Creationists Slandered About the Darwin-Nazi Connection

Darwin’s influence on Nazism is now mainstream—
yet creationists are attacked for pointing it out

 

 

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

It is said that in debates, if one has the facts, one focuses on the facts in the debate. If one cannot do that, one focuses on attacking the debater personally. I attempt to read everything I can that is critical of my views, especially articles that specifically attack my work. It is very rare but occasionally the critic is correct, allowing me to avoid making the same mistake in the future.

My main point is that, if Genesis’ teaching is correct that all men have descended from one man, Adam, then only one ‘race’ exists, the human race. Genesis is clear in this teaching: “And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26, KJV). “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men.” (Romans 5:12, KJV). Replacing this “one blood”-and-“all have sinned” doctrine with “survival of the fittest,” Darwinism laid the seed which grew into eugenics, racism, and Nazism. This is a logical conclusion of the view that some human groups evolved to be more fit than others. This was the conclusion, in fact, of Francis Galton, the father of eugenics. He based it on the evolutionary belief he learned from his cousin Charles Darwin. He spent his life developing the field he named eugenics, which literally means ‘well-born’. The end result was

one of the most shameful chapters in the history of science…. Perhaps most chilling, though, were the ways in which American eugenicists influenced their German counterparts. “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning the prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock,” Adolf Hitler told a Nazi confidant. The Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropy institutions in the United States funded the research of American-trained German eugenicists even after the Nazi Party had made its genocidal intentions clear. That research played a major role in the subsequent mass murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally disabled and others deemed a threat to the purity of the so-called Aryan race.”[1]

Mainstream Historians Admit Darwinian Racism

Evolutionist Martin Brookes, Ph.D., added,

“Since Darwin’s death, all has not been rosy in the evolutionary garden. The theories of the Great Bearded One have been hijacked by cranks, politicians, social reformers—and scientists—to support racist and bigoted views. A direct line runs from Darwin, through the founder of the eugenics movement—Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton—to the extermination camps of Nazi Europe.”[2]

Darwin’s racism was openly admitted by Princeton University professor Agustín Fuentes and published in the most esteemed science journal in the world, apply titled Science.[3] Fuentes wrote that Darwin’s racist “assertions were dismally, and dangerously, wrong. ‘Descent’ [of Man, Darwin’s 1871 treatise, is a book] ….  not to venerate” as is common among many evolutionists today. Fuentes wrote that, despite

some innovative inferences, “Descent” is often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious. Darwin thought he was relying on data, objectivity, and scientific thinking in describing human evolutionary outcomes. But for much of the book, he was not. “Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin’s day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity.[4]

The fact is, “Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements ‘validated’ by their presence in ‘Descent’ as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically.”[5]

Quotes Confirming Darwin’s Influence on Hitler

The fact that the connection between Darwin and Nazism is now mainstream is illustrated by a few quotes.

Eugenics was an integral pillar of Nazi doctrine. Adolf Hitler advocated infanticide for all newborns with physical defects. Interestingly, physicians were the largest professional groups in the Nazi party… The eugenics program was based on the notion of distinguishing superior from inferior, where only the superior were appropriate breeders for the next generation. The Nazis supplied the toughness that led to the Apocalyptic slaughter of so many … The Nazis brought into the world the darkest side of eugenics, the worst imaginable—even unimaginable—fears. But they did not create genetics. Eugenics was there for them to exploit… Thanks to the Nazis, there are few movements born in the nineteenth century which are now in such dispute as eugenics.[6]

Hitler included an entire chapter of Mein Kampf , Chapter 11, on the wisdom of eugenics (“Volk und Rasse” or “Nation and Race”) in which he wrote:

No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race…. The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following: a) Lowering the level of the higher race; b) Physical and intellectual regression, and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.[7]

From Darwin to Marx to Hitler to the Holocaust path is clear, as was summarized by Harvard professor Niall Ferguson.

