Hitler’s racial ideology hinged upon the notion that human beings do not comprise a single composite species but are made up of a number of ‘races’ or ‘subspecies’. This Hitlerian worldview has somehow been morphed into a principle accusation made by Christian fundamentalists toward Darwin, i.e., claiming that Darwin was inherently racist and used science to portray human beings as split into ‘subspecies’ according to a hierarchy. He did no such thing. Indeed, Darwin refuted this view on a number of occasions during his career and dedicated a whole chapter of ‘The Descent of Man’ to demonstrating his doubt and contempt for such ideas. Polygenist views can be traced back to ancient times in several cultures, but for Hitler it was the work of Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) a Frenchman born into a family of minor nobility that struck the major chord. Obsessed with heredity and bloodlines, and claiming to have descended from Norman and Viking royalty, Gobineau somehow managed to conjure up a personal philosophy comprised of a mixture of pseudoscience, Catholic values, anti-democratic views, French aristocratic sentiment and German romanticism. Written several years before Darwin’s findings suggested that all humans, regardless of their ‘race’, have a common evolutionary origin, his highly influential lengthy essay ‘Essai Sur l’inégalité des Races Humaines’ (‘Inequality of Human Races’) was first published in French in 1853. It was translated into German in 1897 by Ludwig Schemann, a leading proponent of Nazi theory. Two quotes from the work encapsulate Gobineau's racial views:

“It is said that Genesis does not admit of a multiple origin for our species..........we must, of course, acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor of the white race. The scriptures are evidently meant to be so understood, for the generations deriving from him are certainly white..........there is nothing to show that, in the view of the first compilers of the Adamite genealogies, those outside the white race were counted as part of the species at all”.

“I conclude......... that the permanence of racial types is beyond dispute; it is so strong and indestructible that the most complete change of environment has no power to overthrow it.”

The first quote is pure Christian-based polygenism which would later become completely at odds with Darwin's views, as discussed in more detail later. The second quote would later become completely at odds with the notion of natural selection. Hitler extended Gobineau’s un-Darwinian thoughts in Mein Kampf:

“Marriage is an institution called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape." 

In April 1933 all government employees in Germany were required to show evidence that they had no Jewish blood. Two years later, in 1935, Hitler signed miscegenation statutes into law in both the ‘Nürnberger Gesetze‘ (Nuremburg Laws), which made all sexual relations, including marriage, between Aryans and Jews illegal, and ‘Gesetz zum Schutze des Deutschen Blutes und der Deutschen Ehre’ (The Protection of German Blood and German Honour Act) which applied similarly to other races where at least one of the partners was a German citizen. Those already in such a marriage suffered legal discrimination by being excluded from government employment or government funded organisations. Until 1874 births in Germany were not registered by the state but by religious authorities. This meant that these laws could not be enacted effectively without the cooperation of the churches. In the case of both the Lutheran and Catholics this was given without dissent. The first law explicitly considered Jews as a distinct racial group, rather than in any religious sense. Having a single Jewish grandparent classified an individual as Jewish, regardless of the religion they had been raised with, or whether they practiced any religion at all. Jews who had converted to Christianity were not exempted and, again, the churches provided the Nazis with baptismal records.

Because it was not based on anything resembling sound science, the policy was problematic from the outset. The prominent race theorist and adviser to the Nazi Party, Hans Gunther, had commissioned a report from Felix Jentzsch in April 1936, 'How Does One Best Research the Magnitude and Type of German-Jewish Mixing (Bastardization)?' which estimated that there were about 500,000 Germans who, although would not meet any criteria for being full-blood Jews, would nevertheless be at least partly genetically Jewish (see e.g., Ehrenreich, 2007). Other anthropologists cautioned that discriminating Jewishness on the basis of physical features alone was unscientific. This was not news to Nazi Party officials. In 1933, when Genealogical Authority director Achim Gercke was asked by Hitler's deputy Rudolph Hesse how prospective racial assessments would be made, Gercke made it plain that racial assessments did not rely on standardised methodology and therefore had no scientific or medical basis. This, however, did not faze him:

“God created the races.....entrusted us to improve and pass on.”

He suggested a purely genealogical criteria; a Jew was someone who could be ascertained to have one sixteenth Jewish blood. He was unable to implement his idea, however, as he was sacked in 1935 after allegations of homosexuality. It was inevitable that the religious notion of ‘racial purity’, as opposed to a cultural definition of Jewishness, was later to backfire on the Nazis. That same year, Emil Maurice, one of the founders of the SS, was discovered to have had Jewish ancestry but, after personal intervention from Hitler, was declared to be ‘Ehrenarier‘ or 'honorary Aryan'. Similarly, the Luftwaffe officer in charge of procurement, Erhard Milch, was found to have a Jewish father and was given Aryan status only after his mother signed an affadavit naming another man as the real father. The most embarrassing episode of this type, however, involved a six-month old girl. In 1935 the Nazi Party's family magazine 'Sonne ins Hause' ('Sun in the Home') announced a competition to find the most beautiful Aryan baby, judged by no less than the Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. In an attempt to poke fun at the Nazi Party's racial policies, photographer Hans Ballin entered a photograph of Hetty, born to Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, a Jewish couple who had immigrated to Germany from Lithuania seven years earlier to pursue careers in classical music, They had lost their positions with an opera company after the Nazi Party came to power and were now doing menial work. Hetty won the competition and featured on the front page of the magazine. After the war she emigrated to the USA and became a professor of chemistry in New York.

Weikart is especially prone to ideologically linking various German scientists, who worked within an evolutionary biological model, with both Gobineau's ideas about race and Nazi Party racial policy. However, on closer examination these links are often grossly exaggerated. Two of the leading evolutionary theorists in 1920s-30s Germany were anthropologist Eugen Fischer and geneticist Fritz Lenz. According to Weikart (2004) they were "...........both influential figures in racial science during the Nazi period".  This much is true and they certainly viewed 'race' as a biological concept including the hierarchical notions of 'inferior' and 'superior' races. They were also committed eugenicists. Along with botanist Erwin Baur they published the seminal work of papers 'Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene' ('Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene'; 1921 and updated five times between then and 1940). This 700-page tome is considered to have played a pivotal role in influencing Nazi Party racial policy from a scientific standpoint; Hitler himself is reported to have read the first edition while in prison.

Weikart further claims, however, that Fischer and Lenz "embraced both Gobineau and Darwinism.” This is overly simplistic, the actual situation being far more nuanced. No doubt they did embrace 'Darwinism' as the best scientific model for evolutionary theory and common descent. The claim that they explicitly employed Darwinian science to influence Nazi racial policy, however, appears far from truthful. If this were so we would expect their flagship textbook to discuss at some length the Darwinian basis for their racial theories. The problem is this: one of the most characteristic features of their highly influential collection of papers is its complete disregard for Darwinian evolutionary theory. Not surprisingly given that Darwin had repudiated hierarchical notions of 'race'. In the important 1931 edition, the terms 'Darwinist' and 'Darwinism' do not occur at all. The term 'Darwinian' is mentioned once on page 132 in reference to the 'Darwinian tubercle', a thickening on the helix of the upper and middle thirds of the primate ear. Darwin himself rates three minor mentions, one of which is entirely unconnected to biology, occurring two thirds of the way through the book, on page 575, where the authors give Darwin as an example of a successful person who was a member of a gifted family! The other brief and inconsequential mentions are on the following page and on page 617.

Weikart also declines to mention that both Fischer, and especially Lenz, were not particularly interested in Nazi politics, beyond seeking government funding for their research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics (part funded by the American Rockefeller Foundation). The Institute opened in September 1927 as part of the Fifth International Congress on Genetics in Berlin where the Chair of the Human Genetics Program was the prominent American zoologist and geneticist, Charles Benedict Davenport, author of the influential 1911 book 'Heredity in Relation to Eugenics' and who, the previous year, had founded the federally-funded United States Eugenics Record Office. Later, even into the war years, Davenport not only publicly sympathised with Nazi party ideals but continued to maintain contact with German geneticists and anthropologists, even serving on the editorial boards of two of their journals. His view was one of particularly strong biological determination, that many did not agree with then and few would agree with today, to the extent that he considered any person exhibiting thalassophilia (a love for the sea) could not have acquired that trait through their experiences. He concluded that, because male naval officers show the trait most often, it must be a sex-linked recessive trait.

Nevertheless, first and foremost Fischer and Lenz considered themselves to be scientists. In her 1990 paper 'The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany 1904-1945', Sheila Weiss notes that the majority of German anthropologists now labelled as 'racial eugenicists' and such-like were, in the German context, far more preoccupied with the decline of class barriers than racial barriers. Historian of medicine Paul Weindling agrees. In his 1989 book 'Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945', he notes that Fischer's relationship with the Nazi Party was distant and he was only ever a peripheral figure with respect to the formulation of policy. He didn't become a party member until December 1939 and then only joined on the insistence of Heinrich Himmler, who advised him that his career might suffer if he didn't. Indeed, soon after Hitler came to power, Fischer had a public spat with the Nazi Party by claiming that Jewish racial characteristics, though distinguishable from Aryan characteristics, were by no means inferior. The Nazi Party were so concerned with the influence Fischer might have that when he attended the International Congress for Anthropology and Ethnology in London in 1934, they had Walter Gross, founder of the 'Aufklärungsamt für Bevölkerungspolitik und Rassenpflege' (Office of Population Policy and Racial Hygiene') accompany him to keep him under surveillance.

Lenz was even more directly antagonistic to Nazi racial policy than Fischer. Although he became a party member a year earlier than Fischer, his notions of 'race' differed considerably from the Nazi Party. Like Darwin, Lenz denied that 'pure races', including that of the Aryan, could be identified on the basis of physical features and, contrary to Nazi Party policy, recognised no consistent demarcation of 'racial' characteristics on the basis of morphology. Rather, he thought that heritable differences between the races became most apparent in their cognitive abilities and personality. Because of this Lenz was decidedly not anti-Semitic. In his paper 'The Inheritance of Intellectual Gifts' (1931) he wrote:

".........contrary to the opinion of the anti-Semite, the Jews have played a constructive role in history...........the Jew is a good family man; he has a natural 'business sense'. Germans and Jews are more similar to one another than most have realised. Next to the Teutonic, in fact, the Jewish spirit is the chief motive force of modern Western history..............the lop-sided anti-Semitism of National Socialism must be regretted.”

Weikart also repeatedly exaggerates the degree to which purportedly 'Darwinian' German anthropologists agreed with and colluded with the unscientific criteria of racial assessment. For example, in July 1940, the Reichsstatthalter (Governor) of the central state of Thuringia, wrote to the director of the Genealogical Authority Kurt Mayer complaining that many anthropological expert reports were questionable because:

“I have seen hundreds of extremely criminal full-Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp by Weimar, who, for the most part, did not exhibit even a trace of anthropological Jewish characteristics. Frequently they  were tall and blond and possessed a sharply defined ‘Aryan’ countenance.” (cited Ehrenreich, 2007)

He further notes:

“In the book Jewish Villainism (Das jüdische Gaunertum) by Herwig Hartner-Hnizdo, you can see numerous pictures of Jews that would in no way be anthropologically recognizable as Jews.”

Hans Weinart was another anthropologist mentioned by Weikart who was frequently commissioned by the Genealogical Authority to assess a person's race. What Weikart declines to tell us is that, again like Darwin, Weinart was highly sceptical as to the notion of 'race' and he too often clashed with Kurt Mayer on this very point. For example, in one 'Expert Report' (R39/838B; 12th September 1941; cited Ehrenreich, 2007) he wrote:

“An individual characteristic is not 'Jewish' in so far as its occurrence is only to be found in Jews. The Jews are not a unified race..........Accordingly, a person who exhibits this or that 'Jewish looking' characteristic cannot [automatically] be accused of having received that characteristic due to Jewish ancestry. He could always fall under the more or less large percentage of persons that have Jewish looking characteristics  without being Jews."

The following year, in another report (R39/226:35, 8th December 1942; again cited Ehrenreich, 2007) Weinart stated that ascertaining the racial heritage of any person is:

​“............only conditionally possible on the basis of a pure racial-scientific evaluation.”

Putting aside the fact that Darwin gave no credence whatsoever to polygenism, the notion of a direct ideological pathway from Darwin to Hitler can only really be taken seriously if it can be demonstrated that the concepts of human ‘subspecies’ did not exist before Darwin. This is, of course, not so. For Hitler, the modern cradle of such laws was not Darwin’s mind but the various state governments of the United States. Law Professor James Whitman ('Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law'; 2017) outlines how, in June 1934, senior Nazi lawyers and Justice Department officials met to study US state legislation in detail, eventually leading to the inclusion of extensive similarities in legal text between American and German anti-miscegenation laws.

Anti-miscegenation laws were present in the first Thirteen Colonies in the late 1600s, long before Darwin. At their peak, 31 states had anti-miscegenation laws on their statute books and in every case the justifications given for instituting such laws were based on Christian views of morality. Although there was never any equivalent Federal law, the right for states to pass such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883, twelve years after Darwin had suggested that all the ‘races’ had a common origin and blended into each other. We now know Darwin was correct. Genetic variation within any one 'race' is greater than the genetic variation between any two 'races'. It has even been observed that variation in a single trait can be greater in an extended family than in the population as a whole. In other words, it is possible that any two random individuals from different 'races' are genetically closer than any two random individuals from the same 'race'.

In January 1913 however, Representative Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia, incensed by the marriage of an African-American boxer to a white woman, tried to enable a federal anti-miscegeneration law through Congress arguing that:

“Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant. It is subversive to social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy.”

Although unsuccessful at the federal level of government ten further states subsequently introduced anti-miscegenation laws. Note that Roddenberry made his appeal not to Darwinian or other scientific notions of biology but to emotional and moral sentiment. Thus there was ample legal and religious precedent from the United States, devoid of any Darwinian motivation, that could have influenced Hitler. The irony is that German anti-miscegenation law was actually more liberal than in most US states in which the term 'negro' was legally defined as anyone with a single 'negro' ancestor, no matter how far back the ancestor lived (the 'one drop' principle). In contrast, Germany adopted a single-Jewish grandparent rule and disregarded earlier ancestors. What is also surprising is how entrenched these laws proved to be. Even after Hitler was defeated and anti-miscegenation laws were repealed in occupied Germany, they hung on in several US states for another two decades. In 1960, seventeen US states still had laws prohibiting people of different races from marrying. As late as 1959 a mixed-race couple of white and African-Native American descent who had married in Washington DC, were jailed for one year under Virginia’s ‘Racial Integrity Act’ of 1924 by Judge Leon Bazile, who described their marriage as "a most serious crime". The sentence was suspended for 25 years on condition that they did not step foot in Virginia. Paraphrasing the German physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840; with whom he was obviously familiar, as well as Nazi 'race hygienists' such Gercke and Fischer) Judge Bazile wrote in his summing up:

“Almighty God created the races White, Black, Yellow, Malay and Red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Of course, Hitler shared Judge Bazile's sentiment about miscegenation. From Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf:

"The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this act will be avenged."

Even fourteen years after Hitler’s demise, Bazile was couching his arguments in favour of anti-miscegenation laws in terms of Christian morality, not Darwinian biology. Bazile was, of course, a devout Catholic who, as his personal correspondence attests, not only had considerable religious difficulties with interracial marriages but also with marriage between Christian sects; as a young man he underwent considerable anguish as to whether it would be morally permissable for him to marry his future wife, Virginia Bowcock, a Baptist.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, though not a Christian polygenist, did promote the idea that Adam was white-skinned and all the other four ‘races’ (‘Mongolian’, ‘Ethiopian’, ‘American’ and ‘Malayan’, in addition to ‘Caucasian’) were the result of degeneration in his bloodline largely due, he hypothesised, to the effects of climate. His work with craniometry, however, led him to change his views somewhat after his data revealed that both mean skull volumes and variations in skull volume were similar in both Europeans and Africans. A later study by Friedrich Tiedemann (1781-1861) confirmed Blumenbach’s findings. In his paper 'On the Brain of the Negro, Compared with That of the European and the Orang-Outang' published in 1836, he reported no differences in brain and skull volume, either absolutely or in relation to body size, between ‘Caucasians’, ‘Mongolians’, ‘Malays’, ‘American Indians’, and ‘Negros’. Thus scientific evidence that human beings did not comprise distinct ‘subspecies’ but shared important phenotypic characteristics was available many years before either Gobineau, Hitler or Bazile had formulated their own views. All evidently chose, however, to ignore the science.

