It has been a while since I have written, but settle in as this may be a long one. Let me first admit that this post has been inspired by the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Clearly this movie is a propoganda instrument. Furthermore, I can completely understand the revulsion any evolutionist or Darwinist might feel when ideas are propogated as a result of it. However, with that disclaimer and admitting a bias on my part I feel compelled to write about one small part of the movie which has stoked deep emotion and indignation in my heart.

So what is Hadamar?

Hadamar is a German town home to the Hadamar Clinic psychiatric hospital. The Hadamar Clinic was used by the Nazis as the site of their T-4 Euthanasia Program, which performed mass sterilizations and mass murder of “undesirable” members of Nazi society, specifically the physically and mentally handicapped. In the first phase of the killing operations (January to August 1941), Hadamar personnel murdered around 10,000 German patients by asphyxiating them with carbon monoxide in a gas chamber made to look like a shower room. From August 1942 to March 24, 1945, around 4,000 victims died at Hadamar by lethal injection.

Thick smoke billowed over Hadamar in the summer of 1941 while the staff celebrated the cremation of their 10,000th patient with beer and wine served in the crematorium. Despite precautions to cover up the T-4 program, the local population knew of the operation. The people killed in the Hadamar hospital would arrive by train or bus and ostensibly vanish behind the site’s fence. Furthermore, since the crematorium ovens were usually fed with two corpses instead of one, the cremation process was faulty. This often resulted in a cloud of stinking smoke hanging over the town. In the local schools, students would often taunt each other by saying “You’ll end up in the Hadamar ovens!”

The Background of the Action T-4

The idea of enforcing “racial hygiene” had been an essential element of Hitler’s ideology from its earliest days. Hitler seems to have had a lifelong horror of mental illness and physical deformity. In his discussions with Bouhler and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, Hitler referred to people who “perpetually dirtied themselves” and who “put their own excrement in their mouths.” More generally, Hitler frequently used medical metaphors for those he sought to remove from the German “racial community” – he referred to the Jews as a bacillus which must be killed or a cancer which must be excised. Likewise, he saw the disabled as a “diseased element” in the German racial body. In the minds of Hitler and other Nazis, the need to “cleanse” the German race was inseparable from the rest of the Nazi project.

In his book Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler wrote:

He who is bodily and mentally not sound and deserving may not perpetuate this misfortune in the bodies of his children. The völkische [racial] state has to perform the most gigantic rearing-task here. One day, however, it will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era.

The Nazi regime began to implement “racial hygienist” policies as soon as it came to power. The July 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with a range of conditions thought to be hereditary such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea and “imbecility”. Sterilisation was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. This law was administered by the Interior Ministry under Wilhelm Frick through special Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte), which examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged care homes and special schools to select those to be sterilised.

It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. The law was used punitively in some cases, against women convicted of prostitution, for example (although the regime may have been concerned with eliminating congenital syphilis). Some people with non-hereditary disabilities were also affected; this policy may have been supported by the assumption that the affected people would not serve society as well as non-affected people. There were some suggestions that the program should be extended to people with physical disabilities, but such ideas had to be expressed carefully given that one of the most powerful figures of the regime, Joseph Goebbels, suffered from congenital club foot. Philipp Bouhler himself was mobility impaired as a result of war wounds to his legs. After 1937 the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from the crash rearmament program meant that anyone capable of work was deemed to be “useful” and was exempted from the law, and the rate of sterilisation declined.

It may be noted that racial hygienist ideas were far from unique to the Nazi movement, although Hitler expressed them in an extreme form. The ideas of social Darwinism were widespread in all western countries in the early 20th century, and the eugenics movement had many followers among educated people, being particularly strong in the United States. The idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary anti-social behaviour was widely accepted, and was put into law in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland and other countries. Between 1935 and 1975, for example, 63,000 people were sterilised on eugenicist grounds in Sweden.

