From Darwin to Dachau: The Deadly Evolution of Eugenics

Did you know the subtitle of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is “The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”?

Until recently, I hadn’t. Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, that “Favoured Races” subtitle has been quietly dropped. But in Darwin’s time, that was still 80 years away.

Darwin’s groundbreaking scientific work was first published on November 24, 1859. Without speculating on Darwin’s personal motives, his work ultimately replaced a loving Creator with a cold and random “god” of natural selection. Where the God of Scripture reveals His image through the Imago Dei, Darwin’s theory offers only a glimpse of a common ancestor—a primate.

The difference between these two answers to life’s most basic questions—“How did we get here?” and “What gives us purpose?”—couldn’t be more profound.

Inspired by Darwin’s work, Herbert Spencer, a self-taught philosopher with no formal degree, wrote Principles of Biology just six years later, in 1864. In that book, he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

Roughly 20 years after Origin of Species, another polymath—this one named Francis Galton—became captivated by Darwin’s theory. Like Spencer, Galton never officially graduated from university. He also happened to be Darwin’s step-cousin, which means the man who would coin the term “eugenics” (meaning “good genes”) actually shared genes with Darwin himself.

For better or worse, Galton—along with Spencer and others—expanded on Darwin’s ideas. His logic was fairly simple: If humans were not created by God, and if natural selection can modify species over time, then why not help the evolutionary process along? After all, if Jacob could selectively breed Laban’s weaker goats in Genesis 30, why shouldn’t society selectively breed out weaker humans?

Much of Galton’s work promoted selective human breeding as a way to “improve” society. The collapse of poverty-stricken communities of alcoholics, for example, was seen as a victory for social engineering, a movement we now call Social Darwinism. Where Darwinism sought to describe natural processes, Social Darwinism (which Darwin himself didn’t advocate) sought to prescribe how society should function.

The practice of eugenics—through selective breeding, forced sterilization, and the institutional removal of the “unfit”—became widespread among scientists, doctors, and educators not only in Europe but also in the United States. It’s worth noting that Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, shared in a letter that her goal was to “exterminate the Negro population”—her own words.

In rapidly modernizing Germany, Social Darwinism took on a new name: Racial Hygiene (Rassenhygiene). In 1905, physician Alfred Ploetz founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene, building on the work of Darwin, Galton, and Spencer to “improve” the German race. The “fit” were encouraged to reproduce, while the “unfit” were discouraged—or worse. The voluntary sterilization of people with hereditary diseases was seen as a step toward purity and away from degeneration. Of course, those deemed “unfit” weren’t exactly lining up to be sterilized by their self-appointed “betters.”

After World War I, eugenics gained new traction. Germany’s economic collapse and the fragile recovery of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) provided fertile ground for these ideas. Voluntary sterilization was promoted as a “therapeutic” solution to the suffering of the poor and disabled. Yet consent—especially from those being sterilized—proved inconvenient for eugenicists, psychiatrists, and other “intellectual” elites eager to speed up the process.

It was within this cultural and scientific environment that a young, radical political activist absorbed the ideas of racial and biological superiority. While imprisoned after his failed coup attempt, Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (1925), railing against racial impurity and condemning “useless eaters.”

Just eight years later, in 1933, Hitler seized power. His hatred for the Jews, combined with his vision for a racially pure Germany, found eager allies among scientists, doctors, and social engineers who had already been quietly applying eugenic theories. What had been slow and methodical under the Weimar Republic quickly accelerated under Nazi rule.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis pushed eugenics to horrifying extremes. Nearly 400,000 Germans were forcibly sterilized, often under vague charges like “moral feeblemindedness.” By 1939, eugenics had evolved into euthanasia. The poor, sick, weak, and dissident were no longer sterilized—they were murdered. This program, known as Aktion T4 (1939-1941), was one of the final precursors to the Holocaust.

All of this history—names, dates, ideas—is meant to highlight a crucial fact: long before the Nazis enacted the Final Solution, Germany had already built the infrastructure of death. By the time the Final Solution—the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews—began in 1942, there were already 20 major concentration camps in operation, with hundreds of smaller facilities scattered across German-held territory. Dachau was built in 1933, Sachsenhausen in 1936, followed by Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, and Flossenbürg in the late 1930s.

This is absolutely chilling—and fascinating. If you’ve ever wondered how 6 million Jews and 5 million other “unfit” or “undesirable” people were murdered in such a short span of time, and without nuclear weapons, the history of German eugenics holds one of the key answers.

Germany, like many other nations, had been playing with fire for decades. But they happened to elect a dictator willing to douse the fire with gasoline.

From natural biologists to pseudo-scientists, from social engineers to medical professionals, and finally to a demon-possessed dictator, the story is clear: Whenever humanity plays god with biology, even with good intentions, we could all lose.

But what do you think?

Micah Coate, President and Host of Salvation and Stuff

For similar articles please read Covid, the Code, and the Place for Christian Ethics and IBM, AI, and the Future of the Human Race.