didn’t have a mechanism, just an overall scheme: evolution occurs as descent with modification. But he didn’t know what was descending; what the unit of inheritance was; or how the inherited characteristics were divided up.” In other words, Darwin had an idea but lacked the basic intellectual foundation for his idea, a problem called “the arrival of the fittest problem.”

The only answer Darwinists have today to explain the arrival of the fittest is mutations, which in reality is no solution because “beneficial mutations are rare;”[9] most are neutral and therefore somewhat negative, and many are deleterious. Nonetheless, evolutionists have no other choice and realize that “No Mutations, No Evolution.”[10] One reason eugenics does not work is the same problem that exists with evolution. This is the idea that single genes exist for most traits. However, this culturally ubiquitous idea was destroyed when sequencing the human genome was finished in 2003. Although there exist thousands of monogenic traits (traits that are caused by one gene), they are

all influenced by other genes, by other phenomena within the genome, and also heavily affected by the environment…. We are complex symphonies of our genes and our environment. There are vanishingly few characteristics which are binary and predictable based on genetics. Whether you have sticky or dry earwax is a monogenic trait, but eye color is polygenic — at least 15 genes have been identified that influence iris color.[11]

The reason people assumed that eye color is a genetically simple trait is that it is a common cultural assumption. Furthermore, this belief was reinforced by many leading scientists. One example is Harvard-trained eugenicist[12] Charles Davenport (June 1, 1866 – February 18, 1944) who was

the key protagonist in the American eugenics movement, [he] claimed that … every trait — eye color, hair color, sexual proclivities, poverty, and weirdly even seafaringness — were Mendelian, they were controlled by a single gene, and if you had that gene, you had that trait.[13]

Darwin had an important role in the development of eugenics. Darwin’s son, Leonard Darwin, was even the president of London’s Eugenics Society from 1911 to 1928. From its origins in Britain, eugenics took root across Europe, especially in Germany, led by Ernest Haeckel who influenced Hitler to get on board. U.S. supporters included President Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and John Harvey Kellogg. In short, eugenics was enormously popular

across the political spectrum. It’s easy to associate eugenics with the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. But in fact, it was equally well supported on the emerging socialist left in Britain, and across all demographics in the United States — where it really took hold with a fervor.[14]

The crimes justified by Darwinian eugenics are among the most significant geopolitical problems that the West has

had for the last 500 years: European expansionism and scientific racism and eugenics. … Even though the concept of eugenics was invented in the U.K., the British were slower … than the Americans, who adopted eugenics policies very enthusiastically. The first enforced sterilization bills passed in Indiana in 1907. Over the course of the next few decades, 31 states introduced coerced sterilization as part of their eugenics policies.[15]

Winston Churchill spearheaded its legislation, and was very influenced by the Indiana state laws after reading

a pamphlet by a doctor from the Indiana reformatory called Harry Clay Sharp. Sharp is best described as an enthusiastic vasectomizer — he claimed he could do 300 vasectomies a day without any anesthetic or health repercussions. Churchill read Sharp’s pamphlet, underlining passages as he went, and … proposed legislation for the involuntary sterilization of the “feeble-minded”…Churchill suggested the procedure could be performed with X-rays. In America, it was adopted wholesale. The majority of states had coercive sterilization on their books for most of the 20th century. Over this time frame, somewhere between 70,000 to the highest estimates of 400,000 people were sterilized against their will or knowledge. One state accounts for half of these, and no-one ever guesses which one it was: California.[16]

The area, for which I was lambasted, was the connection of Darwin to Nazism, a connection that was well documented. Related to this concern, Lane asked Rutherford:

You write in your book that eugenics, particularly American eugenics, later served as the inspiration for the Nazis in their pursuit of “racial hygiene.” Hitler referred to “The Passing of the Great Race” — a 1916 bestselling book written by American eugenicist [Darwinist] Madison Grant — as his “bible,” and it was the first foreign language book to be published in Germany after the Nazis came to power. How big an influence did American eugenics have on the Nazis?[17]

Rutherford’s answer was direct and unambiguous:

It’s undeniable that the key influences for the development of German “rassenhygeine” [racial hygiene, the German word for eugenics] came from the American Eugenics Records Office  ….. The key characters in this are [Darwinists] Charles Davenport, the head of the lab, and his deputy, a guy called Harry Laughlin. In 1920, Laughlin saw that states around America were introducing new sterilization bills, but he thought they were doing it in an ad hoc way. So he wrote a template — a boilerplate legal document — that states could simply fill in the blanks for and pass legislation easier. In 1933, this document was translated into German and became the first of the Nuremberg Laws.[18]

These American eugenists were all hard core Darwinists. Rutherford added that the

German eugenics institutions in Berlin were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin were paying these places visits. When Hitler took power in 1933, eugenics became a central principle of what developed into the Holocaust. The Nazis argued for purifying the German people to make them more “Aryan” while removing other races and people with disabilities from the gene pool. …, and eugenics is just one strand in a complex grouping of racist, ethnonationalist and anti-Semitic policies.[19]

After the war, during the first of the Nuremberg Trials focusing on scientific and medical atrocities, the witness testimonies noted that

some eugenics policies in the U.S. were seen by the Nazis as a little bit too stringent, particularly on who should qualify as Jewish. In the Jim Crow era, the “one drop rule” [referring to “one drop of Black blood”] said that if you had a single ancestor of African origin, then you qualify as African American — regardless of what you look like or what the rest of your ancestry is. The Nazis looked at that and thought it was too strict.[20]

In fact, the Nazi eugenic programs were more important to the leading Nazis than winning the war. Both Hitler and the Nazi elite, including Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-S.S., and the principal architect of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, prioritized genocide over winning the war. For example, when German forces occupied

large swathes of Poland, Ukraine and Russia, the top priority was the murder of the Jews in those areas. The logistical needs of German forces to hold on to and administer the territory they now occupied was a secondary consideration… this genocidal policy was highly labor intensive. It required troops who were previously fighting on the Eastern Front or engaging in military duties throughout occupied Europe to engage in rounding up the Jews, transporting them across vast distances and murdering them on an industry scale—some six million of them in all. It required large numbers of troops, as well as German civilians, to be involved in the running and maintenance of the concentration camps… the Holocaust required the railway network to be used for the murder of the Jews, ahead of the logistical supply of German troops in battle, irrespective of the fact that the tide of the war had turned against the Axis forces on the Eastern front from December 1941. Every train taking the Jews to the death camps was a train not transporting troops to and from the front. Because of Hitler’s prioritization on the Final Solution over military victory, the German army became steadily less able to defeat the Russians.[21]

Summary

In the end, Germany lost the war. The horrors of Nazi atrocities, once they became more widely known, significantly diminished popular support for eugenics. Rutherford concluded that the chain from Darwin to Galton, to the Holocaust has been well-documented as has also the support for eugenics by both academia and academics.[22]

References

[1] Bergman, Jerry. “Evolution, Race and Equality of Intelligence.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 17(2):127-134, September 1980; “Darwinism and the Forgotten German Holocaust.” Review of The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen. Journal of Creation 25(2):42-44, 2011; “The Influence of Evolution on Nazi Race Programs.”  Creation, Social Science and Humanities Quarterly 8(3):24-31, Spring 1986.

[2] Bergman, Jerry. Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview: How the Nazi Eugenic Crusade for a Superior Race Caused the Greatest Holocaust in World History. Joshua Press, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada; The Darwin Effect: Its Influence on Nazism, Eugenics, Racism, Communism, Capitalism & Sexism. Master Books, Green Forest, Arizona, 360 pages, 2014.

[3] Turner, Ben. Geneticist Adam Rutherford on how eugenics, ‘Darwin’s monster’, took over the world; https://www.livescience.com/geneticist-adam-rutherford-on-how-eugenics-darwins-monster-took-over-the-world, 2023.

[4] Turner, 2023.

[5] Rutherford, Adam. “Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics.” W.W. Norton & Company, New York, New York, 2022.

[6] Turner, 2023.

[7] Turner, 2023.

[8] Turner, 2023.

[9] Evans, Dylan, and Howard Selina. Introducing Evolution. Icon Books, London, England, 2001, p. 61.

[10] Evans and Selina, 2001, p. 56.

[11] Turner, 2023.

[12] Davenport graduated with a bachelor’s degree after two years at Harvard, and earned a Ph.D. in biology in 1892. He married Gertrude Crotty, a zoology graduate of Harvard.

[13] Turner, 2023.

[14] Turner, 2023.

[15] Turner, 2023.

[16] Turner, 2023.

[17] Turner, 2023.

[18] Turner, 2023.

[19] Turner, 2023.

[20] Turner, 2023

[21] Holmes, Martin. From the Treaty of Versailles to the Treaty of Maastricht: Conflict, Carnage and Cooperation in Europe, 1918 – 1993. Routledge Publishing, New York, New York, 2022, p. 34.

[22] Rutherford, 2022.

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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,800 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.