Taki Magazine

There is a facile temptation to think of Nazi anti-Semitism as an expression of Christianity and Christian theology—“applied Christianity”, if you will.  But even a cursory examination of Nazi writings and policies shows that this is far from the truth—on the contrary, the campaign to exterminate the Jews grew out of the world view of secular materialism, of evolution and the exaltation of the natural over the supernatural, and was in fact an extreme expression of “applied Darwinism.”

In the past there have been many persecutions of the Jews in Christian countries. These persecutions fell into one of three categories.  Some were mob actions, inflamed expressions of blood lust and fury.  Tragically, many of these were incited by pseudo-Christian exhortations to avenge the death of Christ, or by related blood libels against the Jews (most particularly accusing them of the human sacrifice of Christian children).  The pogroms and the rampaging mobs of the Crusades fall into this category.  However, the Holocaust does not.  The slaughter of the Holocaust was not produced by momentary mob hysteria, but was a calculated, “rational”, long-term campaign plotted by sober, if deranged, minds.

The second category consists of campaigns to produce a Christian society and a Christian state free from the “immoral” (because un-Christian) influence of the Jews.  The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 falls into this category.  These persecutions were predicated on the idea that Jews were deficient in virtue because they lacked the grace which is only available through baptism and the other sacraments.  Baptized – that is, converted – Jews were always welcome, and exempt from the persecution.  The Inquisition was related to this second category of anti-Jewish campaigns.  In order to avoid the forced expulsion from Spain, a large number of Jewish families had pretended to convert to Christianity, while continuing to practice the Jewish religion in secret.  It was these “crypto”-Jews, known as Marranos, who were targets of the Inquisition; not as Jews – for the Inquisition always acknowledged that it had no authority at all over non-Christians – but as heretical, or false, Christians.  As a fight against heresy and sacrilege within the Catholic Church, the Inquisition pursued only Christians. The Marranos, by participating in the sacraments and pretending to be Christian, fell into the purview of the Inquisition. They were unfortunately also heretics because of their Jewish beliefs, and committed sacrilege whenever they participated in the sacraments.  This brought the wrath of the Inquisition down upon them.  Yet it was not based on their being Jewish, but on being false Catholics.

The third category of persecutions of the Jews flowing out of Christianity is represented by laws and actions which were aimed at getting Jews to convert to Christianity.  These campaigns were rooted in Christian theology as understood at the time and motivated by goodwill. (Recent Catholic teaching makes clear that it is always wrong to use coercion to bring about conversion—see Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae).  Since, as it was believed at the time, there was no possibility of Heaven for the unbaptized, it was thought an act of charity to the Jews to do everything possible to bring them to convert to Christianity and so save them from damnation.  These persecutions, aimed at the conversion of Jews, bear no relationship to a campaign to eradicate the Jewish race from the earth, because of their race.  Not only were Christians of Jewish origin spared during these persecutions, but they were the expressed goal of it.

With this background one can see the very different character of the Nazi persecution of the Jews.  Rather than being aimed at “saving” the Jews by bringing about their conversion, or “protecting” Christian culture or morals from the lack of virtue of the unbaptized, its sole aim was the eradication of the race as a race, the freeing of the world from the “taint” of Jewish blood.

The issue was not the religion of the Jew; it was the racial identity.  It was not the apostasy of Judaism which was to be wiped out, but the Jewish race (or “gene pool”).  Being baptized was not an escape; in fact, being born and raised Christian, by parents who had already converted to Christianity, did not make the slightest difference to being marked for extermination – the only issue was being of “Jewish blood.”  The campaign to exterminate the Jews was a eugenics program, done to free the world of the scourge of the Jewish race.  The undesirable characteristics of the Jews were intrinsic; it was not their Jewish faith, or their refusal of Christianity, that made them offensive, but simply their race.  Germany and the world was to be purified of the pollution of Jewish blood as part of the campaign to improve the human race and create a nation of “supermen” through selective breeding. It was applied Darwinism, not applied Christianity. Hitler himself expressed his ideas in the terms of Darwinism:

“Whoever, ignores or despises the laws of race…places an obstacle in the victorious path of the superior race and, by so doing, he interferes with a prerequisite condition for all human progress.” (quoted in Nora Levin, The Holocaust, Schocken Books, 1973, p. 41).

