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The Nazis again used Darwinist concepts to allegedly prove the superiority of the Aryan race. Darwin had proposed that as people evolved so their skulls grew larger. The Nazis embraced this idea fiercely and set about taking skull measurements to show that the German race was superior. In all corners of Nazi Germany comparisons were made showing that German skulls were larger than those of other races. Teeth, eyes, hair and other features were evaluated with evolutionary measurements. Individuals found not to match up to German race measurements were to be exterminated in the name of the principles of eugenics.
All this madness was carried out in the name of implementing Darwinist principles on society. The American historian Michael Grodin, author of the book The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, reveals the reality in this way:
I think what happened was that there was a perfect match of Nazi ideology and Social Darwinism and racial hygiene as it developed in the turn of the 20th Century.53
George Stein explains the subject
National socialism, whatever else it may have been was ultimately the first fully self-conscious attempt to organize a political community on a basis of an explicit biopolicy: a biopolicy fully congruent with the scientific facts of the Darwinian revolution.54
The famous evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith comments on Hitler as follows:
The German Führer is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.55
The author of the book Darwin: Before and After, Robert Clarke, concluded, Adolf Hitler: "…was captivated by evolutionary teaching – probably since the time he was a boy. Hitler reasoned … that a higher race would always conquer a lower."56 The political philosophy of Nazi Germany took shape under the influence of these ideas of Hitler's.
The author of the book Race and Reich, Joseph Tenenbaum noted that the political philosophy of Germany was built on the belief that critical for evolutionary progress were:
… struggle, selection, and survival of the fittest, all notions and observations arrived at … by Darwin … but already in luxuriant bud in the German social philosophy of the nineteenth century. … Thus developed the doctrine of Germany's inherent right to rule the world on the basis of superior strength … [of a] "hammer and anvil" relationship between the Reich and the weaker nations.57
Adolf Hitler was not alone among Nazi leaders in his "war of ideological evolution." Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, "stated that the law of nature must take its course in the survival of the fittest." In fact, all of the Nazi leaders were committed both to evolution and Germanic racism, as were most German scientists and industrialists during those dark years.58