I already knew that the Nazi government officially endorsed Darwinism, but the other day I stumbled across the fact that the Nazis indoctrinated SS recruits with Darwinism during their training. I learned this from a book written by a former SS officer: Surviving Hitler by O. Hakan Palm. SS training included a mandatory course in Darwinism. Hitler fully embraced Darwinism and saw Nazism as ground in and justified by Darwin's theory.
On a related note, in former German resistance member Phllipp von Boeselager's book Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member, we learn that the Nazis were viciously anti-Catholic and that they tried to stop the army from celebrating Christmas.
Well, these are three more parallels between the Nazis and American Democrats.
I see a lot of parallels between Mormons and Nazis, except Mormons are a lot dumber.
In 2006,
Robert J. Richards, historian of Darwin and eugenics at
University of Chicago, wrote "It can only be a tendentious and dogmatically driven assessment that would condemn Darwin for the crimes of the Nazis."
[23] Richards more pointedly concluded "Hitler was not a Darwinian" and "calls this all a desperate tactic to undermine evolution."
[24] Richards explained, "There's not the slightest shred of evidence that Hitler read Darwin," and "Some of the biggest influences on Hitler's anti-Semitism were opposed to evolution, such as British writer
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose racial theory became incorporated into Nazi doctrine."
[24]
Similarly, historian Marius Turda's review asks why Weikart's book did not focus on "some authors who actually are credited with influencing Hitler, such as
Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, the Viennese Aryan racist who formulated the doctrine of
Ariosophy, or
Guido von List, another Viennese occult racist, or
Josef Reimer, author of A Pan-German Germany (1905) (whom Weikart discusses cursorily)."
[25]
Also in a review that same year
Helmut Walser Smith of Vanderbilt University writes that the book's "larger argument remains too narrowly conceived," as elements of Nazism, including "nationalism and anti-Sermitism make cameo appearances, for example, but their power is hardly gauged."
[26] He concludes saying it is "a thesis on a tight rope," which is "convincing as long as one does not look down."
[26]
In 2006,
Ann Taylor Allen, a professor of German history at the
University of Louisville, reviewed Weikart's book for
The Journal of Modern History.
[27] She explained that Weikart's talk about "Darwinism" is not based on any careful reading of Darwin himself but on vague ideas by a variety of people who presented themselves as "
Darwinian."
[27] Moreover, fundamental elements of
Nazism like
anti-Semitism cannot be attributed to Darwinism since they predate evolutionary theory. Allen concluded:
This picture of the Holocaust as the outcome of a 'culture war' between religion and science leads to serious distortions on both sides. The '
Judeo-Christian' worldview is unproblematically associated here with many beliefs — such as opposition to
birth control, legalized
abortion, and
assisted suicide — that many believing Christians and Jews would reject. And 'Darwinism' is equated with a hodgepodge of ideas about race, politics, and social issues. If all these ideas were to fall into well-deserved obsolescence, this would in no way detract from the validity of Darwin's contributions to modern biological science. Neither religion nor science is well served by this oversimplified view of their complex history.
[27]