In a 1934 conversation with two Protestant bishops, Hitler emphasized that the problem with the Jews was one of race and not religion:

“The church must get used to the doctrine of blood and race.  Just as the Catholic church could not change the fact that the earth goes round the sun, so the church could not do away with the irrefutable facts which are given in blood and race.  Unless they recognize that, developments will simply pass them by.” (Klaus Scholder, A Requiem for Hitler, Trinity Press International, Philadelphia, 1989, pp. 174-75 citing H.A.Oberman, Wurseln des Antisemitismus, Berlin, 1981).

When Hitler came to power in 1933, many in the eugenics movement viewed it as a triumph for their science.  In June Hitler set up the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy, and on its recommendation enacted, on July 14, 1933, a law requiring compulsory sterilization for those who carried hereditary conditions or diseases, including feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, alcoholism, and epilepsy.  Under this law German doctors sterilized nearly 400,000 people.  The “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” enacted two years later, which prohibited marriage between Germans and Jews, was more eugenics, this time to protect the German blood from contamination from “subhuman” Jews (in the words of the Reich). 

In 1939 Hitler set up an advisory committee to institute a program to euthanize disabled children saying, “If Germany were to get a million children a year, and was to remove 700,000 to 800,000 of weakest of them, the final result might even be an increase in strength.”  Later that year all state governments received the order that “Children up to the age of three who are retarded or deformed must be registered by midwives or physicians, and a questionnaire must be completed describing their disability.”  On the questionnaire the child’s case was assessed, and a “plus” or “minus” placed to indicate whether the child was to be allowed to live, or be killed. Clinics were set up throughout Germany to euthanize the children by injection, oral drugs, or by the cessation of feeding. The program eventually included children up to twelve years old. The committee also initiated a program, carried out by the“T4” group (named after its headquarters at 4 Tiergarten Strasse) which “euthanized” between 70,000 and 100,000 inmates of German mental institutions. At the Nuremberg trial, the total number of euthanasia victims was estimated at 275,000.  [Sources for above 2 paragraphs: Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, “The Euthanasia Program,” The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Vol II, Macmillan 1990, pp. 451-454; Nora Levin, The Holocaust, Schocken Books 1973, p. 302; Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Papermac, London, 1986, p. 142; and Stephen B. Saetz “Eugenics and the Third Reich” in The Eugenics Bulletin, Winter 1985.]

Eugenics was central to Hitler’s philosophy.  In Mein Kampf Hitler attributes all of the ills of a nation to its failure to impose eugenics:

“Whether we consider questions of general justice or cankers of economic life, symptoms of cultural decline or processes of political degeneration, questions of faulty schooling or the bad influence exerted on grown-ups by the press, etc., everywhere and always it is fundamentally the disregard of the racial needs of ones own people or failure to see a foreign racial menace.” (Mein Kampf, Trans. Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1974, p. 297.)

The Nazi campaign to eradicate the Jews was a massive eugenics program, a diabolical attempt to apply Darwinian principles to society.  As such, its ideological support came not from the proponents of Christianity, but from the proponents of eugenics, i.e. of “planned parenthood.”

For the great proponent of eugenics in the English-speaking world was none other than Margaret Sanger, the foundress of “Planned Parenthood.” She was unabashed in her atheism as well as her promotion of eugenics.  Below the masthead of her magazine, Woman Rebel, ran the slogan “No Gods, No Masters.”

