Darwin and the Nazis: The Final Solution as an exercise in evolutionary biology? ...

Over the years, the Post-Darwinist blog has received many attacks from people who insist that the Nazis owed nothing to Darwin's theory of evolution (which, to Darwin believers is, of course, the fount of all good things).

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the Nazis owed the very definition of who and what they were to Darwin's theory of evolution. They saw themselves as the more fit, more highly evolved master race, after all.

That does NOT mean that the Nazis couldn't have murdered without Darwin. Of course they could have. They could have taken their inspiration for mass murder from anyone who offered it. Charlie Manson, for example. But, as it happens, they found Darwin's "survival of the fittest" or "natural selection" instead.

Anyway, a friend wrote to alert me to the Nazis' Wannsee Protocol for the "Final Solution" (= murdering 6 million Jewish people), and I am assured by historian of the period Richard Weikart (California State University) that it is genuine:

My friend writes

The debt that the Nazis owed to the Theory of Evolution is clearly stated in the protocol of the Final Solution (Endloesung) of the Jewish question formulated on January 20, 1942. This document was produced as a result of a conference among leading Nazis which considered how the Jewish problem could be solved in its entirety.

and draws my attention particularly to this section:

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

In other words, the Nazis even used the terminology of Darwinian evolutionists (= explaining the worry that those Jews who survived forced labour would be naturally selected as the more "fit" population).

Now, museum curators and Darwin hagiographers, airbrush that!

See also:

Darwin Day in America - a Review, especially the systematic attempts to "spin" Darwin's racism and support for eugenics.

Darwin and the Nazis: Nazism as a "biological" political program

Further stories here (scroll down below the one immediately above).