Nazi Eugenics film: updated

Nazi propaganda film arguing against violating the law of natural selection and letting the disabled suffer its consequences. Unlike Hitler, however, Jesus wants us to care for the least of these.




HT:Evolution News and Views

update: From Uncommon Descent, more context...

If we look specifically at the history of the euthanasia movement, just about all historians who have examined it admit that Darwinism and eugenics played a key role in undermining the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic. The first person in Germany to promote killing the disabled was the biologist Ernst Haeckel, the leading nineteenth-century German Darwinist. Almost all early proponents of euthanasia—not only in Germany, but also in Britain and the United States—were avid Darwinists who claimed that Darwinism supported their ideology, as Ian Dowbiggin, Nick Kemp, Udo Benzenhöfer, and many other historians have clearly demonstrated. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, a German historian who is an expert on the Nazi euthanasia program, states, “The race hygiene [i.e., eugenics] paradigm constituted an ethic of a new type, which was ostensibly grounded scientifically in Darwinist biology.” In his book he explains in detail the Darwinian and eugenics background to the Nazi euthanasia program.

Caplan claims that it was Hitler’s hatred of the disabled, not Darwinism, that led to these atrocities against the disabled. But this ignores the fact that Hitler made clear that his contempt for the disabled was based on Darwinian-inspired ideology. In Mein Kampf Hitler stated, “For as soon as procreation as such is limited and the number of births diminished, the natural struggle for existence which leaves only the strongest and healthiest alive is obviously replaced by the obvious desire to save even the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature and her will continues.” He continued, “A stronger race will drive out the weak, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will, time and again, burst all the absurd fetters of the so-called humanity of individuals, in order to replace it by the humanity of Nature which destroys the weak to give his place to the strong.”

No one is claiming that Darwinism leads inevitably toward the Holocaust, and no one is denying the importance of other factors, including anti-Semitism, in shaping Nazi ideology. However, only those unwilling to examine the evidence could claim that Nazism was not influenced by Darwinism.

Richard Weikart is history professor at California State Univ., Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany