The Holocaust Before the Holocaust

Some logical conclusions of evolution have had truly devastating results. Undoubtedly the most well-known is the Jewish Holocaust, the “final solution” carried out in Nazi Germany during WW II.

Although many have not made the connection, Hitler had outlined his conclusion that Social Darwinism was the basis for a “successful Germany” by as early as 1925, in Chapter 4 of his (in)famous book Mein Kampf.

The whole idea that a struggle for existence between the various races of man was at work and that the fairer “Aryan race” was the pinnacle of evolution was the intellectual scaffolding on which his entire ideology hung.

Having read large portions of his work, I can confirm that Hitler was a fanatical Darwinist. All manner of Nazi literature and records of their communications has confirmed as much many times over. Researcher Robert Clark concluded that Adolf Hitler:

was captivated by evolutionary teaching—probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas—quite undisguised—lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf —and in his public speeches. . . . Hitler reasoned . . . that a higher race would always conquer a lower.1

So, the systematic destruction of millions of Jews was in essence simply survival of the fittest in action. Eliminating Jews and others including dark-skinned and other “lesser” people was not considered murder by the Nazis. Those “lesser” people were deemed less human and unworthy of life, justifiably removed from the competition among the higher races.

Genocide in Namibia

What many people aren’t aware of is that Germany had already conducted a live test run of the genocide some 50 years earlier, all based on the same materialistic philosophy, in the African country of Namibia.

Although well documented, this holocaust before the Holocaust is rarely linked to Nazi-ism and its connected ideology—scientific racism.

The brute facts are that more than 80% of the Herero population and 50% of the Nama population of Namibia were killed by German soldiers between 1904 and 1908, but their persecution began much earlier in 1884 when Germany invaded the territory and founded the German South West Africa colony.2

The Herero genocide was a systematic campaign of racial extermination that included the use of concentration camps and medical experimentation and is considered the first genocide of the 20th century.

The details of the campaign are truly horrific. Surviving female prisoners were enslaved and forced to boil down their fellow tribespeople’s decapitated skulls (some of whom were family friends) and preparing them for so-called “scientific study” back in German universities and museums. Such study involved testing skull and brain size to determine their evolutionary status

Thousands of these enslaved women were also victims of sexual violence inflicted by German soldiers, and Dr. Eugene Fischer (the ghoulish German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics, later a member of the Nazi Party who served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics), conducted medical experiments on many of the children born from these rapes.

His conclusions aren’t surprising. Such bi-racial children were deemed “inferior” (although they were superior to their Herrero mothers because of their German father’s genetic contribution).

Fischer later taught his racist theories to many Nazi doctors, and one of his students was none other than Joseph Mengele, later to be known as the Angel of Death. Fischer’s research inspired many, including Adolf Hitler and Mengele, who was responsible for the many horrifying medical experiments and butchery done to innocents in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.

A Restructured Understanding of Humanity

The question that needs to be asked is this: Why did a country that had earlier on in the century sent missionaries to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with Africans suddenly decide that Africans were subhumans worthy of extermination?

A clear answer comes from Jon Bridgeman, an American historian (professor emeritus of the University of Washington), who’s in-depth examination of the Herero genocide reveals the following:

The average German looks down upon the natives as being about on the same level as the higher primates (baboon being their favorite term for the natives) and treats them like animals.3

Again, we see the conceptual links—"same level,” “the higher primates,” “baboon,” “animals”—that we see from the era of freak shows. The Namibian invasion took place only 14 short years after the release of Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man, in which Darwin claimed

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races.4

German intelligentsia had embraced Darwin’s work immediately and had quickly taken its implications and suggestions and extrapolated them to their furthest: Man is the result of natural processes. God does not exist. The only law is nature’s law—survival of the fittest. Since German leaders considered themselves the most fit, they decided to put these principles into practice accordingly.

The link to Darwin’s teaching in the Namibian massacre is even more direct, however, in the words of the German General Lothar van Trotha, who was sent in 1904 to oversee this genocide. His stated strategy was as follows:

At the outset, we cannot do without the natives [i.e., for hard labor]. But they finally have to melt away. Where the climate allows the white man to work, philanthropic views cannot banish Darwin’s law “survival of the fittest.”5

Belief in Darwin’s missing links led directly to belief in Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest, which states that the strong eliminate the weak or less worthy of life.

Such direct connections can be further seen in later Nazi propaganda films that were used to seed the minds of the German population against the “less-human” status of the Jewish population. Search “Smoking Gun Proof Nazi’s Were Evolutionists" on YouTube, and you’ll find an example of such propaganda, called Victims of the Past, which says,

All weak living things will perish in nature. In the last few decades, mankind has sinned frightfully against the law of natural selection. We haven’t just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply!”

Natural Selection: A License to Kill?

The term natural selection had only appeared in 1859, attributed to Darwin. Yet in just a short time, many groups were coming to very specific conclusions to how this process should be directly applied to human populations under evolutionary assumptions.

Remember the 1914 US textbook we quoted from previously (Civic Biology)? Here are brief snippets of its writer’s conclusions, the same conclusions which drove the eugenics movement:

• Evolution of Man: Undoubtedly there once lived upon the earth races of men who were much lower in their mental organization than the present inhabitants. . . . The beginnings of civilization were long ago, but even to-day the earth is not entirely civilized.
• The Races of Man: At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man . . . the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.
• Improvement of Man: If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.
• Eugenics: When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. . . . Feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.
• Parasitism and Its Cost to Society: Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. . . . They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
• The Remedy: If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.6

“If such people were lower animals” is a key phrase here. It’s what unlocked the genie of genocide that has caused untold misery and death around the world. All someone has to do in order to scientifically, intellectually ,and ethically justify murder is to dehumanize a person to the status of a lower animal, and anything goes. Under that mindset, you can justify enslavement, rape, torture, and extermination of whatever target group you deem unworthy of life.

Just ask the abortionists, the serial killers of the day, who operate with impunity because of the declassification of millions of innocent babies as not being truly human. And just like the story of evolution itself, it perseveres with absolutely no real scientific justification whatsoever.

Next Week, Part 5: The Search for Scientific Evidence