Answer to A Challenge

I could go on and on, answering the non-evidenced and ignorant retorts, refusing to look at the evidence and documentation that ties Darwin's natural selection to eugenics in both English speaking countries and Germany and the ties of the active eugenics programs of the United States directly to the Nazi eugenic-mass murders, every single time I have looked into this the number of direct, primary documents in my notes grows larger.  Virtually every scientific eugenicist I've ever read directly ties their eugenics to their reading of The Origin of Species and, even more so, The Descent of Man.  I would, of course, include the proto-Nazi Ernst Haeckel* to that list, the man named by Darwin and his closest associates such as Thomas Huxley and his son Francis Darwin as the foremost champion of Charles Darwin's work in Germany or, in fact, on the continent of Europe.

But this isn't about what the evidence shows, what it shows is neither ambiguous nor is it going to go away.  Eventually it is going to have to be faced by those who deny it now.   That is the thing about primary evidence, in the words of the principles, it doesn't go away, it can't be overcome except through lying and the lies are always vulnerable to people reading that primary documentation.

This article by the expert on these issues, Edwin Black, makes an irrefutable case that the Nazis learned a lot of what they did from Americans, including such ideas as murdering "undesirables" in gas chambers,

Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point No. 8 was euthanasia.

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a "lethal chamber" or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, "Applied Eugenics," which argued, "From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated." "Applied Eugenics" also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."

Applied Eugenics was unambiguous as to where the idea of eugenics came from,

The science of eugenics is the natural result of the spread and acceptance of organic evolution, following the publication of Darwin's work on The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. It took a generation for his ideas to win the day; but then they revolutionized the intellectual life of the civilized world. Man came to realize that the course of nature is regular; that the observed sequences of events can be described in formulas which are called natural laws; he learned that he could achieve great results in plant and animal breeding by working in harmony with these laws. Then the question logically arose, "Is not man himself subject to these same laws?[Pg 148] Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?"

The evolutionist* answered both these questions affirmatively. However great may be the superiority of his mind, man is first of all an animal, subject to the natural laws that govern other animals. He can learn to comply with these laws; he can, therefore, take an active share in furthering the process of evolution toward a higher life.

... It is really on Darwin's work that the modern science of eugenics is based, and it owes its beginning to Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.

Or that the mechanism of selection was, in fact, death.

The lethal factor is the one which Darwin himself most emphasized. Obviously a race will be steadily improved, if the worst stock in it is cut off before it has a chance to reproduce, and if the best stock survives to perpetuate its kind. "This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection, or the survival of the fittest," Darwin wrote; and he went on to show that the principal checks on increase were overcrowding, the difficulty of obtaining food, destruction by enemies, and the lethal effects of climate. These causes may be conveniently divided as in the above diagram, into sustentative and non-sustentative. The sustentative factor has acquired particular prominence in the human species, since Malthus wrote his essay on population—that essay which both Darwin and Wallace confess was the starting point of their discovery of natural selection.

Paul Popenoe:  Applied Eugenics

So, there, the link from Darwin to the proposal to improve the human species through mass gassing of those considered undesirable, all in the person of Paul Popenoe, one of the foremost and respected of the American eugenicists, who, by the way, was quoted by Baur, Lenz and Fischer in the book Hitler was reading while he was spewing Mein Kampf.   The Americans (not to mention British eugenicists) were openly talking about the possible benefits of Darwinian murder of undesirables in gas chambers more than two decades before the Germans built the first of those.  The first of which, by the way, was not used to murder Jews, Roma, Pols and others on the basis of ethnicity but it was at Hadamar Hospital, constructed to murder people who were disabled, many of them Germans, the transports to it were on special buses, not trains, but the victims were just as murdered before their bodies were cremated at the crematorium constructed as part of that mass murder program.  It was certainly a small scale model of what the Nazis would later construct, in which they gassed and burned millions of Jews, Pols, Roma, members of religious minorities, political opponents, etc.

As I said, every time I look at the words of eugenicists, whenever they talk about what inspired their eugenic thinking, they inevitably mention the writings of Charles Darwin.   Another originator of an idea the Nazis made their own mentioned by Black in the article was the eminent American scientist David Starr Jordan.

Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

And Jordan, as well, was explicit about the role that Charles Darwin played in all of his thinking as a biologist.

The law of descent, with change through “natural selection,” brings into organic connection a host of facts hitherto isolated.  Each one considered by itself would be without meaning or explanation.  The essential argument in favor of Darwinism is that it brings all biological facts into unison from whatever field of investigation these facts may be derived.  However much evolutionists have at times seemed to drift away from Darwin's conclusions, it is always the most accurate research and the sanest thought which comes nearest the opinions set forth in the Origin of Species.  The body of facts has grown enormously year by year, but the conclusions we must accept are substantially those laid down by Darwin himself.

David Starr Jordan:  Footnotes to Evolution

There is no possibility in mistaking the source of Jordan's inspiration whenever he talked as a biologist and a eugenicist.

Considering all of this pre-Nazi eugenics by founding presidents of universities like Jordan, whose work informed the millionaires and great philanthropic institutions who were up to their necks in promoting eugenics in pre-Nazi Germany and who funded the very institutions which provided the scientific justifications and methods to the Nazis, even employing the pioneer in using people in death camps for medical experiments and scientific research,  Eugen Fischer, reminds me of another quote, one from the survivor of the death camps and the Nazi mass murders,  Viktor Frankl

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him.  When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. 

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz.  The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment – or as the Nazi liked to say, of “Blood and Soil.”  I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.  


Viktor E. Frankl:  The Doctor and the Soul

Which, in turn, reminds me of that foremost of all Darwinists in Germany up to the very year the Nazi party formed, 1919,  Ernst Haeckel

By the Theory of Descent we are for the first time enabled to conceive of the unity of nature in such a manner that a mechanico-causal explanation of even the most intricate organic phenomena, for example, the origin and structure of the organs of sense, is no more difficult (in a general way) than is the mechanical explanation of any physical process; as, for example, earthquakes, the courses of the wind, or the currents of the ocean. We thus arrive at the extremely important conviction that all natural bodies which are known to us are equally animated, that the distinction which has been made between animate and inanimate bodies does not exist. When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, or when in a solution of salt a crystal is formed, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life than the growth and flowering of plants, than the propagation of animals or the activity of their senses, than the perception or the formation of thought in man. This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature constitutes the highest and most general merit of the Theory of Descent, as reformed by Darwin.

Ernst Haeckel:  Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte  vol. 1 (translated by Ray Lankster)


*  [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 favored races the right to dominate others; the irrational mysticism that had always stood in strange communion with his grave words about objective science—all contributed to the rise of Nazism,

Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny