The vulgar question of priority has been raised in the discussion about who among the dead from the mass murders of the Nazis are most worthy of consideration, now seventy years after the fall of the Nazi government and the public revelation of the extent of their crimes began to be revealed, the extent of which, are still not told. This word "priority" can be used in any number of contexts and framings of discussions and what it means will be limited by those contexts and framings. If you take the popular one when discussing the Nazis, it will be that you have to find which group to be wiped out by murder first entered the mind of Adolph Hitler. Which would be a rather hard thing to do because, as I mentioned the other day, Hitler had little discernible moral conscience which would have made him tell the truth of his intentions or his thinking. He was a complete liar, saying things that didn't reveal his intentions, his lies and deceptions calculated to disarm possible opponents and to gain advantage by duping them. He did it in his formal treaties with governments, including most notably, Stalins' pact with him well past the time his many previous lies and broken agreements should have clued Stalin in that Hitler couldn't be trusted to keep an agreement for a month. The Vatican had learned that in 1933, which accounts for why it, among putative governments, having the most vulnerability and the fewest means of defense, made some of the strongest statements condemning Hitler before and during his campaigns of mass murder. including some made during the war as the Vatican was under siege and the Catholic and Protestant churches were under attack and, as also demonstrated here, marked for extermination, as well. But there is far more to be said about that, soon.
Who were the first people Hitler openly marked for biological elimination from the human species? In terms of action and law, it would be the disabled. Here is what the
Holocaust Museum online says about that.
On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” This law, one of the first steps taken by the Nazis toward their goal of creating an Aryan “master race,” called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With the law’s passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda against people with disabilities, regularly labeling them “life unworthy of life” or “useless eaters” and highlighting their burden upon society.
Just a few years later, the persecution of people with disabilities escalated even further. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of “mercy death” code-named “Operation T4,” in reference to the address of the program’s Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Between 1940 and 1941 approximately 70,000 Austrian and German disabled people were killed under the T4 program, most via large-scale killing operations using poison gas. (This methodology served as the precursor to the streamlined extermination methods of the “Final Solution.”) Although Hitler formally ordered a halt to the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the war’s end, resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities.
The role that salesmanship played in the mass murders of the Nazis is far too little considered, as well as the role that their purposeful and gradual program of habituation to the idea of mass murder among the German population who, if they had announced their intentions to do such things during the campaign that put them in power, they certainly would have mobilized more of their opponents and never have been in the position to form the government. Even after their election they couldn't put their entire plan into effect but they had to gradually, through eliminating their most immediate opponents without exciting those who might waver, gradually though relentlessly disempowering and eliminating their opponents, eventually terrorizing them and, all through that, propagandizing the general public. The eugenic posters of that period were certainly aimed toward the goal of killing the disabled. If that were not the case then the cost of their continued living, sterilized by the Nazi eugenic program, wouldn't have been emphasized. "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too."
If you wanted to go through the vulgar exercise of establishing priority as a means of assigning a ranking of the lives taken on this appalling assignment of significance you could match those legal and extra-legal means of marking the disabled for first involuntary sterilization, a program to prepare the German public for their elimination on the basis of being "useless eaters" because their lives were "unworthy of life" and the end point of that obvious plan of public propaganda, their murder in such places as the gas chamber constructed Hadamar hospital, the corpses of the scores of victims transported to be murdered, daily, in a specially made Mercedes Benz bus, burned in the specially constructed crematorium to burn them, that could be done by looking up dates.
Of course, if you move the frame back a bit and look at the wider picture in which the Nazi eugenic-murder program developed, you would find that it was part of the wider program of eugenics which had included proposals for the identification and murder of the disabled since at least 1868 in the passage advocating Spartan style mandatory infanticide of the disabled from Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte which I posted the other day, noting it was an idea which was taken up by others, including Hitler.* Of course it could be pointed out that Haeckel, in his ranking of races in terms of their development on a ladder, the most "like apes" on the bottom, the whitest Northern Europeans on top. But, while speaking enthusiastically about the benefits to the survivors of their eventual and inevitable extinction, he didn't explicitly call for the legalization of their mass murder.
And, if you do make the extremely disturbing and appalling journey of trying to map back Nazi thinking, back into the period before there were Nazis, back through the minds of those who became Nazis, and those who they were taught by, those who they cited in their pre-Nazi writings, the only evidence that we can have to study the origins of Nazi thinking, the explicit call for murdering the disabled was the earlier, most openly advocated and most widely accepted idea for the biologically beneficial mass murders. As mentioned, Darwin made a similar claim to that of Haeckel and in the next generation of English speaking eugenicists and those influenced by the modern, scientific world view which it was such a part of, people such as H. G. Wells ( the student of Thomas Huxley, aka "Darwin's bulldog") George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Davenport, Lothrop Stoddard, Clarence Darrow,etc.
One particular example is rather chilling, in that he advocated the murder of the children of those he deemed "unfit"
simply on the basis of their parentage.
William J. Robinson, a New York urologist and leading authority on birth control, eugenics, and marriage, wrote that the best solution would be for society to “gently chloroform” the children of the unfit or “give them a dose of potassium cyanide.” Robinson also insisted that splitting hairs about any of their “individual rights” should never be allowed to trump the preservation of the race. “It is the acme of stupidity,” he wrote, “to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual. Such individuals have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.
When I re-read that while preparing this post, it brought to mind a particular passage from Mein Kampf.
If the power to fight for one's own health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends. This world belongs only to the forceful 'whole' man and not to the weak 'half ' man.
If there is a more succinct statement that divides the belief that people are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights and the mode of thinking which is behind natural selection as applied to the human species, that's it. That is the meaning of "survival of the fittest" which no less definitive an authority than Charles Darwin equated with his theory of natural selection, as I've mentioned so often,
on page 92 of the fifth edition of Origin of Species.
I am sure that, as the current extension of the defense of the mythical eugenics-free Darwin which is producing a revised and sanitized Haeckel would point out, Haeckel didn't put Jews near the bottom of that ladder. Robert Richards, among the foremost architects of the revised Haeckel says:
And, of course, there is Haeckel’s placement of Semites in the highest branchesof his tree of human progress. In his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, Haeckel depicted his theory of the evolution of the human species using his new graphic device of the stem-tree. In the first edition of the book (1868), he arranged the human groups—different species, as he regarded them—into a hierarchy of descent, with Papuans, Hottentots, and Australians (and their respective races) sitting on the bottom branches and Caucasians (with their several varieties) on the top (see fig. 1). Haeckel meant vertical position in the tree to indicate the level of progressive advance attained by the various species and races. For different reasons, perhaps, neither his nineteenth-century readers nor we would be surprised to see the Germans and GrecoRomans, among the Caucasian races, at the “pinnacle” (Spitze) of the human species. But readers, both then and now, might wonder at the placement of the Jews and Berbers. He located them at the same highly developed level as the Germans and within the same species.
So if you wanted to look into the context in which the thinking of the Nazis originated to see which group was first marked for extinction on the basis of biological traits, it would be hard to find a group which was earlier than the one the Nazis started with, the disabled. Nor would you find a group whose extermination is more acceptably and even enthusiastically talked about in the post-Nazi era on the basis of biological fitness, economic efficiency and a general disdain for their continued existence. The totally accepted and acceptable talk among neo-utilitarian thinkers and clean handed academics such as Michael Tooley, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva and everyone's favorite, the genteel animal-rights advocate and celebrity of high-middle-brow media, Peter Singer. There is no "Never Again" when it comes to them. Advocating their murder can get you on TV and public radio.
* In looking at a book by the Haeckel revisionist, Robert Richards, again, the other night, I was reminded that the evidence tying Hitler's thinking to what Haeckel said was made by one of Haeckel's promoters inside the Third Reich, Heinz Brucher.
To tighten further the connection between the National Socialists and Haeckel, Brucher focused on a passage from the Naturlische Schopfungsgeschichte that reads: The difference in rationality between a Goethe, a Kant, a Lamarck, a Darwin and that of the lwer natural men – a Veda, a Kaffer, an Australian and a Papuan is much greater than the graduated difference between the rationality of these latter and that of the intelligent vertebrates, for instance, the higher apes.” Brucher then cited a quite similar remark by Hitler in his Nuremberg speech of 1933. Through his several citations, he made Haeckel historically responsible, at least in part, for Hitler's racial attitudes.
\
Robert Richards: The Tragic Sense of Life p 505
Richards then makes a rather slippery and, if you've read the background, unconvincing argument attacking what Brucher said. To do that he has to attack others who concluded the same thing from reading what Haeckel said and comparing it to what the Nazis said, such as Stephen Jay Gould, and historians of the thinking of the Nazis such as Daniel Gasman and Richard Weikart. But for my purpose here, that Brucher said it - and he was one of myriads of Nazis who cited Haeckel and Darwin in support of their classification of people in terms of "fitness" - it only matters that they consciously found support for their ideas and applied science in Haeckel, whose ideas in that very book had been most forcefully promoted by Charles Darwin as a milestone in the understanding of his theory of Natural Selection.
Apart from pretty well dispelling the current line in online discourse that since Haeckel's name appears on a list of books to be taken off of library shelves that means the Nazis weren't Darwinists, in the words of a prominent Nazi scientist, it proves that others, Nazis during the Third Reich and anti-Nazis studying it have noted that connection.
I generally find that the more you know, the more you do a deep checking of what Richards says, it is pretty clear that his campaign of Darwinist-Hackel apologetics is far more interested in maintaining the the post-war cover up and a lot less interested in the truth. I might have more to say about that later this week.
Note: I'm going to limit my postings on this topic to less than one a day, though the temptation to address every phony ploy of the Knights of St. Darwin is great since just about everything they've ever come up with can be refuted. Other than the continual cover-up of the Darwin industry, there is no way to reshuffle the cards left by Darwin, Haeckel, etc. to make them mean anything but what they mean. After seventy years of lying about it, I don't see that they've ever come up with anything that stands a rigorous look at the primary evidence. That doesn't mean the profitable and ideologically motivated PR campaign will end any time soon, it just means that it has the burden of lying about what the primary documents say. I feel a moral obligation to add as much to that burden as it is possible for me to do. In the current campaign to refinish Haeckel's unvarnished version of Darwinism, that campaign reaches about as low as can be imagined.
Update: Hate Mail
I would challenge anyone to find a prominent 19th or early 20th century German clergyman who advocated the total extermination of all Jews on the basis of their ethnicity and anyone who you might ferret out who wasn't openly condemned by more prominent Christian clergy. In many of the things I have read from Haeckel and the line of those who followed his call to murder all of the disabled, including Hitler, they railed against the opposition of the Christian clergy.
It's certainly not something you can attribute to the Catholic church which welcomed and had no problem elevating converts who had been Jews, among those including St. Edith Stein, who was murdered by the Nazis on the basis of her being Jewish. Jews who converted or who would be classified as Jews by the Nazis have risen to the top of the Catholic hierarchy, such as Cardinal Lustiger the Archbisop of Paris and Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York, two of the most prominent archdiocese of the church.
This list of Jewish Catholics which I found this morning while considering your complaint is fascinating and I hope to look into it. I was rather startled to see some of the names which couldn't be more relevant to this discussion such as Fritz Lang, the director and Erich von Stroheim who, as I noted last week, played an evil German doctor in a movie of American anti-Nazi agitprop. If the list is accurate, all of them would have been classified as Jewish and murdered by the Nazis on the basis of their biological heritage, not their religion.
And I am certain what can be said for Catholics can be said for many other denominations.
Update 2: Still gassing on about the alleged Nazi banning of all mention of Darwin and Haeckel? I really don't have time to go looking to see if I can find it online but it would seem rather odd if they did, considering this from four years after the alleged banning of their books.
The official Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, published a tribute to Ernst Haeckel on the twentieth anniversary of Haeckel's death in August 1939. The article was entitled, "Um die Abstammung des Menschen: Zum 20. Jahrestage Ernst Haeckels" ("On the Descent of Man: For the Twentieth Anniversary of Ernst Haeckel['s death]"). The title and the article clearly avowed belief in human evolution and praised Haeckel for his evolutionary ideas.
Volkischer Beobachter was the official Nazi newspaper overseen by the Nazi head of propaganda, the vehemently anti-Christian, Alfred Rosenberg. "Abstammung des Menschen" is, of course, the title that Victor Carus gave to his translation of Darwin's second major book on evolution, The Descent of Man, the book in which he said that if he had seen Ernst Haeckel's book, Naturlischer Schopfungsgeschichte before he'd gotten very far into the writing of Descent of Man, he probably wouldn't have finished his book because he was in pretty much complete agreement with everything Haeckel had said.
I am just about certain that the translation of Carus - which Darwin knew of and, as I recall, approved, was still the standard translation of the book in German.
