In this post we
continue our consideration of the eugenic nature of Adolf Hitler’s notorious
political manifesto ‘Mein Kampf’. Part I can be read here.
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| Adolf Hitler |
The first post in our long-running series on eugenics began
with a consideration of the work of
Thomas Robert Malthus because even though
Malthus was not himself an advocate of eugenics his writings on over-population
form one of the fundamental foundations of the movement. We have already seen
that when
Margaret Sanger was seeking a new ideology following her
disillusionment with Marxism she turned to
neo-Malthusianism. A similar
sequence of events can be seen in the life of Adolf Hitler. After his failure
to gain entry to Vienna’s prestigious School of Art he went through a succession of
menial jobs and, according to his eugenic manifesto
Mein Kampf, spent almost all his spare time reading, particularly
on social and political questions. He became disillusioned with much of
contempory discourse because it did not address the question of human population
growth and the ‘racial quality’ of that population. “Germany” he wrote “has an annual
increase in population of nearly nine hundred thousand souls. The difficulty of
feeding this army of new citizens must grow greater from year to year and
ultimately end in catastrophe, unless ways and means are found to forestall the
danger of starvation and misery in time.”
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| Margaret Sanger |
There is a remarkable unanimity between Hitler’s and Sanger’s
views about the inevitability and consequences of overpopulation. The solutions
they proposed however were somewhat different. Sanger sought to limit
population growth through the rigorous control of human reproduction,
particularly of those groups deemed ‘unfit.’ Hitler however was a more
consistent follower of Darwin.
In
Mein Kampf he rejects the view
that ‘the increase of births could be artificially restricted’ because he
thought it preferable to allow ‘natural selection’ to take its course; the weak
would fall before the strong and the evolution of the Aryan race would continue
on its course. ‘Therefore’ he wrote ‘anyone who wants to secure the existence
of the German people by a self-limitation of its reproduction is robbing it of
its future.’ Hitler in fact wished to see the German population grow as much
possible and hoped that the ‘problem’ of over-population would be solved by
conquering new territories. For Hitler’s ‘Aryan race’ over-population was not a
problem; it was weaker subject races who would have to perish to make way for
them. Many of us were taught at school that Hitler’s desire for
lebensraum (living space) in the east
was a central plank of his political programme and was one of the most important motivations
behind his conquest of Poland
and invasion of the Soviet Union. It is far
less likely that we were informed that the basis of this Nazi policy was the
Malthusian myth of overpopulation that has, for more than two centuries, had
such a malign influence over all aspects of academic, political and popular
culture.
To be continued…
