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Darwinian Racism
To hear some tell it, Adolf Hitler was a Christian creationist who rejected Darwinian evolution. Award-winning historian Richard Weikart shows otherwise. According to Weikart, Darwinian evolution crucially influenced Hitler and the Nazis, and the Nazis zealously propagated evolutionary theory during the Third Reich. Inspired by arguments from both Darwin and early Darwinists, the Nazis viewed the “Nordic race” as superior to other races and set about advancing human evolution by ridding the world of “inferior” races and individuals. As Weikart also shows, these ideas circulate today among white nationalists and neo-Nazis, who routinely use Darwinian theory in their propaganda to advance a racist agenda. Darwinian Racism is careful history. It is also a wake-up call.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
Unknown Binding
Published February 1, 2023
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About the author
Richard Weikart
10 books39 followersDr. Weikart is Professor of History at California State University, Stanislaus, and Fellow at the Center for Science and Culture of Discovery Institute, Seattle.
He completed his Ph.D. in modern European history at the University of Iowa in 1994, receiving the biennial prize of the Forum for History of Human Sciences for the best dissertation in that field. His revised dissertation, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein, was published in 1999.
His book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, documents the influence of naturalistic evolution on ethical thought, euthanasia, militarism, and racism—and ultimately Hitler's ideology.
With an extensive background in modern German and modern European intellectual history, he has published articles in journals such as Isis, Journal of the History of Ideas, German Studies Review, History of European Ideas, European Legacy, and Fides et Historia. One such article received the Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article in 1993 in the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Articles by Richard Weikart
He completed his Ph.D. in modern European history at the University of Iowa in 1994, receiving the biennial prize of the Forum for History of Human Sciences for the best dissertation in that field. His revised dissertation, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein, was published in 1999.
His book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, documents the influence of naturalistic evolution on ethical thought, euthanasia, militarism, and racism—and ultimately Hitler's ideology.
With an extensive background in modern German and modern European intellectual history, he has published articles in journals such as Isis, Journal of the History of Ideas, German Studies Review, History of European Ideas, European Legacy, and Fides et Historia. One such article received the Selma V. Forkosch Prize for the best article in 1993 in the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Articles by Richard Weikart
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November 25, 2025
Book Review: Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism by Richard Weikart
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871, p. 201)
It is essential for anyone who speaks of Darwin or is influenced by his ideas to confront these words and to understand that they are not an anomaly. Darwin wrote many others like them and expressed the same sentiments in correspondence with his cousin, Francis Galton—the founder of eugenics. Darwin believed that Indigenous and Aboriginal peoples, whom he called “savage races,” would inevitably be exterminated by what he termed “civilized” ones, and that this process was not only natural but scientific.
Richard Weikart’s Darwinian Racism is a meticulous and devastating account of how such ideas flowed directly into modern ideologies of racial hierarchy and genocide. From British imperialism to Nazi Germany and into today’s white supremacist movements, Weikart shows that Darwin’s influence was neither incidental nor innocent. The book traces how Darwin’s theory of evolution, built on notions of struggle, fitness, and elimination, gave intellectual legitimacy to racism and imperial domination.
For anyone who has been told that Darwin was “misunderstood,” Weikart’s documentation tells another story. He quotes Darwin’s own words and situates them within the wider intellectual world that received them eagerly. Darwin wrote that “the break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state... and some ape as low as a baboon” (Descent of Man, p. 202). This language reveals a hierarchy of human worth embedded in evolutionary theory itself.
As someone who completed a second M.A. in English Literature with an emphasis on postcolonial studies, I was long taught the opposite—that Darwin’s thought was neutral, that the racism of empire came from misapplication, not from the theory’s roots. But history and Weikart’s research show that the opposite is true. By the end of the nineteenth century, European empires controlled roughly 85 percent of the planet’s land surface. The pseudo-scientific ideas of racial struggle and “survival of the fittest” provided the moral scaffolding for that conquest. Religion had once justified domination in the name of God; science now justified it in the name of progress.
