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Religion, social Darwinism and Hitler's racism

Scholarly interest continues on the extent to which inherited, long-standing, cultural-religious notions of anti-Judaism in Christian Europe contributed to Hitler's personal racial anti-Semitism, and what influence a pseudo-scientific "primitive version of social-Darwinism", mixed with 19th century imperialist notions, brought to bear on his psychology. Laurence Rees noted that "emphasis on Christianity" was absent from the vision expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf and his "bleak and violent vision" and visceral hatred of the Jews had been influenced by quite different sources: the notion of life as struggle he drew from Social Darwinism, the notion of the superiority of the "Aryan race" he drew from Arthur de Gobineau's The Inequality of the Human Races; from events following Russia's surrender in World War One when Germany seized agricultural lands in the East he formed the idea of colonising the Soviet Union; and from Alfred Rosenberg he took the idea of a link between Judaism and Bolshevism. Hitler espoused a ruthless policy of "negative eugenic selection", believing that world history consisted of a struggle for survival between races, in which the Jews plotted to undermine the Germans, and inferior groups like Slavs and defective individuals in the German gene pool, threatened the Aryan "master race". Richard J. Evans wrote that his views on these subjects have often been called "social Darwinist", but that there is little agreement among historians as to what the term may mean, or how it transformed from its 19th century scientific origins, to become a central component of a genocidal political ideology in the 20th century.

Derek Hastings writes that, according to Hitler's personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, the strongly anti-Semitic Hieronymite Catholic priest Bernhard Stempfle was a member of Hitler's inner circle in the early 1920s and frequently advised him on religious issues. He helped Hitler in the writing of Mein Kampf. He was killed by the SS in the 1934 purge. Hitler viewed the Jews as enemies of all civilization and as materialistic, unspiritual beings, writing in Mein Kampf: "His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine." Hitler described his supposedly divine mandate for his anti-Semitism: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." In his rhetoric, Hitler also fed on the old accusation of Jewish deicide. Because of this it has been speculated that Christian anti-Semitism influenced Hitler's ideas, especially such works as Martin Luther's essay On the Jews and Their Lies and the writings of Paul de Lagarde. Others disagree with this view. In support of this view, Hitler biographer John Toland offers the opinion that Hitler "carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God...". Nevertheless, in Mein Kampf Hitler writes of an upbringing in which no particular anti-Semitic prejudice prevailed.

According to historian Lucy Dawidowicz, anti-Semitism has a long history within Christianity, and that the line of "anti-Semitic descent" from Luther to Hitler is "easy to draw." In her The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, she writes that Luther and Hitler were obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews. Dawidowicz states that the similarities between Luther's anti-Jewish writings and modern anti-Semitism are no coincidence, because they derived from a common history of Judenhass which can be traced to Haman's advice to Ahasuerus, although modern German anti-Semitism also has its roots in German nationalism. Catholic historian José M. Sánchez argues that Hitler's anti-Semitism was explicitly rooted in Christianity.

Richard J. Evans Evans noted that Hitler saw Christianity as "indelibly Jewish in origin and character" and a "prototype of Bolshevism", which "violated the law of natural selection". In the decades between Charles Darwin and the mid-twentieth century, various historians have noted that the concept of "Social Darwinism" had been vaunted by both "proponents of altruistic ethics", and by "spokesmen of a brutally elitist morality", but in many of its exponents, it took a rightward shift at the close of the 19th Century, when racist and imperialist notions joined the mix. According to Evans, Hitler "used his own version of the language of social Darwinism as a central element in the discursive practice of extermination...", and the language of Social Darwinism, in its Nazi variant, helped to remove all restraint from the directors of the "terroristic and exterminatory" policies of the regime, by "persuading them that what they were doing was justified by history, science and nature".

