Ernst Haeckel
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| Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919) |
Ernst Haeckel, a biologist who had visited Charles Darwin
and Thomas Huxley in 1866, first introduced their work to a wide German
audience. Haeckel can, along with Darwin and Galton, be considered one of the
founders of ‘scientific racism’. He considered that “the Caucasian, or
Mediterranean man, has from time immemorial been placed at the head of all the
races of men, as the most highly developed and perfect.” Haeckel taught at the University of Jena for forty-seven years from 1862 to
1909 and during this time he worked ceaselessly to propagate both the theory of
evolution and the racial ideology which had become almost inseparable from it.
One of his lasting legacies was a series of drawings of embryos from different
species which purported to demonstrate their gradual evolution. His drawings
are no longer considered as being of any scientific value; indeed they are
widely considered to have been deliberately doctored, even faked, in order to prove
his pre-existing theories. The most influential of Haeckel’s forty-two
published works was The History of
Creation (1868) in which he set out the theory of evolution for his German
audience with his own reflections on the development of the human race. Typical
of his views are his statements that inhabitants of southern Africa are ‘more
like apes’ than any other race of human beings and that ‘no woolly-haired
nation has ever had an important “history”’.[1] Haeckel
shared Charles Darwin’s view that the ‘lower races’ were doomed to extinction. [2] There
would soon be those in Germany
who would attempt to accelerate this supposed evolutionary process.
Alfred Ploetz
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| Alfred Ploetz (1860 - 1940) |
One of the most poisonous fruits of Haeckel’s legacy was the
Freie wissenschaftliche Vereinigung (free
scientific union) a radical group who studied and discussed the writings of
both Haeckel and Darwin. They wanted to found an ideal society on a pacific
island and organise it along eugenic principles. A leading member was Alfred
Ploetz who coined the term Rassenhygiene,
literally ‘Racial Hygiene’, which has essentially the same meaning as the word
‘eugenics’. In 1895 he published Outline
of Racial Hygiene and followed
this with The Efficiency of our Race and the Protection of the Weak in
which he advocated large scale abortion, infanticide and the rigorous control
of human reproduction by the state. In 1904 he founded the journal Archive for Racial and Social Biology and
in 1905 the German Society for Racial Hygiene. He was praised by the Nazi eugenicist Ernst Rudin as a man who ‘by
his meritorious services has helped to set up our Nazi ideology’. Like many
other supporters of brutal population control policies, such as Nelson Mandela and
Barack Obama, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He received this award in
1936, the year after the notorious Nuremberg Laws were instituted. Early in his
career he was considered pro-Jewish and praised the intellectual abilities of
the Jews; he was later to bring his views into line with those of the Nazi
regime.
Eugen Fischer
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| Eugen Fischer (1874 - 1967) |
Eugen Fischer was one of the leading figures of the early
German eugenic and Darwinist movement. In 1908 Fischer conducted a research
project on people of mixed-race in German South West Africa
and concluded that intermarriage between races should be forbidden. On his
return to Germany he founded
the Society for Eugenics in Freiburg. Throughout
this period he worked closely with Charles Davenport and the International
Federation of Eugenics Organisations. In 1927 he became head of the Kaiser
Wilhem Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, which position
he held until 1942. In 1933, the year Hitler rose to power, he was appointed
Rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin and later joined the Nazi party. He was an enthusiastic advocate of
sterilisation and birth control and was responsible for the forced
sterilisation of mixed race children in the Rhineland
(the children of European women and African soldiers in the occupying French
army). After the Second World War, his career continued seemingly unblemished
by his cooperation with the Nazi regime. He was one of the many beneficiaries
(along with International Planned Parenthood) of the policy
of turning a blind eye to those implicated in Nazi eugenics, in order to aid
German recovery. He was made an honorary member of the German Anthropological
Society in 1952.
Ernst Rudin
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| Ernst Rudin (1874 - 1952) |
Ernst Rudin was
introduced to Darwinism and the ideology of eugenics by his brother-in-law
Alfred Ploetz. He began his career by studying the genetic origins of mental
illnesses. From 1917 – 1945 he was Director of the Genealogical-Demographic Department at the German
Institute for Psychiatric Research in Munich.
He was also to be become the head of the Max Planck Institute for Brain
Research and the German Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1933, shortly after
Hitler seized power, Rudin, along with other leading eugenicists sat on the Expert
Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy which advised
Hitler on matters relating to eugenics. Rudin authored the official commentary on the ‘Law
for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring.’ He was arrested in
1945 but was released swiftly.
These
brief portraits should be enough to make clear that the Nazi programme of
genocide, euthanasia and sterilisation was not the isolated work of a rogue
regime but was simply, at that date, the most bloodthirsty of attempts to
implement the eugenic ideology that had been growing in strength for nearly a
century. After the Second World War the advocates of eugenics regrouped and
found new ways of propagating and implementing their ideology. Abortion has
proved to be the simplest way of securing ‘racial hygiene’, for example, around 90% of
infants diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome are now killed in the womb.
We are
all called to do our part in the struggle for human life and dignity in the
face of the almost overwhelming power of the eugenics movement.
Help
defeat eugenics today:
- Join SPUC
- Learn how you can take part in our campaigns
- Learn more about eugenics
- Join SPUC
- Learn how you can take part in our campaigns
- Learn more about eugenics
[1] Ernst
Haeckel, The History of Creation: Volume
II (1880 ed., New York),
p307
[2] In The Descent of Man Darwin had written “Civilized
races of man will almost certainly exterminate the savage races throughout the
world ... The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for
it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even
than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the
negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
