D. James Kennedy, religious wingnut extraordinaire, would have you believe that Hitler followed an ideological version of Darwin's theory to an evil end. In fact, his ministry is planning a documentary called
Darwin's Deadly Legacy. But is this claim truly supported by facts, or were there other influences to Hitler's schemes?
To find this out,
Cygnus X-1 delved deep into the depths of
Mein Kampf. He used the Ralph Manheim translation (1998, Houghton Mifflin Co, ISBN: 0-395-92503-7) which is currently available in many bookstores.
The following is mostly copied (with permission) from his Talk.Origins posting. I modified it where I felt fit (sorry, no coultergeisting from me):
Hitler believed he was doing God's work:
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. [pg 65]
In fact he used many religious comparisons throughout the text:
Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than than a great man be 'discovered' by an election. [pg 88]
Verily a man cannot serve two masters. And I consider the foundation or destruction of a religion far greater than the foundation or destruction of a state, let alone a party. [pg 114]
Certainly we don't have to discuss these matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of the cultural perfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord's image. [pg 178]
Anyone who dares lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise. [pg 383]
He admired Christianity:
The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiation for compromise with and similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but it its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine. [pg 351]
And the adherence to dogma over science:
Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Through its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas. It has recognized quite correctly that its power of resistance does not lie in its lesser or greater adaptation to the scientific findings of the moment, which in reality are always fluctuating, but rather in rigidly holding to dogmas once established, for it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body of the character of a faith. And so today it stands more firmly than ever. It can be prophesied that in exactly the same measure in which appearance evade us, it will gain more and more blind support as a static pole amid the flight of appearances. [pg 459]
Faith harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all time consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. [pp 337-338]
He didn't like the notion of being compared to apes, using the same argument currently employed by some modern creationists:
A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not some monstrosities halfway between man and ape. [pg 402]
Here it almost looks like he's describing the Theory of Evolution:
Nature herself in times of great poverty or bad climatic conditions, as well as poor harvest, intervenes to restrict the increase of population of certain countries or races; this, to be sure, by a method as wise as it is ruthless. She diminishes, not the power of procreation as such, but the conservation of the procreated, by exposing them to hard trials and deprivation with the result that all those who are less strong and less healthy are forced back into the womb of the eternal unknown. those whom she permits to survive the inclemency of existence are a thousandfold tested, hardened, and well adapted to procreate in turn, in order that the process of thoroughgoing selection may begin again from the beginning. By thus brutally proceeding against the individual and immediately calling him back to herself as soon as he shows himself unequal to the storm of life, she keeps the race and species strong, in fact, raises them to the highest accomplishments. [pp 131-134]
But then there's this:
No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower races, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow. [pg 286]
He suggests that higher breeding is a goal of nature; isn't that one of the claims of Intelligent Design?
This is consistent with:
And in this it must remain aware that we, as guardians of the highest humanity on this earth, are bound by the highest obligation, and the more it strives to bring the German people to racial awareness so that, in addition to breeding dogs, horses, and cats, they will have mercy on their own blood, the more it will be able to meet this obligation. [pg 646]
Hitler compares his program of racial purification not to Darwin, but to animal breeding, which predates Darwin by at least thousands of years.
In the 700 pages of Hitler's ramblings, Cygnus X-1 didn't find a single mention of Darwin. Surprised? The unfortunate viewers of Darwin's Deadly Legacy would be.