Page 61 - The Disasters Darwinism Brought To Humanity

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T T H E T E R R I B L E A L L I A N C E B E T W E E N D A R W I N A N D F A S C I S M 61
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American Scientist in this way:
… [Haeckel] argued that Darwin was correct … humankind had unques-
tionably evolved from the animal kingdom. Thus, and here the fatal step
was taken in Haeckel's first major exposition of Darwinism in Germany,
humankind's social and political existence is governed by the laws of evolu-
tion, natural selection, and biology, as clearly shown by Darwin. To argue
otherwise was backward superstition. 48
Haeckel died in 1919. But his ideas were inherited by the Nazis.
Shortly after Hitler came to power an official eugenics programme was
initiated. Hitler summed up the new policy in these sentences:
In the popular state, the education of the mind and the body will play an
important role, but human selection is just as important. …The state has the
responsibility of declaring as unfit for reproductive purposes anyone who is
obviously ill or genetically unsound. … and must carry through with this
responsibility ruthlessly without respect to understanding or lack of
understanding on the part of anyone. …Stopping reproduction of the
bodily degenerate or psychically ill for a period of only 600 years would
lead …to an improvement in human health which can hardly be envis-
aged today. If the fertility of the healthiest members of the race were real-
ized and planned the result would be a race which … would have lost the
Elderly and
sick people
killed under
Hitler's
policy of
eugenics.