A Christian Historical Lesson: Hitler’s Darwinian Worldview

He was obsessed with his personal ideology, his Weltenschauung [worldview]. Again and again he hammered at race and the fact that Germany’s future lay in conquest of eastern territories. Over and over he preached his pseudo-Darwinist sermon of nature’s way: conquest of the weak by the strong.

An essential of Hitler’s conclusions in this book [Hitler’s ‘secret book’] was the conviction drawn from Darwin that might makes right. It led to a vital link between self-preservation and Lebensraum [the doctrine that nation needs territory]. ‘The compulsion to engage in the struggle for existence lies in the limitation of the living space; but in the life-struggle for this living space lies also the basis for evolution.’ The consequence was an eternal battle between nations which could only  be won by a people dedicated to strict racial, folk and blood values. Once standards were lowered and pure blood was mixed with inferior blood the end was in sight. ‘Then the Jew can make his entry in any form, and this master of international poisoning and race corruption will not rest until he has thoroughly uprooted and thereby corrupted such a people.’ This was the first time Hitler not only defined his terms but interwove race, folk and blood values with his hatred of Jews.”

Adolf Hitler, John Toland; p. 226, 230

Worldviews have implications. And when human beings act in accordance with those implications, a worldview has direct consequences. An argument I’ll make as I draw from John Toland's definitive biography of Hitler is this: A direct consequence of Hitler’s Darwinian worldview was the genocide of the Nazi Holocaust, and we should disdain the woldview that allowed for it.

Adolf Hitler quite apparently believed that human beings were merely the result of (a) genetic mutations after which (b) the most fit of those mutations survived and reproduced most successfully. In other words, he believed human beings were merely the products of Darwinian evolution. In this scheme, popularly called simply “evolution,” humans are the result of this impersonal set of circumstances, and therefore there is no fixed, personal standardbearer who objectively declares that all human persons have worth, rights, and dignity. To the philosophically consistent evolutionist, human beings are mere matter in a world of mere matter. In Hitler’s Darwinian worldview, a human being had no more fixed, objective worth than a maggot:

[The working-class districts of Germany are] breeding grounds of blood mixing and bastardization, and of race lowering, thus resulting in those purulent infection centers in which the international Jewish racial-maggots thrive and finally effect further destruction.

Hitler himself, quoted on p. 231

Hitler did not see Jews as fellow human beings made in the image of God because he refused to accept that human beings were directly made by God.

If you hold to Darwinian evolution, that the human species is merely the product of mutation followed by natural selection, then you should ask yourself: Why do I have any worth? Why is a human life worth defending? Why are human rights of any value at all? Could you successfully argue against someone who claimed that human beings were a plague that needed to be wiped out? Could you successfully argue against a man who claimed that only the fit human beings should be allowed to live and reproduce? Would you have anything more than a subjective standard with which to argue against someone else’s subjective standard? If you hold to mere Darwinian evolution, the answer is no. You will not have any objective, binding standard with which you can successfully mount the claim that all human beings, yourself included, have intrinsic worth and dignity. 

But Darwinian evolution is not true. It does not comport with the world we know exists. We know that human beings do have intrinsic value, which is why the stories and pictures of Hitler’s Holocaust are so horrifying. We know Hitler’s Darwinian worldview is false, even if many of us refuse to admit it. A worldview that maintains that life was a chance occurrence and that the forms of life happened in a purely material universe with no immaterial laws governing it cannot account for Hitler’s violation of those immaterial laws, and we know he didviolate them.

If, as Darwinian evolution would contend, Adolf Hitler himself was the chance product physical processes, just like a rock or a drop of sulfuric acid or an iguana, then he was no more “wrong” in enacting his Holocaust than a rock is for rolling down a hill, the drop of sulfuric acid for burning through a tabletop, the iguana for eating a moth. But that is not the reality we live in, and we instinctively know it. Hitler was wrong to enact his Holocaust. He was objectively morally wrong to treat millions of human beings as if they were insects. Human beings were made in the image of the God of Jesus Christ, created directly by God. He designed them to reflect particular glory of His as the capstone of this world He’s made.

To treat a human being as you would a maggot is monstrously evil. The Christian worldview can account for this. The Darwinian one cannot.

Adolf Hitler’s Darwinian worldview was as false as its direct consequences were wicked.