The last anti-miscegenation law was quashed in the USA as late as 1967. Nevertheless, that same year, the Supreme Court of Georgia, who clearly did not understand either Darwin’s or Gregor Mendel’s scientific findings on hybridisation, stated that:

“Amalgamation of the races is.....unnatural, [yielding offspring who are] generally effeminate, and.....inferior in physical development and strength to the full-blood race”

And, as late as 2019, there remained a legal requirement for marriage certificates issued in Virginia to state the race of both partners.

​Unfettered Darwinian natural selection would, of course, result in just what Hitler or these learned judges found so objectionable, i.e., it increases the likelihood of ‘crossing’ in all sexually reproducing species, including humans. What American anti-miscegenation laws were doing (unknowingly, for they were founded on Christian notions of morality, rather than having any scientific basis) was profoundly un-Darwinian as they were hindering natural selection via the crude promotion of artificial selection. As with the American states, the Nazis defended their use of anti-miscegenation laws, not by referring to Darwin’s findings, but to pseudoscientific imperatives based firmly on Judeo-Christian precedent. Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf:

"............it is one of those concerning which it is said with such terrible justice that the sins of the fathers are avenged down to the tenth generation..............Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world."

Did Hitler get the idea that blood desecration is a sin down to the tenth generation from Darwin? No, he got it direct from Deuteronomy 23:2-3:

"No bastard shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord. No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none belonging to them shall enter the assembly of the Lord for ever"

Hitler had his friend Julius Streicher (1885-1946), the founder and publisher of the pro-Nazi weekly newspaper Der Stürmer’ (which had increased its circulation from 14,000 copies in 1927 to 2 million by 1940) help set up the ‘Instituts zur Erforschung Jüdischen Einflusses auf das Deutsche Kirchliche Leben’ or ‘Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life’. Headquarted in Jena, the institute, whose members included professors of theology and bishops, trained the clergy in anti-Semitic theory and practice, organised conferences with an anti-Jewish theme and published a number of pamphlets and books vilifying Jews, including a de-Judaised version of the New Testament, on the basis that Jewish forgeries had been added to the original texts. Der Stürmer’s title banner carried the slogan ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’ (‘the Jews are our Misfortune’; a phrase originating from the Christian theologian and clergyman Martin Luther (1483-1546) and later popularised by the 19th century German historian Heinrich von Treitschke) and Streicher produced record sales by publishing lurid stories of the sexual violation of German women by Jews, accompanied by staged semi-pornographic photographs. In recognition of his work, the city council of Nuremberg voted to present Streicher on his 52nd birthday with a first edition (1543) of Martin Luther’s seminal anti-Semitic treatise ‘Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen’ or ‘On The Jews And Their Lies’. In their story reporting the gift, ‘Der Stürmer’ described the work as “the most radically antisemitic tract ever published”. During his trial at the the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, Streicher attempted to use Luther's treatise in his defence. Even when not citing Luther he was unambiguous as to the religious basis for Nazi anti-miscegenation laws:

"......the Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created the racial law for themselves.....the law of Moses, which says, "If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women”......These laws of the Jews were taken as a model for these [Nazi] laws........notwithstanding many Jews had married non-Jewish women, these marriages were dissolved......That was the beginning of Jewry which, because it introduced these racial laws, has survived throughout the centuries, while all other races and civilizations have perished." 

His last words before being hanged were "Now it goes to God!".

That indigenous German Christian thought had an early anti-Semitic slant is no more evident than in Luther’s comprehensive 65,000 word treatise. The language he employs is ornate, even for a 16th century clergyman, and particularly vexatious, describing Jews as a:

base, whoring people...........full of the devil's faeces...........which they wallow in like swine", while the synagogue was an "incorrigible whore and an evil slut”.

Hitler was clearly taking his cue from Luther when he wrote in 'Mein Kampf':

"........the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew."

Luther recommended seven remedial actions to be taken against the Jews. Summarised, these are for Jewish synagogues, schools and homes to be burned to the ground; for any gold and silver owned by Jews to be confiscated; for their religious writings to be confiscated, for Jewish preaching to be made illegal, with death as the punishment; for Jews to be given no legal right of safe passage and Jews to be forced to work as agricultural slave labour. It is not difficult to see that the essence of what Luther wrote in the 16th century was what the Nazis actually achieved in the first half of the 20th century. Every single one of Luther's seven suggested actions were implemented by the Nazis; in 1938 the government periodical 'Der Informationsdienst' ('The Information Digest') published all seven of Luther's recommendations. They were simply carrying out his suggestions. They needed no input from Darwin. Professor of Religion William Nichols puts it most succinctly and truthfully in his 1995 book 'Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate':

"Luther's proposals read like a program for the Nazis."

In her 1975 book 'The War Against the Jews 1933-1945' the American historian Lucy Dawidowicz agrees with William Nichols, writing that an obvious progression of “anti-Semitic descent” from Luther to Hitler is “easy to draw” and a preponderance of evidence suggests this is so as Peter Weiner (1942) opines:

"Many attempts have been made to explain the exaggerated destructive nationalism of the Germans and the Nazis. Again, I think that to a great extent Martin Luther is at the bottom of it."

Such a view is neither modern nor is it anti-Christian. In a speech given to the 1941 Archbishop's Conference in London, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple noted:

“It is easy to see how Luther prepared the way for Hitler.”

And three years later, one of his fellow clergy, W.R. Inge wrote:

"We must hope that the next swing of the pendulum will put an end to Luther's influence in Germany.”

The importance of Luther in framing Hitler's political ideology did not stop at hatred at Jews, however. Eighteen years before Luther published his infamous anti-Semitic tract he had published a pro-feudal pamphlet 'Wider die Mordischen und Reubischen Rotten der Bawren' ('Against the Peasant Bands of Robbers and Murderers') that goes beyond despotic in its detailing of the divinely-ordained autocratic rights that all rulers should exercise over their subjects. The peasants, Luther declared:

"........are no better than straw. They will not hear the Word and they are without sense; therefore they must be compelled to hear the crack of the whip and the whizz of bullets, and it is only what they deserve. We must pray for them that they may become obedient; but if they do not, pity is of no avail here; we must let the cannon-balls whistle among them, or they will only make things a thousand times worse..........Like the drivers of donkeys, who have to belabour the donkeys incessantly with rods and whips, or they will not obey, so must the ruler do with the people; they must drive, beat, throttle, hang, burn, behead and torture, so as to make themselves feared and to keep the people in check.........the duty of the preachers is to preach hatred. If the authorities refuse to follow this drastic advice, the pastors and preachers are at all events to proclaim it to the people."

Again, Luther provided Hitler with a template for despotic government derived not from Charles Darwin but from Germanic Christianity. Similarly, the coloured stars that Hitler demanded be worn by the Jews and homosexuals were not of his invention but an idea borrowed from the Catholic church. They derived from the earliest Catholic Inquisitions against the French Cathars who had denounced the God of the Old Testament as Satan and considered the Catholic church as having betrayed and corrupted the original purity of Christ's message. After massacring 20,000 Cathars in a single day, the Inquisitors required all those remaining alive who denounced the Cathar teachings to wear a yellow cross on their clothing for the rest of their lives. In 1920, writing in his book 'The New Jerusalem', written following a tour of the Middle East, the devout Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936; currently the subject of a campaign to be canonised) both echoed the church law and predated Nazi law with his suggestion that Jews should not be discriminated against in the social arena, but:

".........let there be one single-clause bill, one simple and sweeping law about Jews.....every Jew must be dressed like an Arab...........The point is that we should know where we are; and he should know where he is, which is in a foreign land."

Originally, Chesterton was sympathetic to the Jews but as he got older the standard anti-Semitic stereotypes such as greed, usury, capitalism, bolshevism, cowardice, disloyalty and secrecy accumulate in his written work (see e.g., Mayers, 2013). Darwin certainly wasn't to blame for Chesterton's anti-Semitism and fascist ideals. On the contrary, although originally unconcerned with evolutionary theory, by the time he wrote about Jews and their clothing Chesterton had became strongly anti-evolution, both from a theological and a scientific perspective. In his defence of Christian apologetics, 'Orthodoxy' (1908), he wrote:

"Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism."

That Luther’s ideas were entrenched early in the development of Nazi policies is further evidenced by this line from Mein Kampf:

"........beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner" 

and by a quote from Bernhard Rust, Hitler’s Education Minister, in the Nazi Party newspaper, ‘Völkischer Beobachter’ (‘People’s Observer’). This he said in August 1933, before Hitler had passed any anti-miscegenation or anti-Jewish laws and well before the destructive events of 9-10th November 1938 (Kristallnacht; note that November 10th was Luther’s birthday):

"Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance ... I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together; they are of the same old stamp”.

The continuing importance of Martin Luther to Nazi thought during their regime is apparent by, for example, the Nazi-financed anti-Semitic feature film 'Jud Suess', released in 1940 but set in the 18th century (well before Darwin had any influence on anyone) and featuring numerous voiceovers of quotes from Luther (and, of course, none from Darwin) inciting anti-Semitic activity. The following year at his acceptance speech on being promoted to Director of Film at the ‘Ministry for the People's Enlightenment and Propaganda’, Hans Hinkel had this to say (cited Steinweis, 1993):

"Through his acts and his spiritual attitude, he began the fight which we will wage today; with Luther, the revolution of German blood and feeling against alien elements of the Volk was begun”.

Another film financed by Hinkel's department was never completed, though footage remains. This anti-Soviet documentary concentrates not on the economic or political differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but on the differing attitudes toward religion. Much is made of the conversion of churches to secular use, including factories for the war effort, in 'Die Gottlosen' ('The Godless).

A political party that claimed to have been directly influenced by Martin Luther was the Christian Social Party of Hitler's native Austria. Founded in 1893 with a great deal of support from the Catholic priesthood within Austria it became the first political party in the world to attain power on the issue of anti-Semitism, winning 66% of the seats on the Vienna City Council in 1895, placing the devout Catholic Karl Lueger as Mayor. For the following 25 years the party's emblem consisted of a Jewish snake strangling the Austrian eagle. Hitler, in Chapter 2 of Volume 1 of 'Mein Kampf' credits Lueger with convincing him of the value of anti-Semitic attitudes:

"I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party...........I had occasion to become acquainted with the man and his work; and slowly my fair judgment turned to unconcealed admiration. Today, more than ever, I regard this man as the greatest German mayor of all times...........How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement! My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all."

In 1907 the Christian Social Party merged with the Austrian Catholic Conservative Party and, representing the vast majority of Catholic voters, the party rose in power to form every national government except one in the period 1918-1938. Despite some Catholic Bishops petitioning Pope Leo XIII to censure the party because of its racist platform he refused to do so and by not doing allowed the party to claim publicly that it had Vatican approval.

But perhaps the most poignant quote concerning Luther comes from Weiner's (1942) comment after reading Austrian historian Heinrich Seuse Denifle's first volume of his 'Luther and Lutherdom' (1904):

"A terrifying, dirty, dishonest Luther appeared, a Luther much blacker and more hideous by far than all his former opponents taken together had depicted him. And the worst of it was that Denifle had quoted hardly anything but Luther's own words.​"

Nevertheless it is commonplace for authors claiming an ideological link between Darwin and Hitler to seriously downplay the influence of Martin Luther on Hitler’s ideology. They have good reason to do so. Criticisms of Luther, who effectively, like Hitler, viewed the Jews as sub-human, effectively destroys the Christian fundamentalist falsehood that the notion of humans being comprised of a hierarchy of ‘sub-species’ is a Darwinian invention. Fundamentalists could argue from the ‘no true Scotsman’ angle, of course, claiming that Luther’s ideas of Christianity were simply a distortion of the genuine article. They tend not to do this either however as the argument skates on even thinner ice. Luther was, after all, the primary historical initiator for the existence of Protestantism, the broad Christian grouping from whose churches nearly all of them belong. It is important to note, in this regard, that in the July 1932 Reichstag election in which the Nazis won the largest representation in the German Parliament, the Nazi Party share of the vote in the predominantly Protestant north and east of Germany was approximately double that of the mainly Catholic south and west of the country (Geary, 1998). Weikart (2004) manages to gracefully sidestep all of these issues. He simply makes no mention of Martin Luther at all in his book.

Despite such compelling evidence, however, it has been suggested by some contemporary German theologians with connections to the Lutheran church such as Johannes Wallman (e.g., 1987) and Uwe Siemon-Netto (e.g., 1996) that Luther’s treatise actually had little effect on the development of Nazi attitudes toward the Jews, as there had been a decline in the number of occasions the treatise was cited in academic works published in the 19th century. They both claim that the Nazis were already anti-Semitic and merely revived Luther’s treatise to bolster their policies. This might be so, but it surely raises the question as to whether, if Luther’s treatise had never existed, Nazi vehemence toward the Jews would be so strong and so devastatingly effective. The fact remains that Hitler and his many supporters within the German clergy were able to call upon a nationalistic German and Christian-based hatred of the Jews that pre-dated Darwin by centuries.

Some Christian churches in Germany have accepted the role played by Luther’s treatise in motivating their clergy into supporting Nazi policy. For example, on the 60th anniversary of 'Kristallnacht’ the Lutheran Church of Bavaria issued a statement containing this extract:

"It is imperative for the Lutheran Church, which knows itself to be indebted to the work and tradition of Martin Luther, to take seriously also his anti-Jewish utterances, to acknowledge their theological function, and to reflect on their consequences. It has to distance itself from every [expression of] anti-Judaism in Lutheran theology,”

which would seem to run counter to the attempts of Wallman and Siemon-Netto to circle their wagons around Luther. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that in Europe Christian anti-Semitism was by no means confined to German Lutheran Christian circles. For example, Cosmo Lang, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928-1941, contended in a speech to the UK's House of Lords that "the Jews themselves" were to blame for the "excesses of the Nazis." American Christian anti-Semitism was another thing entirely, discussed more fully later.

Another prominent German theologian who gave the Nazi party considerable ideological succour was the Lutheran Gustav Adolf Deissmann (1866-1937). Deissmann held Professorships in theology first at Heidelberg and later at Berlin, the latter position long considered to be the most eminent chair in German theology and certainly so during the Reich. In September 1914 he wrote a theological treatise for the Lutheran church and the German people entitled 'The War and Religion' which outlined the Christian case for Germany's involvement in what we now call World War I. His argument was based on the notion that the war provided an important opportunity for Germany to realise Luther's ideals. He goes on:

“The positive effects of war upon religion are infinitely stronger than its negative ones.......Our present religion is national and German, and we preach a German God! A German, a national God!........Christianity is the religion of war”.

Deissmann considered Lutheran German Christianity to be the true expression of Christianity, unlike the  “.........sweet-sentimental, and sentimental-weak Christianity” of Germany's opponents and in his sermons (which were invariably held to packed audiences) has been quoted as saying in response to German soldiers handing out poisoned sweets to children in Belgium:

"I am proud to preach the religion of might and what our enemies call barbarism.........only in a German cloak can the real Christ breathe."

