Adolf Hitler And The Nazi Party History Essay

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party wholeheartedly believed that by applying a selective breeding scheme encouraged by social Darwinism, that the human genome could be greatly improved - similar to applying this notion towards breeding superior strains of dog and cattle as seen today. Although it is may be difficult to comprehend the true nature to why Hitler formulated and articulated the ideas of racial policies, in which is now commonly referred to as Nazi ideology; it is widely acceptable that Hitler and the Nazi's developed and implemented such doctrines in order to protect what they believed to be 'the superior race'. However, this foolishness resulted in the 'final solution', it justified the genocide of approximately "11 million European Jews" [1] in which the Nazi's judged as 'the inferior race'.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, coined the survival of the fittest was observed and applied to the diversity and complexity of life on earth. However, Hitler crudely manipulated this concept in order to protect and encourage the breeding of the Aryan 'master race' [2] . The Nazi party "...went further, convincing themselves that, as mankind had become the dominant species through strengthening the features that distinguish humans from lesser beings and handing them down to succeeding generations, so it would be possible to enhance the race by deliberately choosing to breed from men and women whose qualities you wanted to see preserved. The corollary was the suppression, by extermination or enslavement, of people whose undesirable characteristics would pollute the mix" [3] . This entailed preventing those perceived as the 'inferior race' from assimilating with those believed as superior or Aryan, gifted above all other races - thus effectively reducing the contamination of their gene pool. The notion was justified as it was seen to be employing 'the laws of nature', as outlined by Hitler in his political autobiography, Mein Kampf or translated to 'My Struggle' in which he stated that through the evolution of life, natural selection favoured the breeding of superior organisms and subsequently races. "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 race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps, hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow" [4] . As such, Hitler who came to power in 1933, by this time he had been undoubtedly convinced that he had found the solution for a better future for the Aryan race as he believed that a person's characteristics, attitudes, abilities, and behaviour were determined by his or her so-called racial makeup" [5] and thus also determined whether or not their loyalties lied with Germany. Therefore by intermingling with those believed to be of inferiority; Hitler and the Nazi's viewed this as the dilution of ideal characteristics and the inconceivable distribution of poisonous genes, with dire consequences to those judged superior. "…he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood. The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:

(a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;

(b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness" [6] .

However, it was not until 1935 that Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, introduced a breeding program to strengthen the Aryan race, a practical political purpose - eugenics, that is, the idea of breeding better humans [7] . Consequently, in order for the survival of the Aryans or that of the Nordic type, characterised as "The man of race is not only the most gifted but also the most beautiful. There stands the slim figure of the man, raised up to a triumphant blend of bone and muscle on a magnificent scale - the broad, powerful shoulders, the wide chest and narrow hips. The woman has. slim, rounded shoulders and broad yet slender, curved hips ... The man's face is hard and chiselled, the woman's tender, with rose-pink skin and bright triumphant eyes - a sovereign race" [8] ; they would need to separate themselves from the inferior but also further repress and govern those individuals who would threaten to infiltrate and corrupt the their innate superiority, 'laws of nature' and the Aryan way of life [9] . This included the sterilisation of the 'genetically diseased'. Ernst Ruedin, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton and Eugene Kahn [10] , respected scientists whom openly advocated the ideals of social Darwinism and ultimately paved the way for the Nazi's to create a new scientific ideal, that of racial purity through Germanic sterilisation laws. This law served as a basis to protect and prevent the Nazi's from what they believed at the time to have genetically diseased offspring or of having inferior genes through the contamination of the pure Germanic bloodline but did not target racial groups, instead 'feebleminded' individuals and those considered a burden to society [11] . "As such, the Nazis believed they were destined to rule a vast empire they called Das Dritte Reich, or the Third Reich Nazi ideology and the Holocaust" [12] .

"The nazis reserved their most vicious hatred and systematic genocidal plans for the Jews" [13] - collectively known as the final solution in which the Jews, along with the death of gypsies, communists, Pols, Slavs, mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, political and religious dissidents [14] were singled out. However, according to the Nazi's, the Jewish were "never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others. His intellect at all times developed through the cultural world surrounding him" [15] . This resulted in concentration camps to rid the land of inferior, impure blood which ultimately set social and economic conditions and the justification of the genocide of the Jews as they were deemed inferior, lacking intellect and culture - "What they do accomplish in the field of art is either patchwork or intellectual theft. Thus, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed" [16] .