It is not difficult to see the similarities between her politics and those of the Third Reich.  The following paragraphs are from Blessed are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood, by Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan, (Ignatius, San Francisco, 1991, pp. 1-2):

At a March 1925 international birth control gathering held in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the “black” and “yellow” peril.  The man was not a National Socialist (Nazi) or a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The speaker was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood. Another doctor at this conference lamented that preventive medicine was saving the lives of “worthless unfits,” and he seriously suggested that euthanasia be used to “dispose of some of our utterly hopeless dependents,” but noted that this could not happen until the public changed its “prejudices” on the subject…

Elsewhere Sanger spoke of her plan for sterilizing those she designated as “unfit” as the “salvation of American civilization”. And she also spoke of those who were irresponsible and reckless’’, among whom she included those “whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers”. She further contended that “there is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped”. Whether this was to be accomplished “voluntarily” does not appear to have been a serious policy impediment.

That many Americans of African origin constituted a segment the Sangerites considered as “unfit” can be denied only with great difficulty and in the face of policies that affirm this assumption. At one point Sanger expressed a fear that Negroes might think birth control a clever extermination project, but that selected black ministers could dispose of that idea.

Sanger’s other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists.  One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy. Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as “scientific” and “humanitarian”. And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member of her group, described Slavic and Italian immigrants as “even inferior to our native Negro population not long released from slavery”. Laughlin also spoke of purifying America’s human “breeding stock” and purging America’s “bad strains”. These “strains” included the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South”.

Laughlin apparently was the inspiration for the Nazi compulsory sterilization law passed in 1933. Under its provisions, nearly two million people were forcibly sterilized from 1933 to 1945. (ibid, p. 135)

A number of individuals had high profiles in both Margaret Sanger’s and the Third Reich’s eugenics campaigns. Lothrop Stoddard, mentioned above, in his 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy depicted a slowly increasing white race being overwhelmed by more rapidly increasing “colored” races.  This was apparently so consonant with Sanger’s views that she appointed him to the board of the Birth Control League, the forerunner of Planned Parenthood.  In a later book he noted that the Nazis succeeded in increasing “both the size and the quality of the population”, with a “drastic curb of the defective elements… weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”(Lothrop Stoddard, Into The Darkness: Nazi Germany Today, 1940, pp. 190-91.)  Hitler met Stoddard and was so favorably impressed that he had Stoddard’s writings given great prominence in Nazi school textbooks; so much so that Goebbels, the Reich minister for propaganda, jealously complained. 

Another contributor to Sanger’s Birth Control Review with deep ties to the Third Reich was Ernst Rudin.  He was the director of the foremost German eugenics research institute, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy in Munich.  When Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick established the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy on June 2, 1933, he included Rudin.  This was the committee which recommended the law on forced sterilization law enacted July 14, 1933.  In an address to the German Society for Race-Hygiene, Rudin said:

“The significance of Rassenhygiene [Race-Hygiene]  did not become evident to all aware Germans until the political activity of Adolf Hitler and only through his work has our 30 year long dream of translating Rassenhygiene into action finally become a reality…We can hardly express our efforts more plainly or appropriately than in the words of the Fuhrer: ‘Whoever is not physically or mentally fit must not pass on his defects to his children. The state must take care that only the fit produce children.’” (William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research, 1994, Univ. of Illinois, p. 121.)

Rudin echoed this in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review: “The danger to the community of the unsegregated feeble-minded woman is more evident. [They] should be prevented from procreation.  In my view we should act without delay.” (Birth Control Review, Volume XVII,  Number 4 (April 1933),  pp.  102-04.)

Another board member and associate of Margaret Sanger’s who approved of concentration camps and forced sterilization was Dr. Harry Laughlin, a supervisor of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. In Sanger’s Birth Control Review, he wrote:

“If it is agreed that certain individuals are so degenerate in their hereditary properties that offspring procreated by them would, in high probability, rank as defective or degenerate persons… then it would seem to be the duty of organized society to prevent their reproduction. If such prevention is accomplished by institutional segregation [i.e. prisons or concentration camps] … then sexual sterilization is not necessary. If, however, the degenerate individual is physiologically able to reproduce, and is not restrained from doing so by effective segregation, then the surest way to prevent reproduction would seem to be to destroy the physiological capacity to reproduce. This has been done in many cases.” (Harry H. Laughlin, “Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization,” Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 3, March 1928, p. 78.)

