I recently finished Richard Weikert's outstanding book From Darwin to Hitler (2004). Weikert has written a tour de force in which he argues compellingly that the Nazi holocaust was not an isolated historical aberration but was rather a logical consequence of the conflation of two streams of thought that had been flowing through Germany for seventy years.
The first stream was an increasing secularism that reduced Christianity and Christian morality to an irrelevance. The Christian emphasis on compassion for the weak, poor, and oppressed was supplanted by an emphasis, deriving in large part from Neitszche, on strength and will. The Christian belief that morality was grounded in the will of a benevolent, omniscient God was replaced with the belief that morality was a product of the struggle for advantage among groups competing for their very survival. Once German intellectuals lost faith in a transcendent moral authority it was but a short step to an egoistic, pragmatic version of might makes right.
This meshed neatly with the conlusions of a Darwinian world-view which stressed the survival of the fittest, the inferiority of some kinds of people vis a vis others, and the possibility of improving the fitness of the human species through genetic selection and the removal of competitors.
These ideas manifested themselves in the 19th century in the German eugenics movement which sought to improve mankind through selective breeding and the abortion and euthanization of the sick, infirm, and deformed. As the twentieth century approached more German scholars and opinion makers extended these principles to the competition between races so that "inferior" peoples were seen as subject to the Darwinian laws of extinction. It was no distance at all from there to the conclusion that war against the inferior kinds of humans was morally justified in Darwinian and Neitszchean terms.
In a secular world might makes right and the interest of the stronger is the only defensible ethic. Survival in the competition for resources and living space was ipso facto proof of one's fitness and the ends of survival and dominance justified any means for many prominent Germans prior to the 1920s.
Weikert doesn't simply assert these historical and philosophical trends, he documents them from the writings of numerous infuential German thinkers from the 1860s through the 1920s. In fact, if the book has a shortcoming it is that after awhile the mountain of evidence Weikert amasses begins to get in the way of reading the history.
The author is at pains to insist that Darwinist materialism doesn't necessarily lead to Hitler. It might not have, of course, but what he shows beyond cavil is that the path that history followed was indeed widened, paved, and lit by the ideas of Darwinists and atheists following their assumptions to what they saw as their logical conclusions. It was an historical march made much easier by the demise of a robust Church in Germany and by the notion that any morality worthy of the name had to be grounded in the improvement of the human species.
Whether Weikert is right or wrong I leave to historians to decide but that he is persuasive cannot be gainsaid.
His book is scholarly, and the reader looking for something casual or light will probably find it difficult to finish. Reading it to the end, however, will surely repay anyone who perseveres.
RLC