How Could This Happen

by Dan McMillan

  In the early 1920s, students’ political activity at German universities was completely dominated by the Deutscher Hochschulring, a militantly anti-Semitic organization. Within this organization, the leading anti-Semites explicitly rejected the idea that only cultural differences separated Jews from Gentiles. Rather, Germans and Jews were biologically distinct “races,” they said, and only radical measures could solve the “Jewish problem.” Every member of the Hochschulring had to declare that he had no Jewish parents or grandparents. Student-organized social life also took on an explicitly anti-Semitic tone. Roughly 60 percent of German students belonged to fraternities, and by 1930 almost no fraternities accepted Jews as members.24

  After 1926, the student organization of the Nazi Party increasingly replaced the Hochschulring at German universities. By the time Hitler took power in 1933, this Nazi association had become the dominant student organization at German institutions of higher learning. Of all occupational groups in German society, only university students belonged in their majority to a Nazi organization. Thousands of them would carry their militant anti-Semitism into careers in the Nazi Party and German government and into the planning offices and shooting squads of the extermination program. The rest would serve the government as it carried out the murders, and look the other way.25

  To understand the role anti-Semitism played in the Holocaust, one must recognize that there were many different anti-Semitisms in Germany and in Europe as a whole, each playing a different part in this tragedy. At the center of the murder program stood a hard core of Nazi fanatics, perhaps only a few thousand men, who shared Adolf Hitler’s belief that the Jews constituted the greatest threat to Germany’s survival. Tens of thousands of rank-and-file Nazi Party activists displayed another strain of anti-Semitism, expressed less in racial theories than in recurring violence against their Jewish neighbors, whose lives they made miserable at every opportunity. More widespread, and ultimately more dangerous than the fury of rioting Nazi thugs, was the anti-Semitism of much of Germany’s elite, a group raised across three generations since the 1890s to blame Jews for Marxism, and sharing the enthusiasm of educated men nearly everywhere for “scientific” theories about racial difference. In Eastern Europe and on the territory of the Soviet Union, a widespread and ferociously violent anti-Semitism supplied the Germans with tens of thousands of volunteers who helped to identify and capture Jews and carry out the murders.

  The anti-Semitism of most Germans—those who belonged neither to the Nazi Party nor to the country’s elite—was surely much milder than the violent hatred seen in Poland or Ukraine, or among Nazi Party activists. For most Germans, anti-Semitism may have gone no further than the belief that German Jews were not really German. Even such muted prejudice was enough to let Germans react with indifference as their Jewish neighbors were persecuted in the 1930s, and murdered in the 1940s. However, this brand of anti-Semitism did not cause the Holocaust, or provide a major motive for the murder program. The Holocaust did not happen because the German people rose up and demanded it, but rather because a wildly popular dictator and his fanatical followers planned it, because the country’s elite shared enough of Nazi anti-Semitism to participate in the killing, and because the rest of the country looked the other way.26

  The political conflicts that produced Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the somewhat less extreme anti-Semitism of Germany’s elites tell only part of this story. For the Holocaust to happen, it was not enough that these men blamed Jews for the rise of socialism and communism. Also necessary was that they believed that the Jewish people constituted a race that was biologically distinct from the rest of all humanity and genetically predisposed to behave destructively. This way of seeing the Jews could only have happened in the twentieth century, the high-water mark of racist thinking in world history. At that fateful juncture, racism became much more than a social prejudice. It became a widely accepted scientific theory, commanding the unquestioning support that people of that era granted to anything they called “science.”

  CHAPTER 10

  HATRED AS SCIENCE

  In general, the brain is larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races.

  —Anthropologist Paul Broca in 18611

  Today the word “racism” means dislike for people whose skin is colored differently from ours, usually paired with the suspicion that they are not as intelligent or morally upright as we are. Yet during the years between about 1890 and 1960, and especially in the 1930s and 1940s, racism meant a great deal more. During those years most educated people in Europe and North America believed that racial differences in intelligence and morality were proven scientific fact. Today racism is seen as the kneejerk reflex of the uneducated and socially marginal, of “losers.” In Hitler’s day it was instead a conviction shared by most of society’s leaders, and by millions of people who ranked below them.