All this nourishing food for Hitler's thought, and not a single mention of Darwin anywhere in Deissmann's writings and speeches. Indeed the above quote could have been lifted straight out of 'Mein Kampf'. However, at least three other leading Lutheran theologians bear responsibility for recommending the ideologies of both Luther and Hitler to the German people. The first, Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948), was Professor of Evangelical Theology at the University of Tübingen. He was a passionate anti-Semite throughout his life and became a (prominent) member of the Nazi Party in 1933 and stated at the time that his choice to join was not pragmatic but was based on "a Christian moral foundation." He was a member of a group of twelve leading German theologians and pastors who issued the 1939 'Godesberg Declaration' in which they thanked God for Hitler, described Nazism as "a call of God" and pledged to transform their respective churches into "an instrument of racial policy".

Second was Emanuel Hirsch (1888-1972), Professor of Theology at Göttingen University and a member not only of the Nazi Party but also holding a post within the SS. He described Hitler coming to power in 1933 as a:

"sunrise of divine goodness after endless dark years of wrath and misery" and that the Nazi Party "should be accepted and supported by Christians as a tool of God's grace."

(cited Byassee, 2006). Hirsch gave enthusiastic public support to both the 'Nuremburg Laws' and the 'Protection of German Blood and German Honour Act' and was highly critical of theologians and clergy who did not show active support for the Nazi cause. Unlike many clergy who initially supported Hitler but changed their minds as the Nazi project unfolded, Hirsch remained unrepentent of his attitudes throughout his life.

The third prominent clergyman was Paul Althaus (1888-1966), Professor of Practical and Systematic Theology at the University of Göttingen. He wrote 'The Theology of Martin Luther' (1962) and 'The Ethics of Martin Luther' (1965) both of which offer an unrepentant and uncompromising glorification of the man and his ideology. Like Deissmann he too viewed the waging of war as a perfectly Christian endeavour in order to resolve differences with other nations. He even went so far as to equate Hitler with Martin Luther and even Christ himself:

"Our Protestant churches have greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God."

(cited Ericksen, 2012). Again, powerful home grown theological underpinning for Hitler's political ideologies with Darwin nowhere in sight. And, as Wiener (1942) has argued:

"A nation which found it easy to accept a character like Luther as Christ, could not find it difficult to accept a man like Hitler as Messiah."

Returning to science (and pseudoscience), the claim that Adam was white-skinned certainly predates Darwin. The earliest publication of this doctrine appears to be that of a Protestant turned Catholic Frenchman, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), in an anonymous work written in Latin, 'Prae-Adamitae' (1655), and translated into English a year later as 'Men Before Adam'. Although the work was immediately and widely condemned by both Protestant and Catholic scholars it is important to note that La Peyrère's arguments employed no anthropological or other scientific data; he relied entirely on Biblical evidence. Thus, La Peyrère's devotion to the faith was never questioned, it was his interpretation of the text that was considered heretical. As French biologist Armand de Quatrefages wrote in 'L'Espéce Humaine' (1877):

"He was a theologian, a believer, who admits as true all that is in the Bible, and miracles in particular...........He always finds in the book which serves him as a guide, some reason to support his interpretation. In a word, we find throughout, in La Peyrere, a mixture of complete faith and free criticism. This book convinced no one, and the doctrine of the author soon fell into forgetfulness, until within a few years since it has been reproduced and welcomed with a favor sufficiently unexpected."

Other commentators, such as Edward Long (1774) not only claimed scriptural evidence of separate species but scientific evidence too; according to him (a slave owner and British colonial administrator) people of different 'races' could only ever produce sterile offspring:

"Some examples may possibly have occurred, where, upon the intermarriage of two Mulattos, the woman has borne children; which children have grown to maturity: but I never heard of such an instance; and may we not suspect the lady, in those cases, to have privately intrigued with another man, a White perhaps?.............The subject is really curious, and deserves a further and very attentive enquiry; because it tends, among other evidences, to establish an opinion, which several have entertained, that the White and the Negroe had not one common origin."

Although many nineteenth century American churchmen were certainly robust pre-Adamites others, such as Rev. Ebenezer Burgess writing in 1871, were keen to emphasise that they did not accept the doctrine. Nevertheless, Burgess does show some sympathy with La Peyrère's interpretation of Biblical text. Quoting Genesis he writes:

""These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread." This may be taken literally, as, until recently, has always been done, or its application may be limited to the "Adamite race," whose creation had just been recorded, and whose history is given in the subsequent portions of the sacred writings, without either affirming or denying the existence of another race not descended from Adam. The latter interpretation, though less obvious than the former, is certainly consistent with usage in other parts of the Bible.”

If Quatrefages observation of a "favor sufficiently unexpected" did not emanate wholeheartedly from the churches en bloc and certainly did not come from Darwin, from whence did it come? It came from the thin veneer of scientific credibility through the writings of, among others, the Swiss paleontologist and geologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), the American surgeon Josiah Clark Nott (1804-1873), and the American Egyptologist George Gliddon (1809-1857), all of whose work predated Darwin. Nott and Gliddon's famous compilation of essays ''Types of Mankind' (1854) was distinctly un-Darwinian in approach, attempting to match anthropological data with Biblical history. It was an unashamedly racist and particularly white supremacist book. Their follow-up book ‘Indigenous Races of the Earth’ was equally popular. Published in 1857, two years before Darwin published ‘Origin of Species’, it enjoyed pre-orders well in excess of it's first print-run. Weikart (2004) claims that Hitler paraphrased Agassiz in 'Table Talks' (October 24th, 1941):

"There have been humans at the rank at least of a baboon in any case for 300,000 years at least. The ape is distinguished from the lowest human less than such a human is from a thinker like, for example, Schopenhauer."

Here is the original quote (which appears in a contribution by Agassiz in Nott and Gliddon's 1854 book of essays):

"The chimpanzee and gorilla do not differ more one from the other than the Mandingo and the Guineau Negro: they together do not differ more from the orang than the Malay or white man differs from the Negro.........I maintain distinctly that the differences observed among the races of men are of the same kind and even greater than those upon which the anthropoid monkeys are considered as distinct species."

The link is weak, at best. Nonetheless, according to Weikart, Hitler's paraphrasing of the ardent creationist Agassiz provides evidence that Hitler was a Darwinian! This is surely as illogical, contradictory and spurious a connection as one can ever imagine. Darwin's brief correspondence with Louis Agassiz (he communicated far more with his son, Alexander) reveals the following paragraph from a letter dated April 12th, 1864:

"I know well how strongly you are opposed to nearly everything I have written & it gratifies me deeply that you have not for this cause taken, like a few of my former English friends, a personal dislike to me."

Indeed, Lindberg and Numbers in their 2003 book 'When Science and Christianity Meet' describe Agassiz as "the foremost scientific critic of Darwin in America". And it was precisely because Agassiz was so un-Darwinian (even to the point of being a strong advocate of slavery), that Henry Morris in his book 'Men of Science, Men of God' (1982) lauds Agassiz as one of the most esteemed founders of creation science. He is listed on the website 'Creation Science Hall of Fame: Honoring those who Honored God's Word as Literally Written in Genesis', where we are told:

".......it is significant that he was an inveterate opponent of evolutionism to the very end of his life."

This opposition to evolution was not confined to the biological domain. At a talk given by William Watson Goodwin in 1861 Agassiz even expressed disbelief that modern languages had evolved from earlier ones. He claimed each language to be primordial and considered any similarities between extant and extinct language groups to be either coincidental or based on differences in the mental faculties of the different 'races' (see Goodwin, 1861).

Not only was Agassiz an inveterate opponent of evolutionary theory who honoured God's word, he was also, as were all Christian polygenists, an inveterate racist. For much of his career and until his death Agassiz was convinced that the white race were a superior sub-species of human, relative to all other races, who were "beasts" in comparison and he claimed that this was both a scriptural and a scientific fact. What follows is an extract from a letter Agassiz wrote to his mother, Rose on December 2nd 1846:

"It was in Philadelphia that I first found myself in prolonged contact with Negroes; all the domestics in my hotel were men of color. I can scarcely express to you the painful impression that I received, especially since the feeling that they inspired in me is contrary to all our ideas about the confraternity of the human type (genre) and the unique origin of our species. But truth before all. Nevertheless, I experienced pity at the sight of this degraded and degenerate race, and their lot inspired compassion in me in thinking that they were really men. Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. In seeing their black faces with their thick lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their head, their bent knees, their elongated hands, I could not take my eyes off their face in order to tell them to stay far away. And when they advanced that hideous hand towards my plate in order to serve me, I wished I were able to depart in order to eat a piece of bread elsewhere, rather than dine with such service. What unhappiness for the white race ―to have tied their existence so closely with that of Negroes in certain countries! God preserve us from such a contact.”

The book 'Life and Letters', compiled by Agassiz's wife omits many of Agassiz's more racist attitudes and includes a much shortened version of this letter. The above is the unexpurgated version from the original French language version housed in Harvard University's Houghton Library. Four years later, in an article written for the 'Christian Examiner' (1850) Agassiz demonstrated substantial agreement with La Peyrère:

"To suppose that all men originated from Adam and Eve is to assume that the order of creation has been changed in the course of historical times, and to give to the Mosaic record a meaning that it was never intended to have. On that ground we would particularly insist upon the propriety of considering Genesis as chiefly relating to the history of the white race, with special reference to the history of the Jews."

But even if Weikart is correct, and Hitler was knowingly paraphrasing Agassiz, he was not the only one agreeing with Agassiz for his creationist and racist outlook. Here is George M. Price (the 'father of flood geology') writing in his 1924 book, 'The Phantom of Organic Evolution':

"These present-day anthropoid apes may be just as much a product of modern conditions [degeneration] as are the negroid or the Mongolian types of mankind. And if I were compelled to choose between saying that the apes are degenerate or hybridized men and that man is a developed ape, I am sure it would not take me very long to decide which it would be. Nor do I think it would take any well-informed scientist long to make the choice."

Henry Morris continued his white supremacist (and overt pro-slavery) stance right up until the 1990s. The following quote, for example, can be found in the 1991 2nd edition of his book 'The Beginning Of the World':

"The descendants of Ham were marked especially for secular service to mankind. Indeed they were to be 'servants of servants,' that is 'servants extraordinary!' Although only Canaan is mentioned specifically (possibly because the branch of Ham's family through Canaan would later come into most direct contact with Israel), the whole family of Ham is in view. The prophecy is worldwide in scope and, since Shem and Japheth are covered, all Ham's descendants must be also. These include all nations which are neither Semitic nor Japhetic. Thus, all of the earth's 'colored' races, - yellow, red, brown, and black - essentially the Afro-Asian group of peoples, including the American Indians--are possibly Hamitic in origin and included within the scope of the Canaanitic prophecy, as well as the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, and Phoenicians of antiquity."

And earlier, from 'The Genesis Record' (1976):

"Often the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have become actual personal servants or even slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane matters, they have eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites."

Lest anyone feel that Morris is being somehow being quote-mined, Richard Trott (2003) writes of his personal experience of Morris' attempted evasiveness when confronted with a charge of racism:

"I questioned Henry Morris about this issue personally in North East Maryland on July 18th 1993...............Morris claimed that these announcements are not racist because there are "black Jews" and black "Indians" who are not Hamitic...............this appears to be flatly contradictory to Morris's claim [as quoted above].............that "all of the earth's 'colored races', - yellow, red, brown and black, may be Hamitic. Furthermore, Morris pointed out that there are whites who have been "slaves" and are Hamitic. These white Hamitics are not mentioned in Morris's book. Morris also confirmed to me that he believes that African Americans are Hamitic...............Morris sometimes defended these statements to me and at other times simply contradicted them, but never rescinded them."

George M. Price, was of course, a highly conservative Biblical literalist and white supremacist who wrote that Darwin's scientific findings were "unbiblical and innately immoral" and even blamed German militarism leading up to the First World War on Darwin's influence. If Weikart insists on charging Hitler with paraphrasing Agassiz (and why wouldn't he, given Hitler's creationist outlook?) he must surely also accept that Hitler is also echoing Price (again, why wouldn't he?).

Nott, Gliddon and Agassiz all accepted a translation of the name ‘Adam’ as "to show red in the face" or "blusher". Since only lighter skinned people display a discernible blush, they took this as evidence that Adam must have been Caucasian. This notion was, in turn, predicated on studies of ancient Hebrew made by a number of Christian academics including the Presbyterian minister Josiah Priest, author of ‘Bible Defence Of Slavery: On The Origin, History And Fortunes Of The Negro Race’, published 1843, who wrote:

“First Adam, as above, signifies earthy man, red; second Adamah, signifies red earth, or blood; third Adami, signifies my man red, earthy, human; fourth Admah, signifies earthy, red, or bloody ; all of which words are of the same class, and spring from the same root, which was Adam, signifying red, or copper color.”

Like the works of Nott, Gliddon and Agassiz, Priest's own book was by no means considered fringe. It proved to be immensely popular, being reprinted eight times in the first five years of publication. Later additions included a supplementary pamphlet by the Rev. W.S. Brown, which was highly critical of the anti-slavery movement. So, on the basis of evidence as flimsy as this, polygenists enthusiastically partitioned humans into distinct ‘groupings’. In Gobineau’s case he chose the white (Aryan) race (superior in terms of intelligence, morality and physical harmony), the black race (intense, willful) and the yellow race (lazy, uninventive). In the obvious absence of a biological barrier between the races he proposed the need for a ‘moral’ barrier, in the best interests not only of the Aryan race but of humans in general.

All of the abovementioned examples of polygenic scholarship predate Darwin. However, even after Darwin's scientific findings had been widely accepted in most European countries they did not always find favour in the more fundamentalist white Christian sects in the United States. Another highly influential book, authored by Charles Carroll in 1900, 'The Negro a Beast or, In the Image of God' and published by American Bible House argued, like Gobineau and the other polygenists, that Adam was the progenitor of only the white 'race' and that the negro was, in fact, not a human being but a pre-Adamite animal that did not possess a soul. According to Carroll, a Christian Professor of theology, for a child to possess a soul, both parents needed to provide half a soul each. Thus, if a white person bred with a black person, the child would also soul-less:

"........if the half-breed marries a man, will not their offspring have a soul?" No! "Then if the three-quarter white marries a man will not their offspring have a soul?" No. "If the offspring of man and the Negro was mated with pure whites for generations, would not their ultimate offspring have a soul?" No!" 

Now God commanded Adam to have dominion over the Earth, but prior to Adam and Eve's expulsion form Eden they never had to toil. Obviously, then, they required someone to toil for them. Who else but the beasts of the fields, including the black race? This is all outlined in Chapter 6 entitled 'Red, Yellow and Brown Skin Denotes Amalgamation of the Human Family with the Beast, the Negro.' According to Carroll, the mindset that accepted the ideas of atheism and Darwinian evolution has resulted from the moral and intellectual degeneration of the white race descended from Adam and Eve brought on by miscegenation with such animals.

In stark contrast to these Christian polygenists (whether pseudoscientist or outright crackpot), Darwin did not start out with any particular views on ‘race’ that were not scientifically based (he expressed incredulity, for example, when informed of what Long had written). He did, however,  attempt to explain the sometimes mutually reinforcing presumptions made by others for racial differences and, as a result, in ‘The Descent of Man’ he made plain he considered all such attempts to subdivide humans into races or subspecies to be premature and likely scientifically worthless:

“The question whether mankind consists of one or several species has of late years been much discussed by anthropologists … . But it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point, until some definition of the term “species” is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an indeterminate element such as an act of creation. We might as well attempt without any definition to decide whether a certain number of houses should be called a village, town, or city”.

Darwin also commented on the disagreement between the various factions of anthropologists on how the human ‘races’ or ‘subspecies’ should be delineated. As he saw it the problem was that all of the physical and mental characteristics chosen to categorise each ‘race’ proved, on closer examination, not to be unique to any one ‘race’. It was obvious to Darwin, therefore, that the various ethnic groups had a common evolutionary origin with all identifiable human characteristics highly intermingled. As he further wrote in 'The Descent of Man':

Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole organisation be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these points are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named." 

“Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man.” ​

“.........all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities that these can be accounted for only by inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterised would probably deserve to rank as man...........It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant. Savages, even within the limits of the same tribe, are not nearly so uniform in character, as has been often asserted...... Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke......the races ought not to be ranked as species......they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them”.