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I am sure you have a pretty good guess where I am going with this, but never the less I will go there.

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The Theories and Origins of Social Darwinism

Despite the fact that social Darwinism bears Darwin’s name and his works were widely read by social Darwinists, the theory also draws from the work of many other authors, including Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Darwin himself gave serious consideration to Galton’s work, but thought the ideas of “hereditary improvement” impractical. Aware of weaknesses in his own family, he was sure that families would naturally refuse such selection and wreck the scheme. He thought that even if compulsory registration was the only way to improve the human race, this illiberal idea would be unacceptable, and it would be better to publicize the “principle of inheritance” and let people decide for themselves. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex of 1882 he described how medical advances meant that the weaker were able to survive and have families, and commented on the effects of this, while cautioning that hard reason should not override sympathy, and considering how other factors might reduce the effect. The following is an extended quote from Darwin:

Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. … We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.

Note: The above passages were pulled directly from wikipedia and I am not sure if I would prefer if they be true or untrue.

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With this as a rather massive prelude, I have an abundance of questions. Is the human race impeding the effectiveness of natural selection? It seems to me that clearly our “sympathy” does impede natural selection in the human race. The originator of the premise certainly concurred in this assessment and it is statistically difficult to argue that the most intelligent in our world have the greatest progeny. Would not the logical conclusion of such a statistical fact indicate that our species is destined for a long term decline? Also, considering the supposed long term benefits of natural selection, must we begin to be suspicious of chimpanzees as a species soon (soon in evolutionary terms, of course, let’s say 1 billion years) to surpass our own? Alas, recent studies have shown that Chimpanzees engage in apparently altruistic behavior. It seems that they may already be infected with a “sympathy” similar to that of our own. Perhaps their “social instincts” are getting the better of them! While we are on the subject, the appearance of “social instincts” raises a broader question of how did these come about, what was their impetus and why are they so thoroughly entrenched in our species? These questions and many more that I could ask cause an unravelling of a logically tidy premise into a practically messy concept with ill defined terms throughout.

But before I get lost in a host of what I believe to be truly unknowable questions (in a logical sense), let’s return to the lesson of Hadamar. At this point, I have lived almost 35 years. I am ashamed to say that for the vast majority of those years I lived in the confident assessment that I was in the near perfect category of my species. Oh, I know I wasn’t perfect, but I certainly aspired to be and compared to so many I was close. I was certainly much closer than average. If I would have learned about Action T-4 I would have certainly been bothered by what transpired. I would have believed that this was a violation of basic human rights. Human rights that I believed were written on my heart by my Creator. However, there would have been a logical side of me that understood where they were coming from, and feeling confident of my status as near perfect, I ashamedly confess I might have had the slightest sympathy toward the aims of Action T-4.

This former person was not around as I wept bitterly when contemplating the individuals who were euthanized or sterilized with the intention of preventing hereditarily diseased offspring. I wept because I now know I am now one of them. I no longer have the delusion of near perfection at my side. I wept because I believe that my sons deserve a chance to live and other sons were not given this opportunity. I now know that I contain a possibly genetic disposition to a possible future of physical challenges and / or mental impairment. Let me reiterate that all I am dealing with is the possibility of an uncertain future. Now that I know this, I find it a tremendous challenge to see the world in the same way. And yet logically I know that each and every one of us faces the possibility of an uncertain future.

The lesson of Hadamar is that any assessment of relative human value is exceedingly dangerous. Once it has begun there is no solid rationale as to where in particular it should end. If you are in agreement with me on this concept, I believe it becomes exceedingly difficult to espouse the views of many Darwinian concepts. I believe the old saying of “the devil is in the details” could rarely be more appropriately used than when discussing Darwin and the logical extensions of his propositions. The thought that Darwin is held as a demi-god in the scientific community without any mention of the moral delimmas that his propositions create is unconscionable in my eyes and leaves our society prone to future Hadamar’s.