Just as doubts had begun to assail the Marxists, a breakthrough in an unrelated field of science provided  a vital new source of validation for their model of social change. Darwin’s  revolutionary …  theory of natural selection was immediately seized upon by Engels as fresh evidence for the  theory of class conflict–though it was not long before the same claims were being made by theorists of racial conflict, who crudely misinterpreted and distorted Darwin’s complex (and at times contradictory) message. … Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernest Haeckel took the earlier racial theories of Gobineau and modernized them with a simplified model of natural selection in which competition between individual creatures became a crude struggle between races… Darwinism rapidly took  on a host of different forms: the pseudo-scientific work of eugenic theorists … and ultimately the violent anti-Semitic fantasies of Hitler, which combined racialism and socialism in what was to prove the most explosive ideology of the twentieth century.[8]

Historian Ian Kershaw observed (paraphrasing) that

As a result of the German people’s passiveness, Hitler was able to carry out many of his goals, including the almost total destruction of the Jewish people in Europe. The result was that never before in history has such enormous ruination, both physical and moral, been associated with the actions of one man. The Nazi regime had the support of all levels of society, especially the well-educated, but Hitler’s name will justifiably stand forever as the primary instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times. The power which a beer-hall demagogue, racist bigot, narcissistic megalomaniac, self-styled nation savior, was allowed to acquire and exercise in the most educated nation on earth, an economically advanced, and cultured land known the world over for its philosophers, musicians and poets, was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those twelve tragic years of Hitler’s rule. Hitler was the main author of a war leaving over 50 million dead … Hitler was the chief inspiration of a genocide the likes of which the world had never known, rightly to be viewed as the defining episode of the twentieth century. [9]

Although the “major institution in Germany and Europe that fought against the Nazi crimes was the church, it did far too little too late… Hitler saw Christians, and the church, as weak and, as Lutzer noted, had contempt for both Protestants and Catholics.”[10] These few quotes from leading Nazi scholars document the fact that my conclusions are mainstream.

Creationists Were Concerned About the Harm of Darwinism Decades Ago

Creationists have been noting the harm of eugenics as taught by Darwin, Galton, and others for over a century. Weinberg correctly noted that starting with

George McCready Price, the godfather of young-Earth creationism . . . and those who followed him, the main problem with evolution was NOT that its claims lacked scientific evidence or even that it contradicted the Book of Genesis. Rather, evolution was bad because it made people who believed in it do bad things. It made us behave in an immoral, “beastly” or “animalistic” way.[11]

Rewriting History with Anti-Creationist Slander and Lies

One of the most recent critics of those who rightly put much of the blame on Darwin and Galton is William Trollinger, a Catholic college professor at the University of Dayton. Trollinger instead puts much of the blame on Martin Luther, Bible believing Christians, and Creationists. He states that he grew up in a fundamentalist church as a creationist, but his college education and reading anti-creationist publications turned him against this worldview. Trollinger graduated with a B. A. in English and History from Bethel College, (a Christian college in Minnesota) in 1977. He then completed a Ph. D. in U. S. History at the only secular college in his resumé, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Trollinger then had a short stint as an assistant professor of history at the College of the Ozarks and, next, as an associate professor of history at Messiah College, both Christian colleges.

Why he left the first two college positions is unknown. He ended up at the University of Dayton in the fall of 1996 teaching undergraduate courses for the Department of History and M.A./Ph.D. courses for the Religious Studies Department.  He has written extensively on American evangelicalism and fundamentalism, creationism, the religious “nones,” and the Ku Klux Klan.[12] In his writings, he makes it clear that he is a strident foe of ‘conservative Christianity,’ referring to those who adhere to the basics of the Christian faith. Trollinger has written an entire book that lambastes the Creation Museum of Answers in Genesis in Kentucky.[13] One of the latest examples is to attack both me and Answers in Genesis personally.[14] Here is an example of his ad hominem tactic:

