Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress by Richard Weikart

By Richard Weikart

In this e-book, Weikart is helping unencumber the secret of Hitler’s evil by way of vividly demonstrating the excellent end that Hitler’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler used to be encouraged through evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian venture of biologically bettering the human race. This ethic underlay or stimulated virtually each significant function of Nazi coverage: eugenics (i.e., measures to enhance human heredity, together with obligatory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, inhabitants enlargement, offensive war, and racial extermination.

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6 Darwin would no doubt have been horrified by the way Hitler applied his theory to humanity, but nonetheless, this passage contains several ideas that would later be central to Hitler’s ideology. Darwin not only insisted that humans have attained their present rank via “rapid multiplication” causing a struggle for existence, but he also claimed that this “battle of life” is necessary to continue evolutionary progress. Based on this analysis, he then spelled out two implications of his theory for public policy, both of which would be central to Hitler’s social Darwinist ideology: (1) maintaining high reproductive levels; and (2) maintaining human competition.

Whoever casts even a glance at nature as it is, will find this principle confirmed as valid for all organisms and for all happenings not only on this earth, but even far beyond it. 16 He then informed these officers that the struggle over territory pits one Volk against another and leads to an “eternal selection, to the selection of the best and hardest. 17 For Hitler the struggle for existence took on religious dimensions. In a speech on November 1943 in Munich, Hitler countered criticisms coming from religious quarters.

In a March 1927 speech he explained the importance of the struggle for existence, both for the individual and for the Volk: Politics is the striving and struggle of a Volk for its daily bread and its existence in the world, just as the individual devotes its entire life to the struggle for existence, for its daily bread. And then comes a second matter, caring for future survival, caring for the child. It is the struggle for the moment and the struggle for posterity. 3 As this statement and many other similar ones by Hitler made clear, all his policies and plans served one purpose: the success of his Volk in the struggle for existence.

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