“In the future the several states may well look toward the establishment of a still higher biological standard for the legalization of parenthood. Race betterment, whether in plants, animals, or man, is never achieved with our radical elimination from parenthood of the strains which show hereditary degeneracy… Segregation and eugenical sterilization are sound and legal instruments for preventing reproduction by the most defective strains…. “(Harry H. Laughlin. “Eugenical Aspects of Legal Sterilization.” Birth Control Review, Volume XVII, Number 4, April 1933, p. 87.)

It is obvious that the “improvement” of the race through eugenics was a primary focus of Sanger’s efforts.  Among the titles of articles published by her were “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The Purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), and “Birth Control: The True Eugenics”. In her view, eugenics was the ultimate goal of birth control: “Birth Control is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator…the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization…The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective.” (Birth Control Review October 1921, see Blessed are the Barren, pp. 8-9) ; and “Birth Control… is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method… the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.” (Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization,  Brentano’s Press,  NY,  1922,  p. 189.)  This was in fact explicitly the purpose stated for the New York State Planned Parenthood in their bylaws: “to develop and organize on sound eugenic, social and medical principles, interest in and knowledge of birth control…”  (Blessed are the Barren, p. 25.)

Her plans for a national eugenics program consisted of the same elements found in that of the Third Reich – forced sterilization and concentration camps (which she referred to euphemistically as “separation” or “segregation”).  Consider the following points from her “Plan for Peace”, published in her Birth Control Review (April 1932, pp. 107-108):

“d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring…

“f. to give certain dysgenic [i.e. genetically undesirable]  groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.

“g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives….

”[W]ith five million mental and moral degenerates segregated…we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.”

This debased philosophy was, of course, diametrically opposed to the values of Christianity and, realizing this, Sanger saw the Christian churches, and the Catholic Church in particular, as her worst enemies.  Consider the following quotes from her Birth Control Review:

“The Catholic Church is the bigoted, relentless enemy of birth control…This [birth control] movement threatens its hold upon the poor and the ignorant, and probably only the existence of restraining laws prevents it from applying the thumb-screw and the rack to all those who believe in woman’s right to practice voluntary motherhood.” (Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 6, June 1918, p. 16, editorial comment.)

“The fight for Birth Control becomes increasingly a fight against the usurpations of the Roman Catholic Church.” (“The World We Live In,” Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 4 (April 1924), p. 99)

“Our only real enemy is the [Catholic] church.” (“Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, M.D., on Birth Control,” Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 4 (April 1924), p. 115)

“I ... look forward to seeing humanity free some day of the tyranny of priests no less than of capitalists.” (Walter Adolphe Roberts “Birth Control and the Revolution,” Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 6 (June 1917), p. 7)

The contrast between Sanger’s philosophy and Christianity is also apparent in her views on charity and helping the poor:

“Organized charity itself is. . .  the surest sign that our civilization has bred,  is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives,  delinquents and dependents…[Nothing is] more insidiously injurious than…to supply gratis medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers.”  (Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization. Brentano’s Press,  NY,  1922.  pp. 108, 114)

Associating the Holocaust with a Christian ethic is exactly backwards.  The extermination of the Jews by the Third Reich did not flow out of Christianity, but out of a philosophy directly opposed to Christianity and all that it stands for, one introduced by Darwinism and epitomized in our country by Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger. The Holocaust owed nothing to the principles of “Christianity”; it owed everything to the principles of Margaret Sanger and “Planned Parenthood.” 
This article is excerpted from Salvation is From the Jews, by Roy Schoeman (Ignatius Press, San Francisco: 2004), with the kind permission of the author.