The difference between the creationist hero Agassiz and Darwin regarding their respective attitude to 'race' becomes patently obvious. Of course, when 'Origin of the Species' was first published, slavery was still legal and enthusiastically sanctioned by many churches in the United States. Polygenist views were so rife in these places that European ethnologists had begun referring to such notions as the 'American School' of ethnology, i.e., science contaminated by theology. As Quatrefages (1877) explained:

"The anthropological question is complicated with that of slavery; and from reading the greater part of the writings that have come to us from beyond the sea, it is clear that there they are, before all, advocates or opponents of
that institution. But in the United States it is necessary always to be biblical; and hence came the particular shades which distinguish certain anthropological works in that country. The anti-slavists are generally outspoken monogenists."

And in a remarkably prescient comment, Burgess (1871) agreed noting:

“.............all pluralists depart from the established usage of science, inventing definitions of their own for the sole purpose of maintaining preconceived theories.”

Of course nowadays creationists routinely use their own carefully tailored definitions of scientific terms such as 'theory', 'law', 'mutation', 'evolution', 'observation', 'prediction', 'vestigial' etc, in order to maintain their preconceived ideas.

One of the very few American academics who openly and vehemently opposed polygenism (and Agassiz in particular) was John Bachman, who was both a Professor of Natural History as well as finding time to serve as a Lutheran clergyman, holding his appointment at the same church in Charleston for 56 years. Rather than making cranial measurements he systematically compared the teeth and bones of specimens from different 'races' and came to the same conclusion as Darwin that human beings comprised a single species. In 1850 he published his major work 'The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science'. He also discovered a new species of bird and rat. Nott and Gliddon were particularly vexatious toward him, publically calling him a "clerical ignoramus" while the Scottish polygenist physician and ethnologist Robert Knox in his 1850 book 'The Races of Men' wrote of him "I have read with horror the ravings of Mr. John Bachman". Though, to be fair, Knox was by no means a white supremacist, describing his own 'sub-species' of human being, the 'Saxon' (i.e., having originated in Germany and thus Hitler's 'Aryan') as  someone who "invents nothing......has no musical ear.....lacks genius" and is so "low and boorish" that "he does not know what you mean by fine art." Which goes some way to vindicate Darwin's view that any division of human 'races' is purely arbitrary.

​African-American Christians appear to have understood the true import of Darwin's findings of common descent much earlier than many of their white counterparts. Indeed, many African-Americans were more disposed to Darwinian science than to some of the teachings of the white churches in the southern states. In 1863 an anonymous author for the African-American newspaper 'The Christian Recorder' (published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church "for the dissemination of religion, morality, literature and science") positively reviewed Darwin's findings and, although the article was written prior to Darwin's writings on human evolution, appears to have understood the import of the notion of common descent. They particularly praised him for having acted as a counter to the current polygenist views:

"One question of much dispute seems to have been settled by Mr Darwin.......the Caucasian, the Malay, and the Negro, according to his facts, are varieties of a species, and may all have descended from a single pair, as set forth in the scriptures."

Informed criticism of Christian polygenism also emanated from the highly influential Princeton Theological Seminary, especially so in a 1911 paper 'On the Antiquity and the Unity of the Human Race' authored by its principal, Benjamin Warfield. Although he starts out in modern creationist fashion by remarking that evolutionary theory "is rapidly losing ground among recent scientific workers”, he then goes on to say, perhaps begrudgingly:

“The prevalence of the evolutionary hypotheses has removed all motive for denying a common origin to the human race, and rendered it natural to look upon the differences which exist among the various types of man as differentiations of a common stock………..it is now agreed with practical unanimity that the unity of the human race, in the sense of a common origin, is a necessary corollary of the evolutionary hypothesis.......the fact of the unity of the human race has to thank the evolutionary hypothesis." (my emphasis)

Other honest and realistic views became available. In Spring 1925, for example, the 'Baltimore Afro-American' newspaper published a series of articles, 'Day to Day' by William N. Jones, in which he argued that Darwinian evolution had "created greater racial sympathy in the short-term".  In an article celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Huxley he wrote that few white men had done as much as Huxley to help race relations because Darwin's scientific findings had questioned the Christian notion that some men were born to be rulers "by Divine right" while others were born to be slaves "by Divine curse". He went on:

"Science won, and as a result the world, in spite of hidebound and narrow dogmas, is heading towards real brotherhood."

A few years later the journalist Wilbur Cash writing in his book of personal memoirs, 'The Mind of the South' (1941; and never out of print since) had this to say:

"One of the most stressed notions which went around was that evolution made a Negro as good as a white man-that is, threatened White Supremacy."

Similarly, Jeffrey Moran, commenting in 2011 on attitudes in some states in the 1920s states:

".........antievolutionists were identified with some of the most racist features of the South."

It is mind-boggling indeed that modern day fundamentalist Christians can read historical archives like these, along with passages from Darwin and infer from them that Darwin and his scientific findings convinced that human beings could and should be classified and placed on a hierarchy according to racially specific characteristics. Those who do so would surely fail any standardised reading comprehension test. Compare for yourself the above quotations from Darwin and others with Bergman’s own warped version of Darwin’s scientific conclusions outlined in his paper, ‘Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust’:

“........it was Darwin who claimed that certain races were genetically inferior as was scientifically ‘proven’ by Darwinism..........the ‘superior race’ belief was based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major presumption and requirement of Darwin’s original ‘survival of the fittest’ theory”.

I cannot imagine a more dishonest rendering of what Darwin actually wrote. Thankfully, biologist Steven J. Gould didn’t share Bergman’s difficulty in understanding Darwin’s words. Writing in his essay ‘Eternal Metaphors of Palaeontology’ (1977) he succinctly notes:

“.........an explicit denial of innate progression [of a racial hierarchy] is the most characteristic feature separating Darwin’s theory of natural selection from other nineteenth century evolutionary theories.”

Even Gasman, in the final pages of his book, recognises this and curiously, given the theme of his work, admits that Darwin's findings were, in fact, wholly incompatible with Nazi racial theories, writing:

“It was therefore hardly ideologically admissible at the same time to allow for the evolution of the Aryans from a group of inferior anthropoid progenitors. Any theory of this kind would have destroyed the notion that the Aryans were in possession of racial superiority from the beginning”.

Despite such clear differences between the likes of Gobineau, Hitler and Darwin in their attitude to the ‘races’, however, it is Darwin who creationists frequently claim was inherently racist. One very common source of such accusations is based on the full title of his seminal book, which is ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’. The claim of racism here is both ignorant and odious. Throughout the book Darwin uses terms like ‘race’, ‘sub-species’ and 'variety’ interchangeably when discussing a range of animals such as dogs and horses as well as plants. For example, in this passage from Chapter 1 he uses three different words to describe the same concept:

“When we look to the hereditary varieties or races of our domestic animals and plants, and compare them with species closely allied together, we generally perceive in each domestic race, as already remarked, less uniformity of character than in true species”.

Some other example passages for 'Origin of Species' were Darwin mixes his terms:

"................if we could succeed in naturalising, or were to cultivate, during many generations, the several races, for instance, of the cabbage.”

"...............it is quite incredible that a fantail, identical with the existing breed, could be raised from any other species of pigeon, or even from the other well-established races of the domestic pigeon."

The more prominent irony is that ‘Origin of Species’ doesn't even discuss the evolution of humans (indeed, the word 'man' occurs once only in the entire book; in this sentence, "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history"), so whenever someone remarks on the racist nature of the book’s title, you can be certain he or she hasn't actually familiarised themselves with his work but is merely parroting misinformed and/or blatantly dishonest Christian fundamentalist sources. To compound the misrepresentation, Darwin did not even choose the title of the book. His preferred title was 'An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection'. John Murray, the publisher, objected to this title and insisted on renaming the book as we now know it.

True though, by today’s more enlightened standards Darwin probably was somewhat racist, with the usual prejudices of Victorian England. He was after all, a middle-class white Englishman brought up in a country under the strong influence of the 19th century Church of England where the inferiority of the non-white races was considered to be an empirical fact by most. Indeed, during Darwin's lifetime the vast majority of Europeans had never set eyes on a non-European. The term ‘racism’ is not an absolute and we can observe degrees and varieties of racism. For instance, Darwin made no anti-Semitic comments anywhere in his writing (except perhaps in a single case; in a letter to his sister Susan written September 3rd 1845 he used the relatively innocuous phrase "we are as rich as Jews"), and he certainlt expressed pleasure when he found his work quoted and discussed in Hebrew language publications and, on January 21st 1882, along with a number of other influential Englishmen, he was a signatory to a letter published in the 'Observer' newspaper in London expressing concern at the persecution of Jews in Russia.

Nevertheless, a recent anti-evolution primary school 'Islamic Science' textbook published in Turkey in 2012 has bettered even Bergman by taking the ad hominem fallacy regarding Darwin to a whole new level of absurdity:

"First, he was a Jew. Second, he hated his prominent forehead, big nose and misshapen teeth"

How either of these statements might impact on the veracity of his findings is not mentioned, of course. Darwin did, however, commonly use the terms ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ when referring to Africans and some other ethnic groups. These comments were unlikely to be intended as derogatory. It was simply an acknowledgement of the English lexicon of the time and such words were used both formally and informally by people from all walks of life, including in childrens books. The term ‘Negro’, especially, was in such formal use at that time that it was included in Parliamentary and other legal documents, medical and scientific papers and certainly by both the Anglican and Catholic churches. Indeed, a British politician as esteemed as Winston Churchill used terms such as "blackamoor", "chink", "wop", and "baboo" publicly and in office, even into the 1950s (Toye, 2010). We are able to glean nothing from Darwin’s writings, therefore, that suggests that he was any more racist than any of his peers and in some ways he was much less so, obviously much less so than the likes of Agassiz, Priest, Carroll, Gobineau or Hitler.

He did make what appear to be derogatory remarks about Africans being intellectually inferior to Europeans in his correspondence with fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). It is important to understand, though, that neither Darwin nor Wallace considered intelligence to be any more desirable than any other phenotypic trait for members of any species to possess. They always recognised that nature has no trait hierarchy, simply favouring those traits that conferred a greater chance of reproduction in a specific environment. In his 1890 paper ‘Human Selection’ for example, Wallace (who considered this to be his most important work) had written:

"Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent."

Wallace also considered such people to fall short in the moral stakes too, writing of his distaste for those who were comfortable risking human life and health by employing people to perform dangerous occupations in the service of their bank balance. Wilson (2017) nevertheless accuses Darwin (and by implication, Wallace) of having deliberately devised a belief system tailored to suit the “the Victorian well-to do” (like Darwin himself) in order to convince them that their success in life was fully deserved. As Americans are apt to exclaim, "wait, what?". We started with a discussion of Coulter's charge that Darwin was responsible for Victorian-era communism. Now, apparently, one of Coulter's peers is telling us that Darwin was responsible for making Victorian capitalists feel good about themselves. Can't these Christian fundamentalists ever get their story straight? To such intellectually childish minds the English biologist Richard Dawkins is probably considered the living person most under the malign spell of Darwin. So how well does his view comport with Wilson's? From 'River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life' (1995):

“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, or any justice.”

One might be forgiven for concluding that Wilson has not only not read Darwin or Wallace, he hasn't read Dawkins, either. Dawkins’ view of the implications of evolutionary theory is surely the very antithesis of what Wilson is claiming Darwin was attempting.

​Darwin (along with the rest of his extended family, without exception) was a notable opponent of the slave trade. The phrase often employed by the anti-slavery movement "Am I not a man and a brother?"  was actually coined by Darwin's grandfather, the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, who had it engraved on mass produced china cameos alongside an image of a kneeling black man in chains. Wedgwood, along with Charles Darwin's other grandfather, the physician Erasmus Darwin, founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and financed the 1791 campaign against buying sugar from slave plantations. Later, in 1824, following the deaths of Josiah and Erasmus, both the Wedgewood and Darwin families provided significant financial support to the Anti-Slavery Society run by the politician William Wilberforce. Ironically, Wilberforce's son Samuel, a Church of England Bishop, was to become became an ardent and public opponent of Darwin's scientific findings.

Charles Darwin did not depart from his extended family on this matter and made no secret of his wish that the Confederate States would lose the American Civil War. In Darwin's correspondence, he tells of his sharing a cabin with the captain of the Beagle, a devout Christian with a missionary zeal named Robert FitzRoy, en route to the Galapagos Islands. FitzRoy refused to carry anyone aboard his ship who did not agree to attending a daily worship conducted by himself.  Although they were in agreement on many scientific matters, they argued on the subject of slavery to such an extent that Darwin chose to eat alone and seriously considered leaving the ship. Fortunately for him (and for science) the gun-room officers invited him into their cabin whereupon FitzRoy sent a naval officer with a written apology and request that they remained sharing a cabin. It is ironic that Darwin collected his specimens and made the field notes that were to form the basis of evolutionary theory while having a six-day Biblical literalist as his closest companion. Years later, after Darwin had published his work on evolution, and Fitzroy's faith had become even stronger, he became wracked with guilt at the part he had played in Darwin's discovery of "the abomination of evolution" writing that it had caused him "acutest pain" and attending public meetings concerned with evolution in order to argue the case against.

While at medical school in Edinburgh Darwin came across the work of a black taxidermist, a freed Guyanese slave, and asked if he would teach him his art. He later wrote in his autobiography:

"By the way, a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had travelled with Waterton, and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently: he gave me lessons for payment, and I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man."

Darwin counted Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers (the first federally organised African-American regiment, made up of emancipated slaves, which fought in the American Civil War), as a good friend and had him stay in his home. Writing to him on February 27th 1873 Darwin praises Higginson's 1870 book 'Army Life in a Black Regiment' and goes on:

“I always thought well of the negroes, from the little which I have seen of them; and I have been delighted to have my vague impressions confirmed, and their character and mental powers so ably discussed”.

Higginson wrote two further books, ‘Common Sense About Women’ (1881) and ‘Women and Men’ (1888), in which he advocated gender equality in all spheres of life. Regarding slavery Darwin had previously written in 1833 to Catherine Darwin:

"I have watched how steadily the general feeling, as shown at elections, has been rising against Slavery. What a proud thing for England, if she is the first European nation which utterly abolishes it. I was told before leaving England that after living in slave countries all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the negro character”.

He wrote a very similarly worded sentiment the following year to the clergyman and geologist, John Stevens Henslow. Darwin also tells us that when he doing his field work aboard the ‘Beagle’ he enjoyed the company of the three' westernised' natives from Tierra del Fuego every bit as much as his own countrymen and remarks:

“I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the "Beagle," with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours.”

That very same line later appears in 'The Descent of Man' when Darwin discusses alleged differences between the 'races'. He was obviously not averse then, when occasion permitted, to mixing with other races and treating them as his equal. More likely he suffered, as we all surely do, from a strong whiff of cultural supremacy, suggested by his also writing about how much he disliked native Fuegan culture. So, it is obvious from Darwin's published work and his personal correspondence that Lively (2017) is veering far from the truth when he writes:

"In the late 1850s, Darwin emerged as the ideological savior of the African-slave-owning world.”

And it is equally untruthful to insinuate, as Wilson (2017) has, that Darwin was "secretely sympathetic to slavery." Certainly, this is not a charge that has emanated from within Darwin's lifetime. Really, if his sympathies were so secret that his peers were unaware, what are we to make of the motives of someone who makes such a claim nearly a century and a half after his death? And how long is it, I wonder, until we encounter quotes allegedly emanating from Darwin himself, to the effect that he agreed with slavery all along, but kept his thoughts secret?