“Ken Ham has produced (along with many other writings making the same point) Darwin’s Plantation, a book whose title could easily lead the historically unaware reader to believe that Darwinism was responsible for American slavery . . . even though Origin of Species appeared in 1859, just four years before the Emancipation Proclamation.“

This book nowhere makes this claim, nor does Ken Ham even infer it. The insinuation that Darwin (in England) contributed to the end slavery (in America) makes no sense. Trollinger continued to ridicule Ham for stating the obvious that is well documented in the literature:

“ . . . the aforementioned cover photo on Ham’s book fades into the photo of a Nazi concentration camp. Ham asserts in Darwin’s Plantation that “perhaps the most infamous application of evolution to justify racism was Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime”). The Darwin-to-Hitler trope is commonplace among young Earth creationists. As Henry Morris asserted in The Long War Against God, “Hitler became the supreme evolutionist, and Nazism the ultimate fruit of the evolutionary tree”. Many scholars have convincingly argued that the Darwin-to-Hitler conceit is absurdly simplistic, and of course leaves Christianity and Christians off the hook.[15]

Trollinger Engages in Personal Attacks

Trollinger’s article purports to be about me and my article on Darwinism and Vietnam, but I am not responsible for what others, who claim to be Christians but who do not live up to the Christian standard, say or do. His article not only attacks me personally but expands into a wholesale condemnation of the Christian church and modern Christians.

One of the most prolific promoters of the young-Earth creationist Darwin-to-Hitler trope is Genesis Apologetics’ spokesman Jerry Bergman, with books such as Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview: How the Nazi Eugenic Crusade for a Superior Race Caused the Greatest Holocaust in World History (2012) and The Dark Side of Charles Darwin: A Critical Analysis of an Icon of Science (2011).

One of Trollinger’s tactics is to discredit creation journals and their peer-reviewed research articles, specifically those in the Answers Research Journal from Answers in Genesis.

Bergman has now turned his “historical expertise” to the Vietnam War, with an article in the 2023 volume of Answers Research Journal (ARJ). …. This AiG online publication advertises itself as a “professional, peer-reviewed technical journal” that produces “cutting-edge creation research.” The titles of articles that appear in the ARJ make clear that this is not a typical scholarly publication, e.g., “Ruminating on Created Kinds and Ark Kinds,” “Jesus’ Resurrection: An Archaeological Analysis,” “To the Ark and Back Again? Using the Marsupial Fossil Record to Investigate the Post-Flood Boundary.”

This is an irresponsible diatribe against AiG. To judge how scholarly a journal is by the titles of a few of its articles is purely biased presumption and hasty generalization.

Even more striking is the fact that just a few individuals write the bulk of the articles. And recently Bergman leads the pack. In the past four years 61 articles have appeared in ARJ, and he has written 20 of these articles (most of which are anti-Darwin diatribes). This comes to approximately 33% of all ARJ articles published since 2020. One could easily think of ARJ as Jerry Bergman’s vanity press.

I have over 1,800 publications, thus one would expect me to have a significant number in most creation journals. He is again here resorting to ridicule and name calling.

And now we come to his most recent offering: “The Central Role of Darwinism in the Vietnam War.” …. Bergman’s Darwin-to-Vietnam trope is even more simplistic and even more distorted than the Darwin-to-Hitler trope. In this telling, Darwinism destroyed the Confucian paradise that was Vietnam, and the result was three million dead.

There is absolutely nothing here about the injustices perpetrated on the Vietnamese by the French colonial rulers. Not one thing. And this is very much in keeping with the dreadful history textbooks used in fundamentalist schools, books in which it is claimed that “colonialism was a benign and humane institution that benefited the indigenous peoples of Asia and Africa.”