Weikart demonstrates how Darwin’s concepts of “natural selection” and “struggle for existence” were absorbed by thinkers who saw them as mandates for racial cleansing. He cites Darwin’s statement that “the weaker and inferior members of society propagate their kind,” and that human sympathy that interferes with this process may “be injurious to the race of man” (Descent of Man, pp. 168–169). Such words made eugenics appear both natural and necessary.
The book follows this intellectual lineage through Galton, Haeckel, and others, showing how their biological determinism shaped Nazi racial ideology. Weikart writes that “Darwinism was not merely compatible with Nazism; it was one of its intellectual foundations” (p. 85). Hitler and his contemporaries embraced a worldview in which extermination of the weak was evolution’s work, not evil’s. Concepts like Lebensraum—the struggle for living space—were lifted directly from Darwinian and post-Darwinian biological models of competition and expansion.
Weikart’s analysis extends beyond the Third Reich. He draws a through-line from nineteenth-century evolutionary racism to twentieth-century American eugenics and contemporary white nationalism. The ideas never vanished; they simply adapted. Today, forms of genetic determinism, transhumanist elitism, and so-called “race realism” repeat the same logic. The book’s final chapters warn that this Darwinian mindset continues to shape discourse in both right-wing and liberal circles.
As we have spent two years watching a genocide unfold against the Palestinian people—committed by Zionists and supported by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom—in real time, seeing hundreds of thousands slaughtered cruelly, tens of thousands of children murdered, masses of child amputees, and levels of military depravity against civilians as shocking and grotesque as any witnessed in recorded history, we cannot ignore how deeply these same intellectual patterns persist. The “scientific justifiers of genocide” remain in positions of authority across media, academia, and politics, just as they were in the British Empire, the American Empire, and the Nazi Reich. We must take heed of this continuity.
Weikart’s Darwinian Racism reminds us that genocide is never born in a vacuum; it is always preceded by an intellectual climate that dehumanizes entire peoples and disguises cruelty as progress. To understand Darwin’s legacy honestly is not to deny science, but to recognize how easily the language of science can become the language of domination. In a world still ruled by hierarchies that justify themselves as natural, this book demands that we face the consequences of the ideas we celebrate—and the suffering they continue to enable.
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871, p. 201)
It is essential for anyone who speaks of Darwin or is influenced by his ideas to confront these words and to understand that they are not an anomaly. Darwin wrote many others like them and expressed the same sentiments in correspondence with his cousin, Francis Galton—the founder of eugenics. Darwin believed that Indigenous and Aboriginal peoples, whom he called “savage races,” would inevitably be exterminated by what he termed “civilized” ones, and that this process was not only natural but scientific.
Richard Weikart’s Darwinian Racism is a meticulous and devastating account of how such ideas flowed directly into modern ideologies of racial hierarchy and genocide. From British imperialism to Nazi Germany and into today’s white supremacist movements, Weikart shows that Darwin’s influence was neither incidental nor innocent. The book traces how Darwin’s theory of evolution, built on notions of struggle, fitness, and elimination, gave intellectual legitimacy to racism and imperial domination.
For anyone who has been told that Darwin was “misunderstood,” Weikart’s documentation tells another story. He quotes Darwin’s own words and situates them within the wider intellectual world that received them eagerly. Darwin wrote that “the break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state... and some ape as low as a baboon” (Descent of Man, p. 202). This language reveals a hierarchy of human worth embedded in evolutionary theory itself.
As someone who completed a second M.A. in English Literature with an emphasis on postcolonial studies, I was long taught the opposite—that Darwin’s thought was neutral, that the racism of empire came from misapplication, not from the theory’s roots. But history and Weikart’s research show that the opposite is true. By the end of the nineteenth century, European empires controlled roughly 85 percent of the planet’s land surface. The pseudo-scientific ideas of racial struggle and “survival of the fittest” provided the moral scaffolding for that conquest. Religion had once justified domination in the name of God; science now justified it in the name of progress.
