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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," and declared that this meant lasting and inevitable war. His view was that, "Conquering by the sword is a way of bringing civilisation to barbarism and knowledge to ignorance." 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…"43
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."44
In the 1933 Nuremberg party rally, Hitler proclaimed that "a higher race subjects to itself a lower race… a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right," because it was founded on science.45
Hitler, who maintained the superiority of the Aryan race, believed that the superiority of this race was given to it by nature. Dr. Henry M. Morris, former president of the Institute for Creation Research, quoted in one study the following from Hitler’s Mein Kampf:
The Jews formed a sub-human counter race, predestined by their biological heritage to evil, just as the Nordic race was designated for nobility… History would culminate in a new millennial empire of unparalleled splendour, based on a new racial hierarchy ordained by nature herself.46
Hitler, who thought that human beings were highly developed animals, was obsessed about improving the human race and believed that he needed to manage or keep control of the so-called process of evolution.. 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, the race they believed to be superior.
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.