More Response To More Hate

I am delighted to hear that you uphold the doctrine of the Modification of Species, and defend my views. The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.

Charles Darwin, letter to William Thierry Preyer, March 31, 1868



This part of your imposing investigations being free from arbitrary opinions (which it is impossible to avoid in any treatise on the origin of mankind) is sure, I think, to extend and to confirm Darwinism in the scientific world. Besides Jena there is no University in Germany where your theory is so openly confessed and publicly taught by so many professors. Häckel, Gegenbaur, Dohrn, Strasburger, W. Müller, myself: we are true Darwinians, in our lectures and writings

William Preyer,  letter to C. Darwin  April 27, 1871

Try an experiment, google "University of Jena hotbed of Nazi ideology" and see how many times the words come up.

As to the current,  apparently blog-based myth that the Nazis banned Darwinism, that is totally contradicted by the fact that most of Ernst Haeckel's works - including those which Darwin, himself, said represented his thinking, most notably Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte  - were still being published in Nazi Germany right up to the end of the Nazi period.  Such eminent Nazi academics as Karl Astel, the Darwinist geneticist and rector at the University of Jena - just about all of the biologists, anthropologists, etc. in Germany who held their positions all during the Nazi period were Darwinists - was one of the founders of the Ernst Haeckel Society during the war, in 1941.  He and the co-founder of the society, Gerhard Heberer (both a conventional Darwinian biologist and an SS officer)  invited high placed Nazis to be honorary members of it.  One of those, Nazi Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, wrote to Martin Bormann and Alfred Rosenberg to get their approval, which they gave.

That myth is a blatant lie which depends on the obscurity, in English, of the disproof of it but that barrier is going to be less useful to telling those are translated and publicized in English.  It also depends on the ignorance of historical and text-based scholarship by people who, somehow, get college credentials without ever learning how those work.  And, surprisingly, not all of them seem to come from the STEM subjects.  Though those who should know better might just be telling convenient lies.