  Sometimes, but hardly always, racist belief flowed from some understanding of genetics, of the way that people can inherit physical and mental traits from their parents. Racism usually contained the notion that different races, different nationalities, and also specific classes of society, were born to behave in certain ways. Not only were people of African or Asian descent assumed to naturally act differently from white people, but even different white nationalities—Scotch, Swedes, Greeks, or Poles—were described as having different inborn traits. The poorer classes of every society were also said to have been born with inferior moral and intellectual qualities that kept them at the bottom of the social ladder.2

  Throughout history and also today, inequality has marked the human condition and the powerful have abused their power. Some countries are militarily stronger than others, the wealthy often monopolize the political process, and infants enter the world with drastically unequal life chances. The Western racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not by itself widen inequality or worsen abuses of power, but it gave the actions of social elites and mighty nations some new and dangerous qualities. Men who started wars, persecuted minorities, or murdered civilians gained a new confidence in the rightness of their actions. Their deeds, no matter how violent, now escaped moral condemnation, because their actions supposedly reflected “the laws of nature,” and the natural world, the animal kingdom, knows no morality. Because the new racism enjoyed the tremendous prestige of scientific certainty, it was intellectually respectable. Finally, most human beings were now thought to be prisoners of their heredity, born to act the way they did, unable to change their own behavior even if they wanted to. No amount of education or political pressure could improve a race or nationality; if the behavior of a particular group was considered harmful, its members might therefore have to be eliminated.

  Modern racism had several different intellectual sources, and only with difficulty could one say which of these was most important. However, in this chapter I will focus on the “scientific” strand of racism, which drew its inspiration from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. Several factors dictate this emphasis on Darwinian racism. First, Darwinist racism explicitly motivated Hitler and many other leading perpetrators of the Holocaust. Second, Darwin inspired the researchers, most notably in biology and anthropology, who gave racism its aura of scientific certainty. Third, Darwinian thought may well have been more popular in Germany than anywhere else during these years, in part because Germany was the world’s leading center of biological research before World War I and the Germans were exceptionally literate. Finally, Darwinist racism was the brand of racism most easily understood by the widest number of people, in part because Darwin’s theory was astonishingly simple and easy to explain.3

  When he published On the Origin of Species in November 1859, the English biologist Charles Darwin set the intellectual world on fire. Within the covers of a single book, he convincingly explained the development of every life form on earth, including humankind. Fo
r many readers, he also completely discredited the biblical account of the Earth’s creation and human origins. Darwin persuasively argued that human beings did not descend from a single pair created in God’s image (Adam and Eve), but instead gradually evolved in a process that might have taken millions of years, from lower life forms to apes, then from primitive apes to those of greater intelligence, and finally from intelligent apes to human beings. In so doing, Darwin dealt a devastating blow to the Christian churches, a blow from which—at least in Western Europe—they never recovered. Especially among the educated classes of Western society, Darwin’s theory spread like wildfire from the moment of its publication, not so much through sales of his fairly demanding book as through the works of countless popularizers, who quickly reduced his thinking to a few basic formulas. They could do this easily, and Darwin’s ideas could sweep all before them, because the gist of his theory was remarkably simple and could be summarized in only a few pages.

  Darwin explained that all living beings struggled constantly against each other for survival. Creatures blessed with useful abilities survived more often than did less gifted organisms, and passed their superior abilities on to their offspring. Across many generations of a species, physical or mental traits that enabled survival would therefore become more widespread and more pronounced. The “fit” (capable) members of the species would live longer and produce more offspring, whereas the unfit members would perish earlier and produce fewer offspring. In this way, lower life forms evolved into higher life forms, and weaknesses were weeded out of the population. Darwin called this process “evolution through natural selection,” meaning that the challenge of surviving in nature selected those members of a species who were fit to survive, and thereby improved the species over time. This “survival of the fittest” made the violent struggle for life in the wild something to praise, rather than deplore, because it was a means for a species to progress. Most important, natural selection—rather than God—had given birth to man.4

  According to Darwin’s theory, millions of years of evolution through natural selection had let lower animals evolve into apes, seen as the most intelligent of creatures in the animal kingdom. Over time, apes with larger brains and greater intelligence had then crowded out the less gifted members of their species, who became extinct. Across thousands of generations, apes had become more and more intelligent and had acquired certain useful physical traits, such as hands with opposable thumbs, for grasping tools, and the ability to walk on two legs. This process produced early, primitive versions of the human being, and further evolution through natural selection ultimately culminated in the arrival of the modern humans of Darwin’s era. The impact of these ideas on millions of readers must have been nothing short of exhilarating. Where did human beings come from? And was everything in the Bible, word for word, literal truth? What questions could have been more important to people of that time, indeed, of any time? Suddenly anyone with a primary school education could feel able to answer these enormous questions after reading nothing more than a short pamphlet written at the level of a children’s book.

