This year much of the world remembers the centenary of the start of the First World War and the 70^th anniversary of the Allied invasion of France to begin the end of the Second World War. In each conflict the primary aggressor and enemy was Germany. What is often missed is the important influence of Darwinism on Hitler and Germany's thinking. The human heart is a factory for all kinds of evil – including the evil of racism (Jer. 17:9; Matt. 15:18-19). While Darwin certainly didn’t invent racism, his ideology of evolution has fostered it.

Darwin’s famous book “The Origin of Species” (1859) has a lesser known subtitle “The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” While in it he did not discuss the issue of human races and their relation to each other he laid the framework for another book titled “The Descent of Man” (1871). Here, he theorized that man, having initially evolved from apes, had continued evolving as various races, with some more developed than others. Darwin classified his own white race as more advanced than those “lower organisms” such as pygmies, and he specified different people groups as “savage,” “low,” and “degraded.” He also stated that “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, will no doubt be exterminated.” In all these statements Darwin was consistently applying evolutionary theory to the world of humanity around him.

Ernest Haeckel (1834-1919) was a leading German scientist and a very influential figure in providing the foundation for Hitler’s plans for the advancement of German Aryan superiority. He promoted and popularized Charles Darwin’s work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”) claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species’ evolutionary development, or phylogeny. He is infamous for his drawings of the stages in human embryonic development which have often been used to supposedly demonstrate the stages in evolution e.g. tadpole, fish, amphibian, etc. These drawings are now known to have been fraudulently drawn by Haeckel to verify his thesis. They have often been used in abortion clinics to convince pregnant mothers that their foetus is not yet human and therefore can be aborted without violating the sanctity of human life.

Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction. He claimed that Negros have stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race which is evidence that Negros are related to apes because when apes climb trees they hold on to the trees with their toes.

Haeckel compared Negros to “four-handed” apes. He also believed Negros were savages and that Whites were the most civilised people. Haeckel also stated that “politics is applied biology”, a quote used by Nazi propagandists. The Nazi party used not only Haeckel’s quotes, but also Haeckel’s justifications for racism, nationalism and social Darwinism in their programme of ethnic cleansing of Blacks, Jews, Poles and Gypsies. In his “Ontology and Phylogeny” Harvard palaeontologist and evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

(Haeckel’s) evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a ‘just’ state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favoured races the right to dominate others ... all contributed to the rise of Nazism.

In “Mein Kampf” Hitler wrote that the Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the Jews should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature’s efforts “to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile.” Hitler went on to apply the principles of Darwinism to society in horrifying ways progressing from abortion and forced sterilization, to euthanasia and ethnic cleansing of what he deemed were ‘unfit races’ in the struggle for survival. More than six million people died in the holocaust. Hitler himself became the supreme evolutionist, and Nazism the ultimate fruit of the evolutionary tree.

Firmly convinced that Darwinian evolution was true, Hitler saw himself as the modern saviour of mankind. Society, he felt, would someday regard him as a great ‘scientific socialist’, the benefactor of all humankind. By breeding a superior race, the world would look upon him as the man who pulled humanity up to a higher level of evolutionary development. If Darwinism is true, Hitler was our saviour and we have crucified him. As a result, the human race will grievously suffer. If Darwinism is not true, what Hitler attempted to do must be ranked with the most heinous crimes of history and Darwin as the father of one of the most destructive philosophies of history.