Weikart demonstrates how Darwin’s concepts of “natural selection” and “struggle for existence” were absorbed by thinkers who saw them as mandates for racial cleansing. He cites Darwin’s statement that “the weaker and inferior members of society propagate their kind,” and that human sympathy that interferes with this process may “be injurious to the race of man” (Descent of Man, pp. 168–169). Such words made eugenics appear both natural and necessary.
The book follows this intellectual lineage through Galton, Haeckel, and others, showing how their biological determinism shaped Nazi racial ideology. Weikart writes that “Darwinism was not merely compatible with Nazism; it was one of its intellectual foundations” (p. 85). Hitler and his contemporaries embraced a worldview in which extermination of the weak was evolution’s work, not evil’s. Concepts like Lebensraum—the struggle for living space—were lifted directly from Darwinian and post-Darwinian biological models of competition and expansion.
Weikart’s analysis extends beyond the Third Reich. He draws a through-line from nineteenth-century evolutionary racism to twentieth-century American eugenics and contemporary white nationalism. The ideas never vanished; they simply adapted. Today, forms of genetic determinism, transhumanist elitism, and so-called “race realism” repeat the same logic. The book’s final chapters warn that this Darwinian mindset continues to shape discourse in both right-wing and liberal circles.
As we have spent two years watching a genocide unfold against the Palestinian people—committed by Zionists and supported by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom—in real time, seeing hundreds of thousands slaughtered cruelly, tens of thousands of children murdered, masses of child amputees, and levels of military depravity against civilians as shocking and grotesque as any witnessed in recorded history, we cannot ignore how deeply these same intellectual patterns persist. The “scientific justifiers of genocide” remain in positions of authority across media, academia, and politics, just as they were in the British Empire, the American Empire, and the Nazi Reich. We must take heed of this continuity.
Weikart’s Darwinian Racism reminds us that genocide is never born in a vacuum; it is always preceded by an intellectual climate that dehumanizes entire peoples and disguises cruelty as progress. To understand Darwin’s legacy honestly is not to deny science, but to recognize how easily the language of science can become the language of domination. In a world still ruled by hierarchies that justify themselves as natural, this book demands that we face the consequences of the ideas we celebrate—and the suffering they continue to enable.
October 1, 2023
"Darwin in The Descent of Man pressed the case for common descent even as he embraced the view that races were unequal, not only physically, but also intellectually and even morally."
This book is useful because it demonstrates that National Socialism is based on Darwin's theory of evolution. The author goes through a mountain of hard evidence: the scientific consensus in Germany at the time, the school curriculum, the NSDAP propaganda, etc.
Unfortunately the author is openly hostile to Darwin, National Socialism, and White people in general. The book is littered by snark and hissy fits against the subject matter. There isn't an actual critique (which I would have appreciated), there's just some whining with no explanation every time he has to present the position that not all races are *equal*. Why does he think they are equal? No explanation, it's like a religious dogma that cannot be questioned or explained rationally.
As you'd expect, the author lies about National Socialism. He claims with no evidence that Hitler wanted to exterminate "those races he deemed inferior" when there isn't a single trace of this sentiment in any historical documents. It's funny how the quotes that he manages to find make Darwin much more extreme and ruthless than Hitler.
This book is useless to understand National Socialism from either an historical or an ideological perspective.
National Socialism is... well, socialist. Not in the sense of Marxist socialism (forced equality), but in the sense of creating a community spirit which also helps those in need. They lifted millions of Germans out of poverty and unemployment, they provided better working conditions, they supported the creation of families with children, they ran charity donations for the poor. They were also the first to make laws to protect animals and the environment. National Socialism is not a "dog eat dog" ideology, it's actually empathetic. In National Socialism the evolutionary struggle is seen at the racial level, and not at the individual level. This difference is fundamental, because it sets apart National Socialism from ideologies that propose competition at the individual level (such as libertarianism). Darwinian evolution in National Socialism does involve preparing society for war, which means eliminating those seen as a detriment to society: the mentally ill, the habitual criminals, and even the antisocial and lazy people. There's a fascinating duality in National Socialism: its empathy towards those it considers the in-group and valuable members of the race is contrasted with ruthlessness against the enemies, both outside and inside the race. But still, it is evolution. A pack of wolves doesn't eat its pups. A pack of wolves loves and protects its pups. But it never forgets that it is in eternal struggle with the forces of nature.