  As Darwin’s theory gained widespread acceptance, thinkers of every stripe began to find lessons in it for understanding the politics and society of their time, using Darwinian thought to support their own agendas. This so-called Social Darwinism ran in many different political directions. The right-wing branch of Social Darwinism—which was not necessarily the most popular strand of it—promoted racism, justified social and political inequality, and glorified war. It also inspired Adolf Hitler and his ardent supporters to launch a world war and exterminate the Jews of Europe.5

  Right-wing Social Darwinism produced several ideas that were attractive and convenient to the ruling classes of Europe and North America, and especially to Germany’s warlike and antidemocratic elites. The most important idea may have been “struggle,” the notion that all relations between individuals and between nations were defined by a merciless battle for survival. Struggle followed inevitably from the laws of nature as discovered by Darwin, and therefore had no moral significance. The Christian injunctions to “love your neighbor” and “love your enemies” had no place in the animal kingdom; neither should they control the behavior of human beings, who were not made in the image of God, but rather counted as nothing more than an especially clever type of animal.6

  From these assumptions about struggle followed the argument that extreme social inequality was natural and permanent. The poor were poor because they were less fit than the rich. Charity for the poor blocked humanity from evolving to a higher plane, because it kept unfit members of society alive, allowing them to reproduce and pollute the gene pool with their inferior intelligence and moral weaknesses. The belief in permanent struggle also supported a bias toward violence between nations, a glorification of warfare. “Superior” peoples had every right to conquer, exploit, and even exterminate “inferior” ones. If such aggression let superior peoples expand and become more numerous, the entire human race would improve in the long run; the extinction of lesser races was a cause for celebration rather than pity. In international relations, might made right: by winning a war, the victor showed that he deserved his victory, because his people were more fit to survive than were the losers.7

  This brand of Social Darwinism fostered a racism that was all the more dangerous because it claimed a basis in scientific fact. Partly inspired by Darwin’s own writings, countless writers and politicians argued that each human population, each race or nation, had evolved from the first humans at its own pace, so that some had progressed further than others. Probably almost all educated people in Europe and North America ranked white people of European descent at the top of the evolutionary ladder, with those of African descent on the bottom rung. Perhaps for this reason, racist caricatures of the time typically represented black people with apelike features. The writers of popularized science, and many biologists and anthropologists, carefully ranked races and nationalities from lowest to highest in value, whites always at the top, and among white people in numerous gradations. American elites generally agreed that among people of European descent, those who had emigrated to the United States from Northern and Western Europe—English, Germans, Scandinavians, and others—were born with the highest intelligence, the strongest work ethic, and the best of other moral qualities. In contrast, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe—Poles, Greeks, Italians, Russian Jews, and so on—were said to be markedly inferior, and indeed a potential threat to the country’s “racial health.” Alarmed by this imagined threat, the US Congress enacted an immigration law in 1924 that closed America’s borders to all but a limited number of immigrants from the “wrong” parts of Europe. Earlier laws had almost completely eliminated immigration from China and Japan, whose people, not even being white, were wholly unwanted.8

  Such racist thinking also applied to individuals and social classes within each Western country. Following the common belief that a larger brain meant a higher intelligence, anthropologist Paul Broca wrote in 1861 that, “in general, the brain is larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races.” Similarly, the American paleontologist E. D. Cope identified four groups of lower-quality human beings: women, non-whites, Jews, and “all lower classes of superior races.” The German Ernst Haeckel made the influential argument that each person went through the stages of human evolution over the course of his lifetime, and that many people got, in effect, stuck at some level below the highest point. For each individual, one could pinpoint exactly how far he had managed to evolve from the apes. The Italian physician and pioneer of criminology Cesare Lombroso took this idea forward, blaming crime on the failure of individuals to complete their development. As he succinctly put it: “Criminals are apes in our midst.” Consequently, Lombroso thought, some criminals were “born for evil” and could not be reformed. Because their depravity “shows us the inefficiency of p
unishment for born criminals,” he concluded, there was no choice but to “eliminate them completely, even by death.”9

  Without meaning to, Lombroso had put his finger on what made modern racism so dangerous: it encouraged violent solutions to political and social problems. “Scientific” racism made it easy to demonize any foreign enemy or rebellious social underclass, to say that “these people are not made the way we are, they are less than human.” And since such “inferior” people were born to act dangerously and could not change their behavior even if they wanted to, one could justifiably eliminate them using violent means, a violence legitimized by the Darwinian glorification of struggle.