Good Lord, Not That Lie That The Nazis Banned Haeckel Again!

In my opinion, Robert J. Richards of the University of Chicago, who I have read, is one of the most dishonest supposed scholars who writes in favor of the post-war Darwin myth, the lie in which he had nothing to do with the eugenics which, in indisputable fact, Darwin supported throughout the entire period after he first published his theory of natural selection.  Darwin supported what his own sons called "eugenics" after his cousin Francis Galton named the science he created out of natural selection, he supported Galton's eugenics as cited science.  Darwin supported what Galton said were his earliest eugenic writings and cited them positively in his own work, especially The Descent of Man.  He supported his own son's, George Darwin's early eugenic proposal published in that earliest source of of eugenic propaganda, Macmillan's magazine, for the involuntary dissolution of marriages if one of the couple were diagnosed with a mental illness, certainly one of the first proposed legal applications of natural selection and its logical product, eugenics, I'd guess the first one of those to be published.

If I put up links to support those points, the entire text would be red.

Most relevant in terms of Robert Richard's plaster St. Darwin propaganda, Darwin supported Ernst Heckel's eugenic and scientific-racist claims as science, lending them the kind of support that only Charles Darwin could give.  Those claims by Haeckel were made in Die Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation) a book which I believe Darwin praised beyond all of the contemporary works of science that he endorsed.  Darwin endorsed, accepted and also promoted, in the Descent of Man, in letters, etc.  the idea Haeckel introduced into the science of natural selection, the explicit claim that the extinction of named human ethnic groups would have a very healthy effect on those "superior" specimens that murdered them.  The kind of thing that most honest scholars of Ernst Haeckel will note marks him as one of the intellectual fathers of what would become, the very year of Haeckel's death, Nazism.  What has led some, such as Stephen Jay Gould to call Haeckel a proto-Nazi.

I suspect Robert Richards found that he couldn't get past Darwin's lavish endorsement of eugenics in Haeckel's work, up to and including what would become typical of Nazi ideology,  so Richards mounted a campaign to erect a phony Ernst Haeckel divorced from his proto-Nazi scientific claims and teachings, one which the Nazis rejected.  It worked so well for the focus of his style of revisionism, Darwin, why couldn't you peddle a de-Nazified Haeckel, as well?   It is one of the most blatantly dishonest things I've seen from recent decades, though it's hardly the only blatantly dishonest thing I've seen coming from men of science and academia who erected the post-war St. Darwin, the conventional allowable point of view within English language academic writing on this topic is chock full of lies that can be seen to be lies if one does that most basic of scholarly activities, reading the primary sources, especially the books and letters of Darwin, Haeckel, Galton, etc.  instead of relying on the frequently lying secondary, tertiary and more often cited sources in this area, the contribution of Darwinism to the Nazi genocides.  You have to go to the original sources as the secondary literature is so often dishonest in this area, especially that published after World War II.  Before the war I have not found any credible (or even less than credible) sources who make those dishonest claims.

One example of that which has been spread is the claim that the Nazis banned Haeckel's books when they were published and republished all through the Nazi period, many of the scientific figures in Nazism and those who had had a scientific education were students of Haeckel or specifically cited Haeckel's work as influencing their thinking.  Considering the number of those in the Nazi scientific establishment who had gone to The University of Jena, a place where Haeckel worked and where his influence and that of Darwinism was probably strongest*, it would be hard for that to not be true.  And Nazi publications published articles praising Ernst Haeckel in the most telling of terms.  Or, as I wrote in an update to a piece on this very topic of Haeckel revisionism flowing from Robert Richards:

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. 

*  It was a short post, for my posts on this topic, so I'll just re-post my piece of September 20, 2017

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 as that disproof is 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.

Update:  Looking at my notes, I forgot one of the most obvious proofs that the Nazis didn't ban Haeckel or his books, in 1939 the Nazi Ministry of Education funded the renovation of the previously somewhat neglected Haeckel Haus, the primary house-museum and archive dedicated to the elevation of Ernst Haeckel as a figure in science and culture.  Its director at the time, Victor Franz, was effusive in his thanks to the Nazi Ministry for reviving the reputation and position of Ernst Haeckel at the time.  

I have seen things claimed on atheist and science blogs online that I don't think came from Robert Richards distortion and outright lies about his guy, Haeckel, but a lot of it obviously originated in his hagiographic biography, A Tragic Sense of Life.  If you want to see the evidence of the proto-Nazi quality of Haeckel's Darwinism, all you have to do is read the books I've cited here, The History of Creation (translated into English by one of Darwin's closest associates, Ray Lankester)  The Riddle of Life (translated by one of the early Brit professional atheists, Joseph McCabe) and many of his other writings most of which are either available in the original German or in accurate English translation by his and Darwin's admirers.   The distortions of Richards' version of Haeckel and, even more so, that current on atheist-sciency blogs, are obvious as are his advocating ideas which the Nazis later took up and put into practice in their genocides.  I've seen some claim that Haeckel was the one to introduce the idea of infanticide of the disabled into mainstream German scientific discourse, it's certainly one of the things which the Nazis practiced, as is Haeckel's advocacy for murdering the disabled of all ages.