Overall, this book succeeds in doing what it wanted to do: prove that National Socialism is based on evolution. It does not provide any discussion or analysis on it, which is probably for the best. The book is short (less than 200 pages) so it's a good reference for evidence on the statement above. The following quotes give a good summary of the book:
"Indeed, the historical evidence is overwhelming that human evolution was an integral part of Nazi racial ideology. It held a prominent place in the Nazi school curriculum and in training courses in the Nazi worldview. Nazi officials and SS anthropologists agreed that humans, including the Aryan or Nordic race, had evolved from primates. They believed the Nordic race had evolved to a higher level of intelligence, physical prowess, and social solidarity than other races due to their having faced what evolutionists today would call greater selective pressure."
"Moreover, these ideas were not just “Nazi ideas,” but were in line with the thinking of many of the leading German biologists and anthropologists before the Nazis came to power."
This book is useful because it demonstrates that National Socialism is based on Darwin's theory of evolution. The author goes through a mountain of hard evidence: the scientific consensus in Germany at the time, the school curriculum, the NSDAP propaganda, etc.
Unfortunately the author is openly hostile to Darwin, National Socialism, and White people in general. The book is littered by snark and hissy fits against the subject matter. There isn't an actual critique (which I would have appreciated), there's just some whining with no explanation every time he has to present the position that not all races are *equal*. Why does he think they are equal? No explanation, it's like a religious dogma that cannot be questioned or explained rationally.
As you'd expect, the author lies about National Socialism. He claims with no evidence that Hitler wanted to exterminate "those races he deemed inferior" when there isn't a single trace of this sentiment in any historical documents. It's funny how the quotes that he manages to find make Darwin much more extreme and ruthless than Hitler.
This book is useless to understand National Socialism from either an historical or an ideological perspective.
National Socialism is... well, socialist. Not in the sense of Marxist socialism (forced equality), but in the sense of creating a community spirit which also helps those in need. They lifted millions of Germans out of poverty and unemployment, they provided better working conditions, they supported the creation of families with children, they ran charity donations for the poor. They were also the first to make laws to protect animals and the environment. National Socialism is not a "dog eat dog" ideology, it's actually empathetic. In National Socialism the evolutionary struggle is seen at the racial level, and not at the individual level. This difference is fundamental, because it sets apart National Socialism from ideologies that propose competition at the individual level (such as libertarianism). Darwinian evolution in National Socialism does involve preparing society for war, which means eliminating those seen as a detriment to society: the mentally ill, the habitual criminals, and even the antisocial and lazy people. There's a fascinating duality in National Socialism: its empathy towards those it considers the in-group and valuable members of the race is contrasted with ruthlessness against the enemies, both outside and inside the race. But still, it is evolution. A pack of wolves doesn't eat its pups. A pack of wolves loves and protects its pups. But it never forgets that it is in eternal struggle with the forces of nature.
Overall, this book succeeds in doing what it wanted to do: prove that National Socialism is based on evolution. It does not provide any discussion or analysis on it, which is probably for the best. The book is short (less than 200 pages) so it's a good reference for evidence on the statement above. The following quotes give a good summary of the book:
"Indeed, the historical evidence is overwhelming that human evolution was an integral part of Nazi racial ideology. It held a prominent place in the Nazi school curriculum and in training courses in the Nazi worldview. Nazi officials and SS anthropologists agreed that humans, including the Aryan or Nordic race, had evolved from primates. They believed the Nordic race had evolved to a higher level of intelligence, physical prowess, and social solidarity than other races due to their having faced what evolutionists today would call greater selective pressure."
"Moreover, these ideas were not just “Nazi ideas,” but were in line with the thinking of many of the leading German biologists and anthropologists before the Nazis came to power."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews