Abstract
I do not know how many times I have heard colleagues and friends ask if the title of my book is an oxymoron. How could a mass murderer like Hitler have had any ethic? Yet, surprisingly, the fanaticism that motivated him to pursue mass killing—and many other policies—stemmed at least in part from his sincerely held (but pernicious) conviction that killing people he deemed inferior would serve a higher moral purpose: advancing the human species in the evolutionary process. This kind of evolutionary ethics was central to Hitler’s ideology and practice, because ultimately Hitler measured every policy by its effect on biological improvement. Various Nazi leaders, such as Rudolf Hess and Hans Schemm, agreed with the geneticist Fritz Lenz that Nazism was “applied biology.”1
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Notes
Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 62
Phillip T. Rutherford, Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007)
Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)
John Connelly, “Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice,” Central European History 32 (1999): 1–33.
Hitler, briefing of military leaders on May 23, 1939, in Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 1932–1945, ed. Max Domarus, 4 vols. (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1990), 3: 1618–1619.
Uwe Mai, “Rasse und Raum”: Agrarpolitik, Sozial-und Raumplanung im NS-Staat (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002), 108.
Gilmer Blackburn, Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 21–22
Gerhard Trommer, “Bezüge des NS-Lebenskunde zur Ökologie,” in Medizin, Naturwissenschaft, Technik und Nationalsozialismus: Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten, ed. Christoph Meinel and Peter Voswinckel (Stuttgart: Verlag für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft und der Technik, 1994), 144.
Andreas Frewer, Medizin und Moral in Weimarer Republik und Nationalsozialismus: Die Zeitschrift “Ethik” unter Emil Abderhalden (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2000).
Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Ulf Schmidt, Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany: The History of the Medical Research and Teaching Films of the Reich Office for Educational Films/Reich Institute for Films in Science and Education, 1933–1945 (Husum: Matthiesen Verlag, 2002), 51
Recently Eric Ehrenreich has argued forcefully for this position in “Otmar von Verschuer and the’ scientific’ Legitimization of Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, 1 (2007): 55–72
Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
Benno Müller-Hill, “Reflections of a German Scientist,” in Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004)
Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany, 1933–1945, trans. George R. Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
“Rasse und Vererbung als Beruf: Die Hauptforschungsrichtungen am Kaiser-Wilhlem-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik im Nationalsozialismus,” in Rassenforschung an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten vor und nach 1933, ed. Hans-Walter Schmuhl (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003), 190.
Many recent works on Nazi eugenics and anthropology detail this cooperation. One especially good recent work is Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen: Das Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik 1927–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005)
Gretchen E. Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
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© 2009 Richard Weikart
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Weikart, R. (2009). Conclusion. In: Hitler’s Ethic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623989_11
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