According to Fest, the Nazi dictator simplified Arthur de Gobineau's elaborate ideas of struggle for survival among the different races, from which the Aryan race, guided by providence, was supposed to be the torchbearers of civilization. In Hitler's conception, Jews were enemies of all civilization, especially the Volk. Sherree Owens Zalampas wrote that, although Hitler has been called a "Social Darwinist, he was not such in the usual sense of the word, for, whereas Social Darwinism stressed struggle, change, the survival of the strongest, and a ceaseless battle of competition, Hitler, through the use of modern industrial technology and impersonal bureaucratic methods ended all competition by the ruthless suppression of all opponents." Henri Ellenberger considered his understanding of Darwinism incomplete, and based loosely on the theory of "survival of the fittest" in a social context, as popularly misunderstood at the time. Similarly the historian Karl Dietrich Bracher has argued that it would be wrong to believe that Hitler's views were formed through the discipline of close study and that rather Hitler had drawn on, 'a chance reading of books, occasional pamphlets, and generalisations based on subjective impressions to form the distorted political picture which became the Weltanschauung ' that dominated his future life and work. An example from Hitler's formative Vienna years was the influence of Lanz von Liebenfels, whose programme spread 'the crass exaggerations of the social Darwinist theory of survival, the superman and super-race theory, the dogma of race conflict, and the breeding and extermination theories of the future SS state', and whose Ostara publication was widely available in the tobacco kiosks of Vienna. In Mein Kampf, p. 59, Hitler recounts the genesis of his anti-Semitism and says his 'books' are polemical pamphlets bought 'for a few pennies'.

Hitler biographer Alan Bullock wrote that Hitler did not believe in God, and that one of his central objections to Christianity, was that its teaching was "a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest". Steigmann Gall concludes that, to the extent he believed in a divinity, Hitler did not believe in a "remote, rationalist divinity" but in an "active deity," which he frequently referred to as "Creator" or "Providence". In Hitler's belief God created a world in which different races fought each other for survival as depicted by Arthur de Gobineau. The "Aryan race," supposedly the bearer of civilization, is allocated a special place:

"What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and the reproduction of our race ... so that our people may mature for the fulfilment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. ... Peoples that bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence."

See also

• Benito Mussolini's religious beliefs
• German Christians
• Guilt by association
• Kirchenkampf
• Nazi occultism
• Race of Jesus
• Religion in Nazi Germany
• Religious aspects of Nazism
• The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

References

1. Laurence Rees; The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler; Ebury Press 2012; pp. 61–62
2. ^ Richard J. Evans; In Search of German Social Darwinism: The History and Historiography of a Concept; a chapter from Medicine & Modernity: Public Health & Medical Care in 19th and 20th Century Germany; Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge; 1997; pp. 55–57
3. Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism, p. 67
4. Hastings, Derek (2010). Catholicism and the roots of Nazism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 119.
5. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, p.111
6. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-roehm.htm
7. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 65.
8. Shirer 1960, pp. 91–236 argues that Luther's essay was influential. This view was expounded by Lucy Dawidowicz. (Dawidowicz 1986, p. 23) Uwe Siemon-Netto disputes this conclusion (Siemon-Netto 1995, pp. 17–20).
9. John Toland. (1976). Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. New York: Anchor Books, p. 703.
10. The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945. First published 1975; this Bantam edition 1986, p.23. ISBN 978-0-553-34532-2
11. José M. Sánchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust; Understanding the Controversy (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of American Press, 2002), p. 70.
12. Cite error: The named reference Richard J 2009, p. 547 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
13. Richard J. Evans; In Search of German Social Darwinism: The History and Historiography of a Concept, 1997 - (quoted by Richard Weikart in From Darwin to Hitler; Palgrave MacMillan; USA 2004; ISBN 1-4039-7201-X; p.233)
14. Fest, Joachim (1974). Hitler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 56, 210.
15. Zalampas, Sherree Owens. (1990). Adolf Hitler: A psychological interpretation of his views on architecture, art, and music. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, p. 139..
16. Ellenberger, Henri (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books. p. 235.
17. Sklair, Leslie (2003). The Sociology of Progress. New York: Routledge, p. 71. ISBN 978-0-415-17545-6
18. Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship, pp. 86–87
19. Cite error: The named reference Hitler p.216 & 219 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
20. ^ Steigmann-Gall 2003, p. 26

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External links

• Mein Kampf - by Adolf Hitler
• Mein Kampf - by Adolf Hitler (published by Hurst and Blackett, 1939)
• Introduction to The Holy Reich - by Richard Steigmann-Gall
• Review of Richard Steigmann-Gall's Holy Reich - by John S. Conway
• Full Text of Hitler's Table Talk.
• Was Hitler a Christian?; by Dinesh D'Souza.
• Was Hitler a Catholic?; by John Muscat; Quadrant Online

• Adolf Hitler
• Catholicism-related controversies
• Religious views by individual
• Religion in Nazi Germany