Also in keeping with the fundamentalist history textbooks, this telling of the story preserves American innocence. Here there is no anti-Asian racism, no carpet bombing, no napalm. Here there is no My Lai, with its mass rape and its slaughter of hundreds of children, women, and the elderly. Here there is no reference to Bible-believing evangelicals who – I grew up in such a church – wanted to bomb the hell out of the Vietnamese.[18] 

My article was about the Darwinian influence in the Vietnam conflict, not the injustices perpetrated on the Vietnamese by the French colonial rulers, or anti-Asian racism, the slaughter of hundreds of children, women, and the elderly by Americans, or dreadful textbooks used in Christian schools. Those were incidents after the war was started, and the Communists started the war. That was the focus of my article, which was already too long to cover those issues.

In examining Trollinger’s response I was looking for evidence of mistakes of factual content in my article. However, it can be seen that Trollinger’s response was purely irresponsible name-calling from a militant anti-Christian who opposes Christian schools and the core Christian beliefs. Was Trollinger pro-Vietcong, omitting the atrocities committed by them?

Lastly, Trollinger claimed, “It is not in the least surprising that Bergman’s list of references contains virtually nothing from the best and most substantive work on the Vietnam War.[19]

This was another tactic intended to discredit the article: a blank assertion without documentation. He neglected to give the title of this “most substantive work on the Vietnam War.” It could well be that I did consult it. This was possibly a big lie tactic.

Trollinger closed with a distraction: a blatant case of the either-or fallacy combined with a glittering generality: “the past and present of human history can be reduced to a binary. On one side it is a literal Genesis 1-11, young Earth, capitalism, and heaven. On the other side it is reason, old Earth, Darwinian evolution, socialism, and hell. It’s all so simple.”[20] In other words, agree with him or you are unreasonable.

Not surprisingly, the name-calling and ridicule continued in some of the comments to Trollinger’s article.

Summary

The connection between Darwinism and totalitarian regimes like Nazism and Communism is well established and stated clearly by leading historians. No amount of ridicule by anti-creationists can change history. With new eugenical ideas rising in our time, we must continue to proclaim what happened; those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it.

References

[1] Zimmer, Carl. Unnatural Selection. Discover Magazine, 30 September 2003, pp. 77-78.

[2] Brooks, Martin. Ripe Old Age. New Scientist, 30 January 1999., p. 41.

[3] Fuentes, Agustín.  “The Descent of Man,” 150 years on. Science 372(6544):769, 21 May 2021; DOI: 10.1126/science.abj4606.

[4] Fuentes, 2021, p. 769.

[5] Fuentes, 2021, p. 769.

[6] Rose, Michael. Darwin’s Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1998, p. 143.

[7] Quoted in Michalczyk, John J., et al. Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and the Holocaust: A Prelude to Genocide. Bloomsbury Academic, New York, NY, 2022.

[8] Ferguson, Niall. 1997. Virtual History. Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Fall River Press. pp. 41-42.

[9] Ian Kershaw. Hitlers. 1936-1945 Nemesis.  Norton. New York. 2000. P. 841.

[10] Bergman, Jerry. God in President Eisenhower’s Life, Military Career, and Presidency. Eugene Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers. 2019.  p. 80.

[11] Quoted in Trollinger, William. 14 March 2023;https://rightingamerica.net/charles-darwin-was-responsible-for-the-vietnam-war/. Original in Weinberg, Carl. Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY  2021, p. 55.

[12] Bill Trollinger, University of Dayton Directory; https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/history/trollinger_bill.php.

[13] Jerry Bergman Review of Righting America at the Creation Museum by Susan and William Trollinger. Creation Research Society Quarterly 55(2):116-117, Fall 2018.

[14] Trollinger, William; https://rightingamerica.net/charles-darwin-was-responsible-for-the-vietnam-war/, 14 March 2023.

[15] Trollinger, 2016, pp. 183-184.

[16] Trollinger, 2016, pp. 183-184.

[17] Bergman, Jerry. Censoring the Darwin Skeptics: How Belief in Evolution is Enforced by Eliminating Dissidents. Leafcutter Press, Southworth, WA, 2018.

[18] Trollinger, 2023.

[19] Trollinger, 2023.

[20] Trollinger, 2023.

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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.