The folly of Nazi inhumane actions in the use of social Darwinism and applying the 'laws of nature' upon the Jewish community and cultural ways in Europe almost resulted in the absolute annihilation of a 'race' as Hitler and the Nazi party believed that the Jews were not to exist at all, "...a Jew never thinks of leaving a territory that he has occupied, but remains where he is, and he sits so fast that even by force it is very hard to drive him out. His extension to ever-new countries occurs only in the moment in which certain conditions for his existence are there present, without which...he would not change his residence. He is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him" [17] . This was based upon racial background and primarily concluded that the Jews did not have a religion, that it was null and void, "His life within other peoples can only endure for any length of time if he succeeds in arousing the opinion that he is not a people but a 'religious community,' though of a special sort. And this is the first great lie. In order to carry on his existence as a parasite as in other peoples, he is forced to deny his inner nature. The more intelligent the individual Jew is, the more he will succeed in this deception...Due to his original special nature, the Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form, and hence the belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the conviction of survival after death in some form...the Jewish menace may be considered as broken" [18] . In conjunction, Hitler and the Nazi's further believed that the Jews also lacked characteristics of personal value and of having a cultural community which further evoked "future anti-Semitic measures by unequivocally dividing the nation into 'Aryan' Germans and Jews...were oppressed not for what they believed, but for who they-or their parents-were by birth. As a result, the terms of the law made Jewish identity impossible to deny or alter, representing a fundamental break with the anti-Semitism of the past" [19] . However, the anti-Semitic stance of the Nazi's and Germans can be said to have played a part in causing the genocide of the Jews-hence it can be concluded that through the addition of social Darwinism, that is the mass murder of the weak in the eternal struggle for survival, to such existing attitudes, did it culminate into what is now referred to as the Holocaust. This "contributed to the death of over nine million people in concentration camps, and about 40 million other humans in a war that cost about six trillion dollars. Furthermore, the primary reason that Nazism reached to the extent of the holocaust was the widespread acceptance of Social Darwinism by the scientific and academic community" [20] , [21] . Although the exact moment of the judgment to execute the final solution is not known, it can be speculated that this occurred on 20th January 1942, which involved fifteen high ranking Nazi bureaucrats and SS officers [22] whom through their foolishness in trying to apply the 'laws of nature' against the Jews in Europe, they had effectively the sealed the fate of millions through mass murder and genocide. It can be further concluded that the meeting was to purify the German nation of Jews in what the Nazi's perceived to be of a just and legal manner, the final solution. However, to the contrary, this meant genocide of the European Jews as it was scientifically justified by social Darwinism. "After the SS and police had begun to physically annihilate entire Jewish communities in the east, mass murder became not only conceivable but also achievable in practice-a more 'final' solution than mass expulsion. Murder by shooting in open-air pits was slow, inefficient, and psychologically traumatic for some of the shooters; also, it tended in the long term to awaken genuine unrest in the indigenous populations...the camp staff on occasion killed as many as 10,000 Jews in a single day. The bodies were incinerated in crematoria adjacent to the gas chambers; in the case of a malfunction, the bodies were burned in open fields. Between the establishment of Auschwitz I in 1940 and the evacuation of the complex in January 1945, the SS at Auschwitz killed about one million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war" [23] .

With the end of World War II and the suicide of Adolf Hitler both occurring in 1945 [24] , Europe was left in a state of turmoil and despair. The folly of the Nazi's in applying the 'laws of nature' and using social Darwinism as a means to justify the genocide of European Jews meant that, for the Jews of western society, it would take countless of years in order to begin restoring or even, if possible, to begin recovering from. "Indeed, what was destroyed during the 12 years of Nazi rule-human life, culture, history, community, and collective memory-could be never be rebuilt or repaired" [25] .

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Hitler viewed himself as the saviour of mankind that by applying social Darwinism and the 'laws of nature' upon the genetically inferior beings, he and many others of the Nazi party regarded themselves as modern, scientific socialists, advocators of human life. "By breeding a superior race, the world would look upon him as the man who pulled humanity up to a higher level of evolutionary development" [26] . However, the Nazi's attempts in doing so, resulted in the 'final solution' and the genocide of European Jews, in which they suffered grievously as a result of the foolish acts portrayed by those that believed in the Nazi ideology and benefactors of social Darwinism. "The culmination of this darker side of eugenics was, of course, Adolf Hitler's attempt to produce a "'master race' by encouraging mating between pure 'Aryans'" and by the murder of six million people whom he claimed to have inferior genes...Hitler was certainly obsessed with the idea. So, in terms of its consequences, this must qualify as one of the greatest scientific blunders of all time" [27] , [28] .