By the last decades of the 19th century, Darwin's theory was increasingly popular among Germany's intellectual elite. Darwin had claimed that humans and other mammals were the product of what he called natural selection, a blind struggle for existence where the fittest survived and reproduced, and the less fit died off. In his book, The Descent of Man, Darwin made clear that his idea of natural selection had implications for human society. Charles Darwin clearly was a social Darwinist.
He was not as rabid a social Darwinist as some of his followers later on, but he clearly did believe that Darwinism should be applied to human societies. Darwin worried that civilized societies were harming humanity by helping the poor, caring for the sick, and otherwise saving those who nature would have killed off. Darwin feared that such humanitarianism could eventually destroy the human race. Darwin also predicted that in the future, the civilized races of mankind would exterminate the inferior ones.
Darwin himself was ambivalent about some of the social implications of his theory. But in Germany, Darwin's ideas supplied a new generation of political leaders, social thinkers, and scientists with what they regarded as a biological justification for world domination. If you read the scientists of the day, in the late 19th and early 20th century, many of them were... Promoting racism and even racial extermination, extinction of races.
They were promoting the gaining of living space. They were promoting competition. The things that we know of as social Darwinism, these were things being promoted by Charles Darwin himself to some degree, many other leading biologists.
The war of annihilation is a natural law, without which the organic world could not continue to exist at all. German zoologist Gustav Jäger, 1870. Just as in nature, the struggle for existence is the moving principle of evolution and perfection, so also in world history, the destruction of the weaker nations through the stronger is a postulate of progress. German ethnologist Friedrich Helwald, 1875. According to Darwin's theory, wars have always been of the greatest importance for the general progress of the human species.
The physically weaker, the less intelligent, the morally lower, must give place to the stronger. German biologist Heinrich Ziegler, 1893 Not all German Darwinists defended war as a biological imperative. Some in fact criticized it for undermining natural selection. They feared that wars in Europe would kill off too many of the superior races.
Yet even these pacifist Darwinists tended to approve of wars raged against races they considered lower on the evolutionary scale. Like the native peoples of Africa. And it was in Germany's colony in South West Africa. now known as Namibia, that the social Darwinism of German military leaders moved from theory to practice in the years leading up to World War I. Between 1904 and 1908 the German military attempted to eradicate the Herero people in southwest Africa, what some scholars consider the first genocide of the 20th century. October the 2nd, 1904, General Lothar von Trotha issued what became known as his Extermination Order, declaring that the Hereros either had to leave German Southwest Africa or face extinction.
Herero men would be executed, and Herero women and children would be driven into the desert, where they would die of starvation or dehydration. Von Trotha justified his extermination campaign by an explicit appeal to social Darwinism. telling one newspaper that human feelings of philanthropy could not override the law of Darwin's The Struggle of the Fittest. When von Trotha's extermination campaign provoked a backlash in Germany, a new plan was developed to move the remaining Hereros to concentration camps, where many more would ultimately die from malnutrition, disease and exhaustion. In these death camps, the Hereros were subjected to medical experiments by German doctors and their skulls were collected for shipment back to Germany to be studied by experts in racial science.
By 1908 it's estimated that more than 80 percent of the Herero people had been eliminated from German southwest Africa. Back in Europe meanwhile, German military leaders prepared for the next conflict on their continent. In 1912 German General Friedrich von Bernhardi published his bestseller, Germany and the Next War.
Bernhardi argued that the struggle for existence is, in the life of nature, the basis of all healthy development. Therefore, war is a biological necessity. Similar ideas could be found among the military leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Count Franz Konrad von Hötzendorf has been called by one scholar The architect of the apocalypse, for his formative role in World War I. The chief of the general staff of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, von Hotzendorf, read Darwin as a young officer, and he soon applied the Darwinian worldview to his ideas about foreign relations. After World War I started, many German thinkers invoked Darwinian theory to justify the conflict, including prominent zoologist Ernst Haeckel, previously a pacifist. Once it got going, there were many people who argued that it was a part of the Darwinian struggle for existence.
Ernst Haeckel even wrote a book during the war in which he called it part of the struggle for existence in which he argued that the perfidious French were using black colonial troops against the superior Germans. He found that horrifying that they would do such a thing. And so there were many people who were justifying the war on as part of the Darwinian struggle for existence.
In the end, Germany and its allies lost the First World War. But the ideology of social Darwinism that inspired its academic and military leaders survived for another day. Among the defeated soldiers of the German war machine was a young corporal in the Bavarian army, intensely bitter at the defeat of Germany and its allies.
The corporal found new purpose for his life by embracing an even more fanatical social Darwinism than that which had been adopted by the leaders of the Second Reich. Within two decades, the whole world would know the corporal's name.