In Dinesh D’Souza’s excellent book What’s So Great About Christianity?, the author has a chapter titled A License to Kill: Atheism and the Mass Murders of History. In this chapter D’Souza responds to the popular claim of modern atheists that religion is the source of mass death in history. Quite the contrary, the chapter documents that the mass death of the twentieth century were the logical conclusions of atheism and evolutionism.
Responding to the claims of atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, D’Souza shows how Hitler was anything but religious. Hitler would sometimes make an outward show of religion only so long as it suited his purposes, but in reality Hitler and his Nazi henchmen were quite anti-religious. For example:
Hitler’s Table Talk, a revealing collection of the Fuhrer’s private opinions assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great ‘scourges’ of history, and said of the Germans, ‘Let’s be the only people who are immunized against this disease.’ He promised that ‘through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity.’ In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution. . . Hitler’s leading advisers — Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann — were athesits who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany. (p.218)
And he goes on to explain:
Once Hitler and the Nazis came to power, they launched a ruthless drive to subdue and weaken Christian churches in Germany. . . The Nazis stopped celebrating Christmas, and the Hitler Youth recited a prayer thanking the Fuhrer rather than God for thier blessings. Clergy regarded as ‘troublemakers’ were ordered not to preach, hundreds of them were imprisoned, and many were simply murdered. Chruches were under constant Gestapo surveillance. The Nazis closed religious schools, forced Christian organizations to disband, dismissed civil servants who were practicing Christians, confiscated church property, and censored religious newspapers. (p.219)
If the Nazis did not get their murderous ways from religion, from where did it come? D’Souza explains:
If Nazism represented the culmination of anything, it was that of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ideology of social Darwinsim. As historian Richard Weikart documents, both Hitler and Himmler were admirers of Darwin and often spoke of their role as enacting a ‘law of nature’ that guaranteed the ‘elimination of the unfit.’ Weikart argues that Hitler himself ‘drew upon a bountiful fund of social Dawinist thought to construct his own racist philosophy’ and concludes that while Darwinism is not a ‘sufficient’ intellectual explanation for Nazism, it is a ‘necessary’ one. Without Darwinism, there might not have been Nazism.
The Nazis also drew on philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, adapting his atheist philosophy to their crude purposes. Nietzsche’s vision of the uberrmensch and his elevation of the new ethic ‘beyond good and evil’ were avidly embraced by Nazi propagandists. . . I am not for a moment suggesting that Darwin or Nietzsche would have approved of Hitler’s ideas. But Hitler and his henchmen approved of Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s ideas. Sam Harris simply ignores the evidence of the Nazi’s sympathies for Darwin, Nietzsche, and atheism. So what sense can we make of his claim that the leading Nazis were ‘knowingly or unknowingly agents of religion? Clearly it is nonsense. (p.219-220)
D’Souza and his research demonstrate the the death and destruction brought about by the Nazi ideology was the fruit of eliminating the Christian religion and adapting the ideology of Darwin’s survival of the fittest and Nietzsche’s philosophy of atheism. The book also shows that modern atheists such as Harris and Hitchens can only make their conclusions by creating a misleading view of history.
(For more info on how evolution supports racism, see here.)