Nevertheless, Darwin could be extraordinarily naive about what he was told by native peoples. For example, The Beagle and its crew were the first Europeans to set eyes on the Yamana people of Tierra del Fuego. In a letter to Caroline Darwin (12th April, 1833) he wrote:

"These Fuegians are Cannibals............Jemmy Button [one of the three 'westernised' Fuegans] told Matthews, a long time since, that in winter they sometimes eat the women...........the other day a Sealing Captain said that a Fuegian boy, whom he had, said the same thing...........it is difficult to disbelieve two such distinct explicit accounts & given by boys.— Was ever any thing so atrocious heard of, to work them like slave to procure food in the summer & occasionally in winter to eat them.— I feel quite a disgust at the very sound of the voices of these miserable savages."

Note that Darwin reports no observed instances of cannabilism. That Darwin and his compatriots had been duped by these boys was confirmed by Lucas Bridges, who was born in Terra del Fuego in 1874 (along with three of his siblings). The son of the English Christian missionary Thomas Bridges, his family had settled there permanently three years earlier. According to Bridges' 1948 book 'The Uttermost Part of the Earth', the Fuegans lied to Darwin because they had learned that this was the kind of behaviour Europeans had come to expect of 'savages'. That the Fuegans had never practiced cannibalism was confirmed by the archeologist and anthropologist Samuel Kirkland Lothrop (1928). In the end it was the Europeans who were the more savage. Well-armed sheep farmers and repeated measles epidemics killed many Fuegans. By the 1930s their culture had become extinct. 

One particularly fanciful notion held by Gobineau was that Aryans were descended from a primeval people from Northern India who had originally lived an ideal ‘Rousseau-esque’ existence and it was from these origins that all the major human cultures such as Ancient Egyptian and Greek, Roman, Chinese and pre-Columbian American, had flourished. He wrote that, "history springs only from contact with the white races." All these societies had eventually failed, he believed, because the Aryan bloodline had eventually become diluted by interbreeding with the other two inferior races. Only the Germanic peoples were deemed to have enough of the original Aryan bloodline left to be able to reconstitute a pure Aryan race once again. This would obviously require an end to all interacial breeding in order to reduce the previous ‘deleterious’ effects of Darwinian natural selection. Gobineau observed this process of racial dilution being continued in 19th century Europe as a result of colonisation and for this reason he opposed Europeans becoming too involved in other cultures, lest the pure Aryan bloodline was further diluted and purity become even more unattainable. Gobineau was not particularly anti-Semitic, however, and in ‘Inequality of the Human Races’ wrote at some length in praise of the “free, strong, and intelligent” Jewish people who had succeeded despite their “natural disadvantages”. Obviously these opinions were anathema to the Nazi party and they heavily edited this aspect of his work in their own material designed for public consumption.

Although he wrote ‘Inequality of the Human Races’ before Darwin had published ‘The Descent of Man’, Gobineau lived for another eleven years after Darwin’s findings became available and would certainly have become aware of how Darwin so strongly negated polygenist ideas and notions of racial hierarchies. Despite having ample opportunity to defend his ideas, however, he chose not to do so, writing only fiction and historical texts in his remaining years. Although Darwin was responsible for first outlining the actual mechanism by which natural selection has effect, it is only fair to mention that notions of ‘speciation’, that plants and animals (including humans) had changed over vast amounts of time, existed long before Darwin’s findings, originating as far back as Ancient Greece with philosophers such as Anaximander, Empedocles and Aristotle.

Having been a diplomat in the French mission in Tehran, and a keen and knowledgeable student of oriental culture (he wrote a history of the Persian people and was the first European to publish on the Baha’i faith), it is almost certain that Gobineau would also have been aware of the views of early Islamic thinkers on the subject of the common ancestory of humans. Compared to the Bible the Qur'an contains a relatively incomplete chronology of creation. In particular, the ‘six ayums’ it supposedly took Allah to create the seven firmaments plus the Earth do not equate to the six days outlined in a literal interpretation of Genesis. Ayums tend to be defined as developmental stages, each of which is of an indeterminant time. It is not uncommon for Islamic scholars to consider the concept of the six ayums to be consistent with the scientific evidence for the timeline of the universe. Thus notions equating to the silliness of Christian young Earth creationism are comparatively recent concepts in Islam. Having an indeterminate and potentially extended timeframe at their philosophical disposal resulted in a number of early Islamic scholars producing texts that anticipated both abiogenesis and modern evolutionary theory. The prolific Arabic author Al-Jahiz (c. 776-869), for example, in his lavishly illustrated seven-volume 'Kitab al-Hayawan' ('Book of Animals’) suggested a form of ‘Lamarkian’ inheritance in which environmental factors caused a ‘struggle for existence’ resulting in the survival of stronger bloodlines by the transmission of inherited characteristics (see e.g., Shah, unpublished manuscript; Stott, 2012)

This has provided fertile ground for yet another Christian fundamentalist (and Islamic) Darwin myth. We now have him learning Arabic from the Cambridge University linguist Samuel Lee (1783-1852), reading Al-Jahiz in the original Arabic (yet to be translated into English) and then deliberately plagiarising his ideas. Unfortunately for the purveyers of this assertion, Darwin knew no Arabic at all and and, in any case, he records meeting Lee on one occasion only, for the duration of a dinner party only. Wilson (2017) makes a particularly strong charge of plagiarism, referring to Darwin's:

“............inability to come clean about….......his debts to previous scientists” due to his “driving ambition to become the English Humboldt” and a “towering ambition..........to be a universal genius”.

But this argument is easily refuted. First, as the historian of biology Peter Bowler (2003) reminds us:

"Such efforts to denigrate Darwin misunderstand the whole point of the history of science..........Simple priority is not enough to earn a thinker a place in the history of science: one has to develop the idea and convince others of its value to make a real contribution. Darwin's notebooks [available since 1967 in their entirety, despite the erroneous claim made by Wilson that some remain missing] confirm that he drew no inspiration from........any of the alleged precursers."

Bowler is correct on this important point; scientific discoveries as comprehensive as biological evolution have never derived solely from the ideas of a single individual; for science stands on the shoulders of giants. Second, in the third edition of 'Origin of the Species' Darwin added 'An Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species' in which he lists thirty people who had conveyed similar notions of evolution before him and who he acknowledged had been of influence. In the fourth edition he added eight more.

By way of an example of Wilson's historical inaccuracy we need look no further than his claim that Darwin entirely ignored the prior work of Edward Blyth. Considered an expert on both the bird species of India (with several species named after him) and artificial breeding techniques of farm animals, Blyth had published an article in 1835 briefly outlining a proposal as to why some species had become extinct and others flourished. A number of fundamentalist Christian institutions, such as 'Answers in Genesis' agree with Wilson that Darwin deliberately plagiarised Blyth. Yet, contrary to these allegations, we know that in February 1855 Darwin initiated contact with Blyth by writing to him and between then and 1869 the two men exchanged letters on no less than 57 occasions. In none of these correspondences does Blyth accuse Darwin of plagiarising his ideas, nor even discuss the matter. Indeed, their mutual respect is obvious and Darwin referred to Blyth in the very first chapter of 'Origin of Species' as:

"Mr Blyth, whose opinion, from his large and varied stores of knowledge, I should value more than that of almost anyone."

Furthermore, the reference section of Darwin's book 'Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication' (1868) shows that Blyth is, by far, the most cited author. To compound Wilson's inaccuracy, Blyth was initally an old-earth creationist. In 1837 he had written of:

"...........an eternal and ever-glorious Being which willed matter into existence [with humans as] the last act of creation upon this world."

Twenty years later, it is clear from their correspondence that the primary influence was from Darwin to Blyth. In a letter dated February 19th 1867, for example, Blyth relates to Darwin his hypothesis that humans had descended from primates related to gibbons. But more importantly than shoddy historical research and vested interests in demonising Darwin, surely the claim of plagiarism (regardless of the alleged progenitor) acts to dispel the credibility of the Darwin-Hitler link? For, if Darwin's scientific findings weren't actually his, what would be the point in finding fault with Darwin the man? Surely, none of Darwin's personal faults can be attached to his findings (and their alleged ramifications) if they weren't even his findings in the first place?

The concept of a separate creation for each of the human races was, as Gobineau continually affirms, a distinctly Christian notion, although to be fair the majority of Christians did not adhere to that belief until the African slave trade became established and needed to be defended on moral grounds. While the Qur'an posits a sharp distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims, teaching, for example, that Allah loves all true believers and comparing unbelievers to the lowest of animals for whom just about every type of sanction is permissable, there is no similar delineation made on the basis of a biological concept of ‘race’ anywhere in Islamic teachings. In contrast to the Nazis the Jews are generally only considered lower beings on the basis of their (lack of) faith, not their ‘race’. This Islamic ‘colour-blindness’ was certainly recognised in the mid-19th century. For example, a Dr. Browning (a member of the London Abolition Convention) recounting his experiences of travelling in Islamic countries in the ‘Pennsylvania Freeman’ of August 6th, 1840 noted that:

"There was one circumstance connected with the East that was peculiarly interesting, and that was, that there they knew of no distinction of color; they had no nobility of skin. White men, of the highest rank, married black women, and black men frequently occupied the highest social and official situations."

Commenting on Browning's observations, Josiah Priest (1843) was, of course, in no doubt this was an abomination:

"Oh, how happy a thing it would be, in the estimation of this man, would the Americans only pattern after the Mahometan, in this thing, and thus confound the two colors, black and white, and sin against God."

So, despite Gobineau having ready access to contrary views from both another religion and from scientific investigation, he seemed unwilling to modify his view that the ‘races’ were created separately and that the Biblical Adam was the progenitor of only the Aryan race. Hitler’s attitude was no different, by allowing himself to be guided by Gobineau rather than Darwin, he was effectively opting for a racial view of humanity based on religious faith and romantic ideals rather than scientific evidence. Accordingly, in ‘Rassenpolitik’ (a government published photobook issued in 1942 credited to Heinrich Himmler, and which attempted to explain Nazi racial policies in a ‘scientific’ way to the German people), no mention is made of ‘Darwin’, ‘Darwinism’ or of ‘natural selection’. There is mention, however, of Gobineau and of Gregor Mendel and of course some typical Nazi un-Darwinian pseudoscientific nonsense. Some extracts:

“Gobineau recognized with sure perceptiveness the danger of race mixing........We owe to these Nordic scientists this revolutionary knowledge: Humanity is not equal............Racial differences are physical, spiritual, and intellectual............Gregor Mendel was the first to discover the laws of genetics.............Genetics tells us that characteristics are passed unaltered from generation to generation, and that spiritual and other characteristics are inherited along with physical ones”

Similar pseudoscientific gabble can be found in Brennecke's 'The Nazi Primer' colloqually known as the'Hitler Youth Manual' which also purports to explain Nazi policy in scientific terms, this time to teenagers. This book is repeatedly claimed to provide evidence that the Nazi Party's ideology was based on Darwinian principles. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once again, the terms ‘Darwinist’, ‘Darwinian’, ‘Darwinism’ and the actual term ‘natural selection’ occur nowhere. Darwin himself is mentioned once – in a single sentence in Chapter 3 – the word ‘evolution’ is similarly mentioned only once – in that very same sentence. This is the context:

“………types today have developed gradually out of the older forms. This assumption is in fact generally accepted today after experiments have demonstrated that race and consequently species transformation occur on the earth. The study, which has to do with this question, is called the study of evolution. Closely associated with it is the name of the Englishman Charles Darwin (1809-1882).”

And that’s it. That’s the totality of the mention of the man claimed to have provided the scientific basis for Nazi racial policy. Simply that Darwin is “closely associated” with the concept of biological evolution. There is far more mention of Gregor Mendel, including a brief biography and a surprisingly accurate, lengthy discussion of Mendelian heritability. Any objective reader would surely conclude that the Nazis were actually pushing Mendel’s scientific findings, not Darwin’s. The book even says as much:

“ ……..we shape the life of our people and our legislation according to the verdicts of the teachings of genetics. Out of the laws of heredity, we have learned something about the nature of races.”

Darwin, of course, knew nothing and wrote nothing about genetics or the laws of heredity. Mendelian biologists enjoyed a much higher status in Germany than Darwinian biologists who, as discussed, found it difficult to get papers published after the Nazi Party science journal published editorials denouncing Darwinian evolution in the strongest of terms. But it gets worse. The manual is replete with religious sentiment and ideology:

“To man belongs his body, his mind, and his soul. These three form a unity. Therefore, in our consideration of races we will investigate not only physical structure, but also mental and spiritual characteristics.............We have learned already that numerous inheritable factors of a bodily, mental, and spiritual sort are transmitted from man to man...............The inheritableness also extends, however, to the diseases of body and soul.”

It is ironic that the distinctly Nazi notion that the soul can be affected by mechanisms of heredity has been taken up by some Christian (particularly Catholic) theologians in recent years. Faced with the overwhelming scientific evidence for Homo sapiens being a branch of the ape family and not descended from only two individuals, requires that they identify at what point in history the first hominid (or first heterosexual pair of proto-humans, or small group of humans simultaneously) was 'infused' with a soul, which is then inherited by their offspring, eventually becoming fixed in the entire species. Such a process would not be visible from fossil remains, as 'ensouled' hominids would not be expected to differ physically from 'soul-less' hominids. Some suggest that the presence of a soul can be determined by the ability to reason and to use that reasoning ability to alter the environment, something which can be observed. Unfortunately, this idea also has obvious Nazi-type leanings. If being 'ensouled' is synonymous with possessing the ability to reason, it follows that human beings who cannot adequately reason either do not have souls, or have inferior souls. And, as the Nazis argued, should be treated accordingly.
​
Back to the 'Hitler Youth Manual': As expected, Hans Günther’s definition of race and his classification of six distinct races (1922) is described in detail, but the main thrust of the argument is standard Nazi creationist and anti-evolution polemic; that the races were created separately, are ultimately immutable, and can only be 'diluted', never completely changed:

“......we believe that races receive their different natures in order to develop them and not to mix them.”

Indeed, much of the discussion of race could have been lifted from a Christian polygenist book from the mid-19th century or a pamphlet aimed at preventing the repeal of US anti-miscegenation laws in the latter half of the 20th century. Further examples from Chapters 2-4:

“A race is a collection of individuals differentiated from every other group (constituted in such a way) by its unique combination of bodily characteristics and soul attributes and continually reproduces its own kind.” 

“In no instance up to this time have environmental influences brought about the formation of a new race. That is one more reason for our belief: A Jew both in Germany and in all other countries remains only a Jew. He can never change his race by centuries of residence with another people, as he often asserts, but just as often contradicts by his own actions.”

“the blood stream of a people can be defiled by being mixed with blood that is essentially and racially foreign to it. Our fostering of a race should prevent these pollutions.”

“Intermarrying with races of foreign blood is as dangerous for the continuance and existence of a people as inheritable internal defects.”

“……….we could make two types of influences responsible for the creation of new races. These have to do with environmental influences or with changes of internal factors. We will see what there is to be said as to both possibilities…………… Only that which is of value in the struggle for life remains permanent………..What we need to learn from these experiments is the following: In no instance up to this time have environmental influences brought about the formation of a new race…………. All arguments and political demands, which are founded on the belief in the power of environment, are therefore false and weak.”

When the Hitler Youth Manual does appear to discuss natural selection (it devotes a whole two out of 320 pages to a bastardised version of the mechanism) it does so in terms of the dangers it poses to maintaining racial purity. The effects of natural selection are claimed to be almost always deleterious and for that reason, they conclude, they should not be encouraged to spread and attempts should always be made to remove the effects from the gene pool. Note the serious discrepancy in reasoning here between the Hitler Youth Manual and the minutes of the Wansee Conference of 1942. In the former, natural selection is claimed to be detrimental to Nazi aspirations as it would lead to a weakening of a race. In the latter it is claimed to be detrimental to Nazi aspirations as it would lead to a strengthening of a race! Arthur Keith appears to have been correct; Hitler and the Nazi Party did not understand evolutionary theory at all.

Another major intellectual influence on Nazism was Chamberlain​ (1855–1927). Chamberlain was a British-born author, son of an admiral, and self-described devout Christian who chose to live in Germany for most of his life and whose second wife was Eva von Bülow-Wagner, Franz Liszt's granddaughter and Richard Wagner's step-daughter. He became a German citizen during the First World War and was awarded the Iron Cross by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Hitler became a close friend of Chamberlain in the last few years of his life and visited him, along with Joseph Goebbels, on a number of occasions in the years 1923-1926 at his home at Bayreuth, at the time Hitler was writing ‘Mein Kampf’. In 1923 Chamberlain wrote to Hitler giving him his blessings (cited Stackleberg & Winkle, 2002):

“Most respected and dear Hitler … That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler – that is proof of her vitality … I can now go untroubled to sleep… May God protect you!”.

Chamberlain became a member of the Nazi Party and penned a number of articles for their journals. And despite possessing a BSc degree and having conducted postgraduate experimental work in plant physiology, Chamberlain repeatedly made it clear that he had no time whatsoever for Darwin’s evidence and thoughts on evolution. Bear in mind when reading the following quotes that Chamberlain is acknowledged to have been a primary ideological influence on Hitler by a number of creationist authors. In a letter to his future mother-in-law Cosima Wagner, written March 9th 1896 (cited Pretzsch, 1934) he stated:

“.........this hair-raising absurdity poisons not only natural science but the whole of human thought: Darwinism rules everywhere, corrupting history and religion; it leads to social idiocy; it degrades judgment about men and things.”
 
And from his philosophical work, ‘Kant’ (1905):

“.........man was said to be descended from the ape; the anatomical impossibility of this is established to-day by a thousand reasons …”

Where else have we read such sentences? Their blunt and erroneous nature – they are as wrong then as they are now – is mirrored by any number of creationist authors and websites today. Chamberlain’s own seminal book (‘Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts’; ‘The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century’; decoriusly described by Robert Richards (2013) as:

“a rich farrago of Goethean sentiment, Kantian epistemology, Wagnerian mysticism, and Aryan anti-Semitism”

was published in 1899, and continued his anti-Darwinian theme along with his own novel ideas on Christianity and no less than 135 pages examining Jewish physiology and character traits. In his introduction, Chamberlain referred to ‘Darwinism’ as:

“a manifestly unsound system”, an “English sickness” and “a craze”. He then goes on to describe it as “the evolution mania and the pseudo-scientific dogmatism of our century”, followed by:

“.......we have seen the idea of evolution develop itself till it spread from biology and geology to all spheres of thought and investigation, and, intoxicated by its success, exercised such a tyranny that any one who did not swear by it was to be looked upon as a simpleton.” 

"Biologists delude themselves with the belief that empirical theories such as those of Darwin are sufficient."

Slightly more florid in style than something that might be published by the Discovery Institute, perhaps, but the sentiment is near identical. In ‘Kant’ (1905) he further wrote:

“the historical sketch with which Darwin prefaced his book is a mere mockery. From the very first sentence Darwin speaks of species as if they were things running about like Tom, Dick and Harry, which any child might see by merely opening its eyes.”

Chamberlain’s hatred of evolutionary theory did not stop at criticism of the science, however. Like Bergman, he disparaged Charles Darwin the man at every opportunity, venting his spleen particularly strongly in ‘Kant’ where he informs us that:

“Darwin.......did not see clearly, and still less did he think deeply” and jibes “Had Darwin...... been in ever so slight a measure a thinker”, and “what a want of reflection disfigures the fundamental thoughts of Darwin and his followers.”

Bergman insists, quite incredibly, in 'Darwinism And The Nazi Race Holocaust' (1999) that Chamberlain was actually pro-Darwin and that Darwin's theory was merely:

"modified by Chamberlain" and "clearly contributed to the death of over nine million people in concentration camps".

Once again, I feel can safely leave it up to the reader to make their own mind up about Bergman's honesty in this regard. However, Bergman's cynical and selective use of history is particularly disingenuous when it comes to Chamberlain. Discovery Institute fellow, biochemist Michael Behe, who claims to have identified irreducible complexity in his book 'Darwin's Black Box' (1996), employing the bacterial flagellum as his flagship mechanism, actually owes a great deal to Chamberlain. For it was Chamberlain, in Chapter 6 of 'Kant' (1905) who first suggested that the bacterial flagellum could not have evolved by Darwinian mechanisms because all of its parts would have been needed from the outset. As usual, Bergman is wrong; it wasn't Chamberlain who modified Darwin, it was Behe who modified Chamberlain.

Unsurprisingly for someone who could not accept Darwin’s scientific findings, Chamberlain also advanced explicitly racist sentiments. There are significant differences in thinking between Gobineau and Chamberlain in this regard, however. While Gobineau was primarily motivated by romantic and scholarly endeavours, and did his best to place his opinions within a distinctly Christian context, Chamberlain, although also a Christian, was far more overtly political. Chamberlain’s view of what comprised the Aryan race was also much wider than that of Gobineau, emphasising a Proto-Indo-European culture linking the northern European Nordics, Celts and Teutons with the southern European Slavs, Greeks, and Latins. He also considered the North African Berber tribes to have originated from Aryan stock. Of course the natural leadership of this racial grouping and of all ethnic groups was considered to be provided only by the Germanic peoples:

“the less Teutonic a land is, the more uncivilised it is..........the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right ... the lords of the world” (1899). 

Further, he championed governance of the Aryan people by a non-democratic, "thought out by a few and carried out with iron consequence”, Catholic-based theocracy:

“the Roman Church is not only a religion but also a secular system of government, and that the Church as representative of God upon earth may eo ipso claim — and always has claimed — absolute power in all things of this world.” (1899).

Unlike Gobineau, Chamberlain held particular disdain for the Jewish people, typically pronouncing (1899) à
la Luther that:

“Their existence is sin, their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life” and “all that is derived from the Jewish mind, corrodes and disintegrates what is best in us” and, apparently unaware of the irony, described Judaism as “a religion of exclusive self-assertion and fanatical intolerance”. 

As a result of his comprehensive analysis of the Jewish character, he became certain that Jesus could not have been a Jew, but a Galilean of Aryan descent. One peculiar perception he had of Jews was that they were more likely than Christians to become atheist:

“theists become in the twinkling of an eye atheists, a strikingly common thing in the case of Jews …” Of course, this conversion was not so prevalent in Germans as “…...for us (Teutons) God is always in the background”. (1899).

Hitler, with his characteristic hatred of both atheists and Jews, picked up on Chamberlain’s idiosyncratic Jewish-atheist link and later included it as a criticism of the Jews in ‘Mein Kampf’. He also accepted Chamberlain’s view that Jesus was not a Jew.

Hitler would have had more than the historical views of Luther or the contemporary views of Chamberlain to influence him, however, as virulent anti-semitic and anti-evolution feelings were not confined to Germany. They were particularly prominent in the United States among Baptist preachers. Perhaps the best known was the previously mentioned William Bell Riley, founder of the World Christian Fundamentals Association. He was also the founder and long-time director of the Northwestern Bible School in 1902 (shut in 1966 and reopened in 1972 as Northwestern College) which at the time of his death in 1947, aged 86 years, was the second largest Bible college in the world. Riley was a staunch advocate of the inherent and scriptural superiority of the white race (contributing numerous articles, along with George M. Price, to the openly racist magazine 'Defender') a rabid anti-Semite and a hater of evolutionary theory. He regularly praised Hitler throughout the 1930s on his weekly radio show broadcast throughout the United States, sharing such gems as:

“There is no question in my mind that Hitler is an instrument of God with help from on high."

Thereby mirroring the opinions of his Christian comrades across the pond, such as Deissmann, Kittel, Hirsch and Althaus. Similarly, Riley asserted that Hitler had “snatched Germany from the very jaws of atheistic Communism" and supported his efforts to "foil the nefarious Jewish plot" (cited FitzGerald, 2017). Other influential fundamentalist Christian organisations, such as the Moody Bible Institute held similar opinions. Their popular magazine 'Moody Monthly' published a large number of readers letters praising Hitler for both his Christian moral values and sound political management. The following example comes from October 1935:

"To the Editor:
After much prayer to our Saviour, I send you this word. I think you very much for your article in June about our brethren in Germany. God bless you that you give justice to Adolf Hitler, that you do not misjudge him. He tries as best he knows how to help Germany. You know that he was a Roman Catholic and he still knows little about the Bible. But he studies the New Testament, and we who know Christ as God and Saviour who died for our sins on the cross, love him, and we have to pray for him and not to believe everything his enemies speak about him. I am a German. Two years ago I was on a visit in Germany for three months. All my relatives live in Germany. They are Christians that believe in the shed blood of Christ for our sins. They praise Hitler. They have full freedom to preach Christ crucified for our sins. We believe that Christ will come soon and that He will be merciful to Hitler too. Hitler’s father was a drinker, but Adolf lives with his mother and is a very good son. I am an old woman and pray for the coming of the Lord.
Sincerely yours,
Hedwig Nabholz"

The author of this letter was apparently unaware that Hitler's mother had died 28 years earlier. Another popular fundamentalist Christian periodical, 'King's Business' regularly published editorials and articles extolling the Christian virtues of Hitler, such as these excerpts from March 1934:

“Hitlerism is preferable to atheistic Sovietism……..the Bolshevik Jew is of atheistic Jewry – not to Orthodox Jewry. The Bolshevik Jew, hater of all that is called God, naturally is a sworn enemy of his own believing brethren.”

“Hitler is to be commended for preventing an orgy of bloodshed and destruction, the object of which would have been the annihilation of the people of God in that land.”

The second extracted quote is certainly premature in its praise. By the 1930s several US states had small towns, often with a high percentage of inhabitants with German ancestry, that made no attempt to disguise their leanings toward Nazism. Perhaps the best example is that of Yaphank in Suffolk County, approximately 100 kilometres from New York City. Here, main streets were renamed after Hitler and Goebbels and numerous houses proudly flew swastikas on their front lawns. Until 1941 the town was also home to Camp Siegfried, modelled on similar ventures organised by Hitler Youth, where Aryan youth, strictly Christian youth only, naturally, were domiciled and schooled in the moral and political virtues of Nazism.

Riley, and many of those like-minded, maintained their public admiration for Hitler until the United States government made it plain they were on the side of the allies. Realising that he would be perceived as unpatriotic, and lose his legal right to show allegiance to Hitler, as well as having to deal with a manifesto against anti-Semitism signed by 50 fundamentalist pastors, Riley in 1940 did an abrupt about-turn and started referring to the Nazis as “pagans” and "evolutionists". He then proceeded in 1941 to publish his pamphlet 'Hitlerism: Or the Philosophy of Evolution in Action' in which he referred to Hitler a "Beast-Man" though, tellingly, declining to make any comment at all regarding Hitler's treatment of the Jews (see Riley, 1942).

In 1934 in the basement of his church Riley published and widely distributed ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ (known in Germany as the 'Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion') a fraudulent, anonymously authored pamphlet first published in the Russian anti-Semitic magazine 'Znamya' between August 26th and September 7th 1903. It purported to have uncovered the Jewish plan for the global economic domination and slavery of all non-Jewish peoples. It was part-plagiarised from a French satirical work entitled 'Dialogue aux Enfers Machiavelli et Montesquieu' ('A Conversation in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu'; 1864) by the journalist Maurice Joly, intended as a savage critique of Napoleon III. Protocol 2:3 of the Protocols states:

“Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche-ism. To us Jews, at any rate, it should be plain to see what a disintegrating importance these directives have had upon the minds of the Goyim [non-Jew]”

The document was already widely available in Europe in the early 20th century (and has become popular again in some Islamic countries such as Egypt). Hitler was certainly taken in. In Chapter 10 of the first volume of 'Mein Kampf' he labels the work as “authentic” (as, initially, did the 'London Times' in May, 1920) and goes on:

“To what an extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion.........with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.”

The Italian philosopher Julius Evola (1898-1974) had provided a foreword to the 1938 edition in Italy where he described the Protocols as a "spiritual tonic", even though it was widely known that he was dubious as to the authenticity of the document. Like Riley, Evola was pro-European, an anti-Semite and determinedly anti-Darwinian. His influential 1941 book 'Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza' ('A Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race'; re-published in Germany in 1943 after he fled there following the allied invasion of Italy), despite offering a far more esoteric version of racial theory than the Nazi pseudoscientific Christian model, was nevertheless considered recommended reading for Nazi intellectuals partly due to Evola's praise for the spiritual ideals of Himmler (who he considered a personal friend) and the SS (he considered the moral basis for the SS and the Jesuits to be near identical), but also because of his consistent criticism of Darwinian theory and 'biological materialism' generally, as well as political democracy. In his 1958 book 'Metaphysics of Sex' he further expounded his philosophy of 'de-evolutionary spiritual racism':

"Our starting point will be not the modern theory of evolution but the traditional doctrine of involution. We do not believe the man is derived from the ape by evolution. We believe that the ape is derived from man by involution........We concur with the various researchers........who have rebelled against the evolutionary dogma."

The Protocols pamphlet had previously been published more than ten years earlier than Riley's edition in the United States by car-maker Henry Ford through his Dearborn Publishing Company, which was forced to cease trading due to the large number of lawsuits they attracted due to anti-Semitic editorials and articles which libelled several prominent Jewish-Americans. In 1927 Henry Ford was forced to issue a public apology for publishing the Protocols, admitting that they are “gross forgeries.” James Gray, then editor of Moody Monthly, subsequently wrote an editorial claiming that Ford's apology was evidence itself of the hold the Jews had over the legal system. Riley, too, would have been perfectly aware of its fraudulent nature. In 1935 the 'Federation of Jewish Communities in Switzerland' sued a pro-Nazi group who were also publishing the pamphlet. During the trial in Bern several Russian witnesses testified that the document was fake. This was reported in newspapers throughout the world.

Nevertheless, after Riley did cease publication three years later, the Protocols were republished by the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin, in his newspaper 'Social Justice'. To do this, he received financial help from Henry Ford (which is doubly ironic, as Ford also took a dislike to Catholics, referring to them as "slaves of Jews" after a Catholic lawyer had represented a Jewish businessman suing Ford for libel) and, it has been claimed, from Nazi Germany also. This is entirely feasible. Coughlin was an influential member of the pro-Nazi Christian Front. By far the largest chapter of the Christian Front was in Boston, led by Francis Moran. As in Germany, the Christian Front organised boycotts of Jewish businesses and were also responsible for numerous serious assaults on Jewish citizens, including children. Moran was a personal friend of the German Consul-General in Boston, Herbert Scholz, an SS officer and confidante of Heinrich Himmler. The transcript of the Nuremburg War Trials has Scholz speaking about his close relationship with Moran and how the SS had funded the Christian Front's office in the expensive Copley Square Hotel until 1940 when the FBI closed down the Christian Front as a terrorist organisation.

Like Riley, Coughlin had a nationwide radio show, with an audience estimated at up to 30 million, in which he  regularly spewed forth his pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic venom. Despite having been ordered by the Vatican two years previously to tone down his anti-Semitism Coughlin gave a speech in New York in 1938 when, while giving a Nazi salute, he exclaimed:

“When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” (cited Warren, 1996)

Coughlin's claim were no different to those of Chamberlain and Hitler; Marxist atheism was a Jewish plot, this time aimed not at Germany, but against the United States. An investigation by the Department of Justice into the activity of the priest found:

"...there is at least one occasion upon which 'Social Justice' reprinted in almost identical form a speech delivered by Joseph Goebbels. The 'Social Justice' article gave no credit to Goebbels and did not in any way indicate that it was a reprint of Goebbel's speech." (cited Warren, 1996)

The popularity and influence of anti-Jewish rhetoric in the United States at this time was remarkable. When Ford first gained control of the medium-sized weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent in 1919, it was distributed only in the Dearborn, Michigan area and had a circulation of 72,000. After the first anti-Semitic article appeared, however, circulation steadily rose, reaching ten-fold within five years, eventually becoming by 1925, the newspaper with the second-largest circulation in the United States after the New York Daily News, which only surpassed it by 50,000 copies. It was distributed primarily through Ford car dealerships and churches, as well as colleges and schools, often given away.

On March 8th 1923, The Chicago Tribune published an interview with Hitler. When asked about the possibility that Henry Ford might run for President, Hitler responded:

“I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian fascist platform. We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany”.

Hitler was referring to Ford’s compilation book, 'The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem' which comprised 91 anti-Semitic articles published by the Dearborn Independent. It was then rebadged as 'The Eternal Jew' in Germany where it sold very well. There were two German publishers, one in Berlin and the other in Leipzig. The Leipzig company, Theodor Fritsch, alone reported that between 1920-22 five re-printings were made and by 1938 they had released 29 editions. The 1923 Chicago Tribune interview with Hitler went on to mention that their reporters could not find a single bookshop in Southern Germany that did not stock Ford’s book. Four years later Samuel Untermeyer, President of The Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, had this to say in the New York Times (25 July 1927):

“Wherever I went on my recent world tour, even into the most remote corners of the earth, in every county, city, and hamlet, the Ford cars were to be found. Wherever there was a Ford car there was a Ford agency not far away, and wherever there was a Ford agency these vile, libelous books in the language of that country were to be found.... These articles are so fantastic and so naive in their incredible fantasy, they read like the work of a lunatic and but for the authority of the Ford name, they would have never seen the light of day and would have been quite harmless if they had. With that name, they spread like wildfire and became the bible of every anti-Semite.”

Not surprisingly, Hitler praised the work of Henry Ford throughout his political career. The New York Times reported on 3rd December 1922 that in Hitler's office in Munich:

"The wall beside his desk is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford. In the antechamber; there is a large table covered with books, nearly all of which are a translation of a book written and published by Henry Ford."

He is the only American to get a mention in 'Mein Kampf' (a single sentence in the first edition only, however) and striking similarities can be observed between some of the passages in that book and 'The Eternal Jew'. In July 1938 Ford was awarded the 'German Eagle Order'. This award, instituted by Hitler himself, was given to non-Germans who had benefitted German society in some way. The benefit was not simply one of support and incentive; by 1942 about a third of all the trucks in the German armed forces had been built by Ford's factories in Germany (Solomon, 2010). Ford's influence was felt way beyond Hitler, however. According to French historian Leon Poliakov (in 'The History of Anti-Semitism Vol. IV: Suicidal Europe'; 1977) Himmler's personal masseur Felix Kersten told him that Himmler's dislike of the Jewish people came only after reading 'The Eternal Jew'. Similarly, the leader of the Hitler Youth Movement, Baldur von Schirach, stated at the International War Tribunal in 1945 that Ford's book had been the primary reason he had joined the Nazi Party at the age of seventeen, adding:

"You have no idea what a great influence this book had on the thinking of German youth.The younger generation looked with envy to the symbols of success and prosperity like Henry Ford, and if he said the Jews were to blame, we naturally believed him."

The respect was certainly not one-sided. Ford's 'right-hand man', Ernest Liebold, who acted as general manager of Dearborn Publishing, placed an order for a commemorative box of 100 swastika tie-pins, to be given as gifts for Ford's like-minded business associates. While Dearborn publications and the views of Ford himself were certainly denounced by ‘liberal’ church pulpits on the east coast of the United States, the more conservative, fundamentalist-style churches in the south and mid-west proved far more supportive. Even the normally circumspect Christian Science Monitor published an unusually lengthy editorial entitled ‘The Jewish Peril’ on June 19th 1920, giving credence to Ford's warnings:

"...........it would be a tremendous mistake to conclude that the Jewish peril, given another name and atmosphere, does not exist. It might, indeed, be renamed, out of one of the grandest of the books of the Old Testament, ‘the terror by night,’ for it is, essentially, the Psalmist’s concept of the forces of mental evil.........In other words, that a secret international political organization exists, working unremittingly by means of its Bureau of Psychology, though the world which should be awake to it is entirely asleep to it."

'The International Jew' remains in publication in the USA, available from the website of the Christian organisation Promise Ministries, where it is described as a "monumental work".

The ‘Protocols of Zion’ appealed to Riley, not only because they provided him with anti-Semitic ammunition but also because he abhorred anything to do with Darwin and evolution, especially when it was taught in schools. He often claimed, in similar manner to the Nazi botanist Ernst Bergdolt, that evolution was no less than "an international Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy”. In 1923 he helped set up the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota which grew within a year to be the Anti-Evolution League of America. The organisation was anti-evolution to what bordered on a perverse level. One of his closest colleagues, Thomas Theodore Martin, author 'Hell and the High Schools' (1923) which included this example of Christian moral sensibilities:

"The German soldiers who killed Belgian and French children with poisoned candy were angels compared to the teachers and textbook writers who corrupted the souls of children and thereby sentenced them to eternal death."

This, of course, was the very same incident applauded by the later to be Hitler-loving Christian theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann. However, while Deissmann had his 'might is right' moral stance to fall back on, one wonders about Martin's conception of God; the psychopath who sends people to eternal death, simply because they had been taught a particular biological theory at school? Martin's deranged sense of morality is made worse by the fact that he didn't understand evolutionary theory, and clearly mistook Darwin's findings for Lamarckian notions (capitalised words are in the original):

"Professor August Weisman of the University of Frieburg "demonstrated beyond all question" THAT ACQUIRED CHARACTERISTICS BY A PARENT CANNOT BE TRANSMITTED TO THE OFFSPRING. Prof. William Bateson of England, the greatest living Biologist, in his address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Toronto, Canada, December, 1921, admitted and stated it positively, THAT ACQUIRED CHARACTERISTICS CANNOT BE INHERITED. Elsewhere he said, "AN ORGANISM CANNOT PASS ON TO ITS OFFSPRING A FACTOR WHICH IT DID NOT ITSELF RECEIVE IN FERTILIZATION." Professor S. C. Schmucker, in "The Meaning of Evolution," p. 261, says: "The blight of the fact that acquired characteristics cannot be transmitted, meets us here." He hits the nail on the head -- "the blight of the fact"; for it certainly blights Evolution -- how can there be evolution from lower to higher species if there is no transmitting acquired characteristics? "How wide must a chasm be before it becomes visible to an evolutionist?" (1923)

Basic misunderstandings of evolutionary theory by fundamentalist Christians, mistaking the ideas of Lamarck and Darwin, are far from historical, however. Wilson (2017) makes the same error, mocking Darwin for assuming that today's long-necked giraffes resulted from short-necked ancestors “panting to reach those leaves, but without success”.

​It is obvious why people like Riley and Martin disliked evolution. If all the ‘races’ shared common ancestry, as Darwin suggested, then state laws promoting racial barriers, which they avidly supported, could be perceived as arbitrary and so difficult to justify on the basis of Biblical knowledge and authority. Naturally, then, the good people of the Anti-Evolution League accepted no "degenerates" among their membership. This included "persons of African origin" (the irony burning particularly brightly here, given what they were protesting against), as well as the more usual "drunkards and fornicators". Of course, along with all their fundamentalist brethren, Riley and Martin believed in the literal truth of Genesis 1:27:

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

And, of course, they were in no doubt as to what God's image entails and it certainly would not be the image of any "degenerate", such as "persons of African origin". The modern day 'Institute for Creation Research' clearly appreciate what Riley and Martin meant. In their article 'Illustrations of Ancient Humans Skew Facts' (2009) author Brian Thomas discusses the work of paleoartist Viktor Deak who, using computer modelling, had created 3D virtual models faces from skeletal structures. Thomas takes exception to Deak's work, because he had:

"............depicted mankind as having emerged, Darwinian style, from a hairy, ape-like ancestor.............The clear message is conveyed, without a spoken word, that humans evolved from dark skinned, wide-nosed creatures.............if Deak had depicted these cretures with light skin, normal lips...........they would have been just as valid, scientifically. But that wouldn't fit with the evolutionary story."

In other words, depicting proto-humans as being 'dark, skinned', 'wide nosed creatures', without 'normal lips', must be wrong because it clashes with the belief that God created man in his own image and that image would certainly not have these three characteristics! It looks like Thomas would have no difficulty getting along with Riley and Martin. To confirm that view, Thomas publised another article the following year, 'Canadian Philosopher Insists 'We Are All African!''. He first outlines what it is he is criticising :

"Philosopher and secular humanist Christopher dicarlo claims that if humans trace their lineages far back enough in time, they will all have an African origin...............DiCarlo figured that if no group has any special status, all humans can embrace their evolutionary origins and be freed of the "hatred, violence and bloodshed."

This is a problem for Thomas because:

"Even if scientific studies show that all people are biologically the same, this does not logically justify his "no special status" claim. God can choose certain people, and that makes them special - unless it is first assumed that there is no God."

So let's recap here. According to Thomas, if you don't believe in God then you have to accept that if "all people are biologically the same" then no group deserves "special status". This is a bad thing. But, if you do believe in God, then "even if scientific studies show that all people are biologically the same" some groups of people can still be "special" if God has chosen them. This is a good thing. Thomas then digs himself into an even deeper hole. Further discussing the "evolutionary ancestor-descendant relationship" he opines:

"They are more accurately interpreted as varieties of mankind who all lived at the same time."

Bearing in mind that Darwin's clonclusion was that:

"the races ought not to be ranked as species...........they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them”

does Thomas' modern day creationist view sound un-Darwinian? Yes, it surely does. Does it sound more like something Hitler might have written? Decidedly so.

One of the first campaigns fought by the Anti-Evolution League of America culminated in the 1925 Tennessee anti-evolution law known as the 'Butler Act', which banned teachers in state schools from denying the Biblical account of human origins. They made no secret in their pamphlets as to why they gave their support. Apart from the fact that evolution questioned the Biblical creation, they also feared that evolutionary theory promoted the notion that the black and white races were equal and belonged to the same species. Indeed, the standard textbook used in Tennessee high schools at that time was George Hunter's 'A Civic Biology' which explicitly listed five 'races' or 'subspecies' in ascending order according to civilisation; 'Caucasians' at the pinnacle, 'Mongolian' in second place, 'American Indian' in third place, 'Malay' in fourth place and 'Negro' in fifth place. It also alluded to polygenism and psudoscience by portraying the notion that interbreeding within a species was genetically detrimental. That emotionally-laden racism was the primary  reason for purveying such nonsense appears to have been well understood in a scathing editorial 'If Monkey's Could Speak' in the 'Chicago Defender', May 23rd 1925 (published during the trial):

"Anything which conflicts with the South's idea of her own importance, anything which tends to break down her doctine of white superiority, she fights. If truths are introduced and these truths do not conform to what southern grandfathers believed, then it must be suppressed.................The Tennessee legislators who passed a law making it a crime to teach Darwinism in that state probably have never read the text themselves and all they know about the subject is that the entire human race is supposed to have started from a common origin. Therein lies their difficulty. Admit that premise and they will have to admit that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise."

Yet again, old habits die hard and as recently as 2005 the influential creationist website 'Answers in Genesis' exhibited similar views to those of Tennessee legislators 80 years earlier. In an article entitled ‘A Wakeup Call to Christians’ authored by Joshua Gilbert, he pointed out the “seriousness of the threat of the theory of Evolution to the Christian Faith”, lamenting the changes that had occurred in the South African education system as the result of the dismantling of the apartheid system. Under apartheid, all state schools followed the Christian National Education curriculum, in which, like Tennessee, teaching of the theory of evolution pertaining to hominids was banned because it directly undermined the Biblical notion that the ‘races’ were separate creations arranged in a divine hierarchy. The ban was rescinded in 1994. As an example of the dangers of “evolutionary indoctrination” Gilbert cites and links to a paper published in the South African Archaeological Bulletin (Esterhuysen & Smith, 1998) which states:

“Christian National Policy stated, amongst other things, that white children should "receive a separate education from black children to prepare them for their respective superior and inferior positions in South African social and economic life, and all education should be based on Christian National principles............Pupils were indoctrinated by the CN [Christian National] world-view through the formal curriculum, which omitted "anti-biblical" concepts such as evolution, made Bible education compulsory and presented a version of history that..."omitted, distorted or vilified the role of blacks, 'coloureds' and Asians in the country's past."

Not surprisingly, both the original article and the link to the paper cited have since been removed from the Answers in Genesis website though not, of course, from internet archiving sites.

A further difference between Gobineau and Chamberlain concerned their view of the current status of the Aryan race. To Gobineau, although the Aryan race was superior in most aspects of human endeavour, other races might have minor superiorities which could be capitalised on by a small influx of blood from other races. However he warned that too much race mixing would result in the dilution in purity of the Aryan race with the ultimate destruction of civilisation. Chamberlain, on the other hand, perceived the Aryan race as enjoying a high level of purity and the object should be to preserve this purity at all costs. Thus Hitler’s attitudes toward other races, and particularly to the Jewish people, as well as his ideas of racial purity appear to have been influenced far more by the anti-Semitic and Darwin-phobic Chamberlain than by the Darwin-ignoring Gobineau. Arguably, Hitler also portrayed far more in common with Americans like Ford, Coughlin, Riley and Martin than even Germans such as Fischer, Lenz and Weinart.

‘The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century’ was distributed to all German libraries on the instructions of Kaiser Wilhelm II and included in the German school curriculum. It was later considered recommended reading by all Nazi Party members simply because Hitler was so impressed by it. Not surprisingly, given this level of recommendation, it sold extremely well; surpassing 60,000 copies within 10 years, 100,000 copies by 1914 and 24 editions and more than 250,000 copies sold by 1938. On September 9th, 1925 the official Nazi Party newspaper dedicated five columns to Chamberlain to honour his 70th birthday, describing his book as the "Gospel of the Nazi movement".

A third influence on the Hitlerian worldview, albeit with a much more chequered history, is that of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Haeckel was a polymath with particular expertise in biology and zoology, rising to Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the University of Jena where he spent 47 years. Impressed with Darwin’s work at an early stage he wrote, rather sycophantically, to Darwin in July 1864:

“Of all the books I have ever read, not a single one has come even close to making such an overpowering and lasting impression on me as your theory of the evolution of species ........Since then your theory — I can say without exaggerating — has occupied my mind every day.”

Haeckel's own book ‘Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte’ or ‘The History of Creation’, first published in 1868, was marketed in Germany as an attempt to explain Darwin’s ideas to the general public. It was not an accurate description of its content, nor of Haeckel's career. Although he is often painted as the man who did more than anyone else to promote the work of Charles Darwin in Germany, Haeckel’s views on biology in general and on human origins in particular can be considered no more than semi-Darwinian. Although certainly an enthusiastic proponent of the general concept of evolution, in no sense can he be realistically labelled a ‘Darwinian’ as, crucially, he did not believe that natural selection was the method by which evolution progressed. He was also a polygenist.

Despite these most basic scientific disagreements between Haeckel and Darwin there is no shortage of Christian fundamentalist authors who try to convince their readers that the two men were not only in complete agreement, but in cahoots. In order to do so they often invent their own definitions of what a ‘Darwinist’ is (or was), which are invariably far broader than would be accepted by mainstream biologists and historians. For instance, in their paper ‘Haeckel: Legacy of Fraud to Popularise Evolution’, published in the ‘Journal of Creation’ (where else?), Finnish authors Ojala and Leisol refer to Haeckel as “a Darwinian demagogue”. This is nowhere near being true. By his own admission, Haeckel’s view of evolution was far more Lamarckian than Darwinian. To be considered a Darwinian in the first half of the 20th century required, at a minimum, acceptance of three of Darwin’s claims re humanity. First, that Homo sapiens comprised a single species. Second, that Homo sapiens were a branch of the primate family and had evolved from a common ancestor shared with modern non-human primates. Third, that the evolution of Homo sapiens had been mediated by natural selection. Haeckel accepted the first claim in part only (while Hitler accepted neither of the first two claims and made no comment at all on the third). Indeed, according to George Uschmann (1979; then director of the Ernst Haeckel House), when Thomas Huxley edited the English translation of Haeckel's earlier book 'Generelle Morphologie' he removed, at Darwin's request (being ever the gentleman; and with Haeckel's agreement), large segments of Haeckel's grossly acidic views on others who had contributed to the field and with whom he disagreed. In the end, the book was reduced to less than half its size and was never published in that form. The historian of science, Lynn Nyhart (1994) has also discussed the distinct differences in direction that Darwin's and Haeckel's work took in the decades following publication of 'Origin of Species'. Thus, as Gasman (1971) reminds us:

"Haeckel's Darwinism is a vast transformation of what Darwin wrote and stood for."

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the French naturalist credited as the first to suggest explicitly that human beings had evolved from the ape lineage. His book ‘Philosophie Zoologique’ published in 1809 contains the following paragraph:

“Certainly, if some race of apes, especially the most perfect among them, lost, by necessity of circumstances, or some other cause, the habit of climbing trees and grasping branches with the feet..…and if the individuals of that race, over generations, were forced to use their feet only for walking and ceased to use their hands as feet, doubtless … these apes would be transformed into two-handed beings and … their feet would no longer serve any purpose other than to walk”.

This passage demonstrates key differences between the views of Lamarck and Darwin. Lamarck is suggesting that speciation was caused by phenotypic changes occurring during an organism's lifetime due to use and/or disuse, then being passed on to future generations (thus the inheritance of 'acquired characteristics’; it was this hypothesis that T.T. Martin, founder of the Anti-Evolution League of America erroneously took Darwinian evolution to be). Darwin, on the other hand, hypothesised something very different; that advantageous traits would appear more often in future generations simply because the individual organisms having that advantageous trait would be more likely to reproduce (i.e., ‘naturally selected characteristics'). Strictly speaking, however, no selection actually takes place, and it is actually disadvantageous traits being removed from the gene pool that shapes subsequent generations. Although Darwin shows great respect for Lamarck in his publications, it is clear from his private correspondence that an early repudiation of his views was the case. This from a letter he wrote to the English botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker on January 11th, 1844:

”Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a “tendency to progression” “adaptations from the slow willing of animals” &c,—but the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his."

Darwin disagreed particularly with Lamarck’s further notion of directed variation, or an underlying teleological process to evolution which would always flow in the same direction, and which had enabled a selected ‘lower’ form of life to eventually become a ‘higher’ form of life (humans being, of course, the highest). It was not that Darwin outright rejected the notion of evolutionary progress, at least in his early work. As he wrote in the penultimate paragraph of ‘Origin of the Species’:

“.......as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection”

This is highly unusual wording for Darwin as his main premise for direction in natural selection was that it tends toward fecundity, nothing more. Darwin was, of course, a theist when he wrote ‘Origin of the Species’ and it likely that this passage might simply reflect his (perhaps remnant) beliefs. He had, however, written earlier in the text:

“It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact”.
 
Nevertheless, this sole suggestion of teleology in Darwin's writing was naturally picked up by Chamberlain (1905) in one of the very few times he finds himself able to mention the name without providing an accompanying polemic:

“Darwin specially recommends his theory for our acceptance in that it also promises to mankind that all corporal and mental endowments will tend to progress in the direction towards perfection”.

Unlike Darwin, who conducted extensive fieldwork, Lamarck’s ideas, as the title of his work suggests, were largely philosophical and he presented far less original data. In essence, Lamarck took a theological approach. He concluded that progress had occurred in one deity-favoured human lineage while Haeckel suggested very few lineages. Bearing in mind that both Lamarck and Haeckel perceived the human ‘races’ as separate lineages it was not a huge leap, then, to view the ‘lower’ races as having been exposed to difficult environmental conditions for so long that significant progress in their "direction toward perfection" was unlikely. Haeckel never came to fully accept a Darwinian view and kept to a Lamarckian outlook even after Gregor Mendel’s (1822-1884) work on trait inheritance demonstrated that Lamarck was wrong and Darwin was right. Haeckel may well have been someone’s demagogue, but he was certainly not a Darwinian demagogue.

Nowhere else in Darwin’s work (or in later mainstream biology for that matter) does there exist the notion that evolution tends to “progress in the direction towards perfection”. This was well appreciated even during both Haeckel and Hitler’s lifetimes. Even if there was some kind of teleological force directing evolution it would appear to be an incredibly wasteful process, as 99% of the species ever evolved have since become extinct and the remaining modern species are riddled with examples of how evolutionary mechanisms have driven phenotypic changes by ‘piggy-backing’ on existing structures, often resulting in inefficiencies that no good designer would countenance. The notion of biological teleology also raises an important question: when is this perfection reached and evolution then (necessarily) end (and what or who is it that decides)?

Haeckel did agree with Darwin that human beings had evolved from a common ancestor shared with modern apes, albeit thinking the cradle was in Asia rather than Africa. He departed from Darwin’s ideas far more seriously, however, in that he was also an adamant polygenist, unable to accept Darwin’s view that all human races were members of not only the same genus but the same species. Like Gobineau and Chamberlain he was also resolute in his support of the notion of a superior Aryan race. He categorised human beings first crudely by their hair type and wrote that those people with ‘woolly-hair’, such as Africans, as opposed to ‘straight-hair’, such as northern Europeans, were:

“.......incapable of a true inner culture or of a higher mental development..........only among the Aryans was there that “symmetry of all parts, and that equal development, which we call the type of perfect human beauty.” (1868)
 
He then went on to identify a hierarchy of ten distinct sub-species of humans, going so far as to label each separately within the genus Homo. In his numerous human tree diagrams, Caucasians (Aryans or ‘Homo mediterraneus’) were, of course, always at the top and negros always at the bottom of the ladder. Perhaps most surprising given the appeal he is supposed to have had for those of a Nazi persuasion was his consistent placing of the Jews at or very near the highest rungs of the ladder. For unlike Chamberlain, Haeckel was not nearly as anti-Semitic, if he could even be considered such at all, becoming known for his ‘Judenfreundschaft’, or friendliness toward Jews.

In 1894 the Austrian journalist and dramatist Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) published a series of interviews on the subject of anti-Semitism with several dozen of the leading contemporary European commentators, including Haeckel. Haeckel told Bahr that despite having students who were anti-Semitic, several of his good friends were Jewish and they were “admirable and excellent men”. He then went on to praise educated Jews:

“I hold these refined and noble Jews to be important elements in German culture. One should not forget that they have always stood bravely for enlightenment and freedom against the forces of reaction, inexhaustible opponents, as often as needed, against the obscurantists And now in the dangers of these perilous times, when Papism again rears up mightily everywhere, we cannot do without their tried and true courage”

Haeckel displayed other relatively liberal views for his time. In the last decade of his life Haeckel befriended the Jewish physician and sexologist, Magnus Hirshfeld (1868-1935), founder of the ‘Scientific Humanitarian Committee’, now considered the first advocacy group in the world for homosexual and transgender people (he also coined the term transvestite). His book ‘Naturgesetze der Liebe’ or the ‘Natural Laws of Love’, published in 1912, in which he contended that homosexuality was an innate part of human sexuality and therefore perfectly natural, was dedicated to Haeckel after he had read the proofs and praised them. Sexually liberal notions such as these proved too much for Nazi fascist, religious and pseudoscientific sensitivities; 'Der Informationsdienst' even published an article in 1938 'Staatsfiende sind Auszumerzen' ('Eradication of National Enemies') which claimed that Jewish people were more likely than Aryans to be homosexual. Within a year of coming to power Hitler had Hirshfeld’s ‘Institut für Sexualwissenschaft’ (Institute for Sexual Research) closed down. The standard archival newsreel of the Nazi book-burnings that was distributed throughout the world is believed to be of Hirschfeld's library and records. Hirshfeld was in France at the time and died in Paris two years later.

Another interesting feature of Haeckel’s tree diagrams was that of the relative position of the ‘races’. They appear to have been malleable, not because of new scientific findings, but according to the effect Haeckel thought the ranking might have on his reputation. For example, earlier versions of his human tree show native Americans near the top, ahead of the Asian ‘races’. They were, however, relegated in favour of the Japanese ‘race’ when his books were translated into Japanese. Native Americans never did regain their lost position, forever placed lower than the Asian peoples in subsequent versions. Even after Darwin had suggested otherwise, Haeckel always maintained the presumption that some sort of racial hierarchy existed. Again from ‘The History of Creation’:

“ … the morphological differences between two generally recognized species - for example sheep and goats - are much less important than those … between a Hottentot and a man of the Teutonic race”.

Darwin would have been either bewildered or appalled, likely both. Similarly from Haeckel’s book ‘Die Lebenswunder’ (‘The Wonders of Life’; 1904):

“the lower races, such as the Veddahs or Australian Negroes, are psychologically nearer to the mammals, apes and dogs, than to the civilised European. We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives......their only interest are food and reproduction......many of the higher animals, especially monogamous mammals and birds, have reached a higher stage than the lower savages”.

The notion that sheep and goats, whose offspring are invariably stillborn, are closer in an evolutionary sense than two humans, such as an African and a European, who would ordinarily have no problem in achieving viable offspring, is obvious nonsense even to someone with no knowledge of phylogenetic trees. Nowadays, of course, there is an agreement among biologists that the concept of ‘species’ can effectively be defined by genetic relationship and ability to reproduce. In the late 19th century, however, the nature of a ‘species’ had yet to be so exactly determined. Darwin himself acknowledges this in Chapter 2 of ‘Origin of Species’:

“no one definition (of species) has as yet satisfied all naturalists” but then goes on to say, “yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species”.
 
Defining a ‘species’ by the ability of two of its members to successfully breed was certainly not alien to Haeckel. As with Gobineau, Chamberlain and Hitler, however, he appears to have decided to ignore evidence contrary to his views. The idea was first mooted in Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1889 book ‘Darwinism’. Briefly, he (correctly) proposed that natural selection contributes to reproductive isolation and that over time two populations can become reproductively isolated and eventually become two distinct species. When it came to humans, though, Haeckel appears to have dismissed any role for reproduction in his view of what constituted a species or sub-species, arbitrarily choosing perceived differences in language development as the delineating factor:

“With each of these human species, language developed on its own and independently of the others..…If one views the origin of the branches of language as the special and principal act of becoming human, and the species of humankind as distinguished according to their language stem, then one can say that arose independently of one another." (1868)

Note that Haeckel’s culturally-based approach to defining “the different species of men” is, paradoxically, species-specific; it could not be used to sub-categorise any other species of animal.

So we can see a general two-fold trend of un-Darwinian thought running through Christian polygenists, such as Gobineau and Chamberlain, Haeckel and finally Hitler; that humans are not a singular species but made up of subspecies (or even different species) and that some subspecies are somehow more ‘advanced’ than others and so exceptional. However, in order to substantiate an ideological link between Darwin and Hitler requires that one or more people acted as important intermediary influences. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least that there is no evidence that Hitler actually read any of Darwin’s works. Also, given that he was unsuccessful at any academic pursuit, even if he had read Darwin, it is questionable whether he would have sufficiently understood the material to have gained enough insight to be able to put the ideas into practice. Gobineau could not have been an intermediary as his relevant work was written too early and, in any case, he ignored Darwin’s work. It was certainly not Chamberlain - he absolutely hated Darwin and all he stood for. The task, then, is left to Haeckel. However, evidence for this role has proven a highly contentious issue.

Notwithstanding the debate between Weikart and Gasman (who both accuse Haeckel of providing the link) and Robert Richards (who staunchly defends Haeckel), the problems in establishing an ideological link between Haeckel and Hitler are threefold. First, and most importantly to this discussion, Haeckel’s heart was never really into being a ‘Darwinian’. Although he was certainly a champion for the concept of evolution he never accepted that natural selection was the mechanism by which it operated. As mentioned, it is really not feasible to consider someone a ‘Darwinian’ if they outright deny natural selection, despite the arbitrary and inconsistent definitions of 'Darwinist' employed by creationists such as Weikart, Ojala and Leisola. Redefining terms to suit the argument is, of course, commonplace in Christian fundamentalist literature and particularly noticeable in books written by 'fellows' of the Discovery Institute. Nonetheless, the same practice is pounced on when the argument does not suit their agenda. For example, when Weikart reviewed Richard Steigmann-Gall’s book 'The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity' in 'German Studies Review' in 2004 he had the audacity to complain:

"Many German pantheists used religious, even Christian, terminology, but they often redefined it." 

This is a typical ploy of Weikart's; attempting to divert culpability away from Christianity by relabelling the obviously religious members of the Nazi Party as pantheists and pagans. Second, and this surely cannot be stressed enough; Haeckel was a polygenist. It is just not possible to be both a polygenist and a 'Darwinist'. Third, although Hitler would have had no difficulty with Haeckel’s basic racial ideology, he would certainly have taken umbrage (and did, as we shall see) with most of Haeckel’s political and philosophical beliefs.

One particularly tenuous line of evidence linking Haeckel to Hitler is his alleged membership in 1918 to the Thule Society. This claim was initially made by Gasman (1971) and has been repeated in a number of fundamentalist Christian publications since then. It is pertinent because the Thule society sponsored the ‘Deutsche Arbeiterpartei’ (‘German Workers Party’) who, under Hitler’s tutelage, became the National Socialists. Gasman describes them as “a political-theosophical-astrological-anti-Semitic secret organization.” Which is what they were and more; they actually believed that Aryans had descended from various deities. Despite their support for the German Workers Party the Thule Society included a number of aristocrats in their membership and were wealthy enough to purchase 'Munchener Beobachter' ('Munich Observer'; later renamed 'Völkischer Beobachter' or 'People's Observer') a large circulation newspaper which they used to publish pro-Nazi articles. To be accepted as a member the following oath was required (von Sebottendorf, 1933):

"The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races".

The similarity with the membership requirement for the Anti-Evolution League of America is obvious. Rudolph Hesse, was a prominent member, as was the Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg. Despite claims to the contrary, however, there is no evidence that Hitler himself ever joined, nor stepped foot inside their hallowed halls (Goodrick-Clarke, 1985). Nor is there any evidence that Haeckel was a member. For a start, Haeckel was not anti-Semitic, at least to that degree, and was far too much of a philosophical naturalist to have anything to do with mumbo-jumbo as esoteric as theosophy, astrology or descent from deities. In addition, at the supposed time of his membership Haeckel was an invalid - he was to die within a year - and was unable to leave his home. The society did, however, list a painter named Ernst Häckel as a member and we can distinguish between the two because the latter actually wrote to the former on a few occasions and these letters were kept by Haeckel and are currently archived.

Unlike Gobineau and Chamberlain, Haeckel was not particularly enamoured with any of the Christian churches, especially Catholicism, and could be pugnacious in his dealings with clergy. One story goes that after he gave a lecture at the International Freethinkers Conference in Rome in 1904 the Pope was so incensed as to what he said that he ordered a "divine fumigation" of the auditorium. Nevertheless, Haeckel did continue as a member of the German Evangelical Church, regularly paying his dues, until 1910 when he wrote an article announcing his resignation. In Haeckel’s ‘Monist’ view, organic and inorganic substances are different only in the relative sense. In essence they are identical. This sole primordial substance was even considered to include the concept of God. In other words the universe, including all its tangible and intangible manifesations, is ultimately made up of one substance only, which remains always inseparable. The theological consequences are obvious: there is no place for the existence of the soul separate from the universe itself. It is surprising, then, to note that the first president of the Monist League, formed in 1906, was the Protestant churchman Albert Kalthoff (1850-1906) and, initially, the institution was run along the lines of a church. The Nobel laureate in chemistry, Wilhelm Ostwald, even gave regular Monistic Sunday Sermons, later published in several volumes. The organisation became increasingly pacifist and socialist as well as atheistic. This trio of policies was, of course, complete anathema to Hitler and so the Monist League voluntary disbanded when he came to power, their members fearing that they would be persecuted.