Nazism was born in the chaos of the Germany which emerged defeated from the First World War. The leader of the party was the angry and aggressive Adolf Hitler. Racism formed the basis of Hitler's world view. Hitler believed that the Aryan race, the fundamental element of the German nation, was superior to all the other races and had to rule them. He dreamed that the Aryan race would found a world empire that would last 1,000 years.

The scientific support Hitler found for these racist theories was Darwin's theory of evolution.

Hitler's most important idea-moulder, the racist German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, was strongly affected by Darwin's theory of evolution and based his racist views on Darwinism. He used to say, "Nations can only develop by violent competition like Darwin's survival of the fittest," He thought: "The yellow races have no understanding of artistic ability and political freedom. It is the destiny of the black races to serve the whites and to be the target of the whites' loathing for all eternity…" [1]

While Hitler was developing his theories he drew inspiration, like Treitschke, from Darwin and particularly Darwin's idea of the fight for survival. The title of his notorious book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") was inspired by the idea of this fight for survival. Just like Darwin, Hitler gave non-European races the status of monkeys, and said, "Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of apes." [2]

Hitler thought that human beings were highly developed animals and instead of allowing natural forces and chance, in a word coincidence, to control evolution, it was necessary to take the management of it into his own hands to develop the human race. And this was the ultimate aim of the Nazi movement. In order to realise this aim, the first step was to separate, to isolate, the inferior races from the Aryan race.

At this point the Nazis moved to the implementation of Darwinism, and took as their example the "theory of eugenics" which itself had its origins in Darwinism.

The theory of eugenics, which emerged in the first half of the 20th century, meant the weeding out of sick and handicapped people and the "improving" of the human race by increasing the number of healthy individuals. According to the theory of eugenics, in the same way that better kinds of animals can be produced by mating healthy animals with each other, so the human race could be improved in the same way.

As might be expected, those who put forward the eugenics programme were Darwinists. At the head of the eugenics wave in England came Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, and his son Leonard Darwin.

It was clear that the idea of eugenics was a natural result of Darwinism. In fact, this truth was awarded special importance in those publications which supported eugenics, "Eugenics is man's taking charge of his own evolution," it was said.

In Germany the first person to be influenced by and to spread eugenics was the famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was a close friend and supporter of Darwin. He suggested that newly-born handicapped children should be killed forthwith and that this would speed up the evolution of society. He went even further, claiming that lepers and people with cancer and mental illnesses should be painlessly killed, or else these people would be a burden on society and would slow down evolution.

Haeckel died in 1919. But his ideas were inherited by the Nazis. Shortly after Hitler came to power an official eugenics programme was initiated. Hitler summed up the new policy in these sentences:

In the popular state, the education of the mind and the body will play an important role, but human selection is just as important. …The state has the responsibility of declaring as unfit for reproductive purposes anyone who is obviously ill or genetically unsound. … and must carry through with this responsibility ruthlessly without respect to understanding or lack of understanding on the part of anyone. …Stopping reproduction of the bodily degenerate or psychically ill for a period of only 600 years would lead …to an improvement in human health which can hardly be envisaged today. ……… [3]

As a necessity of this policy of Hitler's, the mentally ill, the disabled, the blind from birth, and those with genetic diseases in German society, were rounded up in special "sterilisation centres." These people were regarded as parasites harmful to the purity and evolutionary progress of the German race. A while later in fact, these people who were removed from society began to be killed by secret order of Hitler.

These murders were presented as perfectly reasonable and those who were accepted as genetically inferior were described as "unprofitable" and obstacle to the development of the nation. Hitler said. "It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on." [4]