Rejoinder to Professor Robert Richards’ Article: “Haeckel’s Alleged

Anti-Semitism and Contributions to Nazi Biology.” Daniel Gasman Professor of History John Jay College and the Graduate Center City University of New York [email protected]

Professor Robert J. Richards of the has attempted in a number of venues to discredit the hypothesis that I have advanced for many years that the German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel, was instrumental in formulating the birth of Nazi and Fascist ideology and that he was committed to a virulent form of anti-Semitism.1

Richards’ recent endeavor in this regard is reflected in an article posted on the Internet and then in slightly altered form in the pages of Biological Theory.2 The article displays either an astonishing naiveté or the calculated omission of enormous segments of relevant material, its purported revelations disclosing multiple distortions and apparent falsehoods.3 Hardly a line of the essay fails to provoke the reader to question the scholarly judgment and intellectual intention of the author. Richards alleges that there are fundamental factual misrepresentations in my scholarship and in this way I have managed to hoodwink scores of prominent writers and historians throughout the world about Haeckel’s anti-Semitism and predilection for Nazi-like ideas. This is seen, he writes, when one analyzes the well-known interview conducted with Haeckel in 1894, on the subject of anti-

Semitism, by the prominent art and literary critic and member of the

Monist League, Hermann Bahr. Richards suggests that the encounter with

Bahr clearly indicates that Haeckel was not anti-Semitic and that in

1 fact the opposite is true and that he was an outstanding friend of

German Jewry.4 Richards can manufacture such claims of revisionist feats because he excludes from his analysis more than ninety percent of the actual discussion and the summary of the remaining content can only be described as fantastical. Richards introduces an idiosyncratic alchemy that transforms Haeckel’s hostile remarks into affirmations of philo-

Semitism, and makes a case that the dialogue shows that Haeckel did not define the Jews in racial terms. The trouble is, none of this is true or even remotely indicative of Haeckel’s actual point of view.

Contrary to the highly questionable allegations of Richards, for Haeckel, the forum made available by Bahr presented an opportunity for justifying and supporting the international anti-Semitic movement.

Richards writes: “Haeckel mentioned …that he had many good friends among Jews, ‘admirable and excellent men,’ and that these acquaintances had rendered [sic!] him without this prejudice.”5 But, in the context of the entire discussion, Haeckel’s passing remark about being free of anti-Semitism was disingenuous in the extreme as well as self serving because Haeckel went on immediately to contradict himself and to disclose overwhelming support for hostility to the Jews and opposition to the continued presence of any Jewish identity in Germany

– a crucial aspect of the story that is suppressed by Richards.

Richards does not divulge that Haeckel told Bahr [in the extensive sections deleted], that far from decrying opposition to the

Jews, he was supportive of and sympathized with the centuries old anti-Semitic movement, and that he believed that its continued existence was required because it performed the indispensable function of compelling the Jews to assimilate, in other words, to disappear – the ominous leitmotiv of Haeckel’s reflections on the Jews.6 It was

2 constructive because it served to make the Jews aware of their own condition and was therefore a healthy movement. “Anti-Semitism,” Haeckel stated, “is a justifiable idea because it [seeks to] free the

Jews from their separatist behavior, and desires that they assimilate with us completely.” Only by vanishing as a separate group – including the Enlightened and assimilated Jews of Germany – could they validate their patriotism and at the same time contribute to the national interest of Germany. Far from exhibiting admiration for the Jews, Haeckel charged the

Jews themselves with generating anti-Semitism. Shrugging off all responsibility on the part of the non-Jewish world, Haeckel explained to Bahr that the durability of anti-Semitism throughout history led one to the inescapable conclusion that the Jews were in fact the source of their own misfortune and were themselves to blame for the sentiments that were often expressed against them. “I cannot believe,”

Haeckel said, “that such a powerful, enduring, and great movement could have been possible without adequate cause.” He found, rather, that anti-Semitism arose from an inner justification and was not to be considered the product of a pathological state of mind. Approvingly aware of its pervasiveness, Haeckel acknowledged the existence of anti-Semitic feelings among his students and this seemed to him completely normal and predictable.

According to Richards, Haeckel attributed the Jewish problem to the rise of nationalism and not to the intrinsic manifestations of race. But Haeckel explicitly declared the reverse, that while the

Jewish question had indeed become imperative because of the rise of nationalism, it remained, nonetheless, and above all a “racial question” and much less a “religious and social” one;7 and this racial position provided Haeckel with an opening to vent his full fury

3 against the policy of the State permitting an escalating influx of

Russian Jews into Germany. Richards, though, is not dissuaded by such contradictory remarks and pursues his misleading case further, comforting us that Haeckel did not describe the Eastern European Jews in derogatory racial terms. “[Haeckel’s] tangential reservations about Eastern-Jewish immigration were not racial or biological, certainly not of the sort favored by the Nazis, but behavioral and attitudinal, more in keeping with the distaste of the German Mandarins for the lower classes of any sort.”

Eastern European Jews were to be excluded from the Second Reich, according to Richards’ account, “not because they were Jews, but because they could not be assimilated.”8 But do such interpretations of what Haeckel actually said make any sense at all? To be sure, Haeckel was again disingenuous, when he qualified his remarks to say that he did not have the Russian Jews in mind because they were Jews. But his remarks were again self-serving and contradictory, an attempt to imply his own enlightenment and civilized tolerance for differences among people. But who were the other lower classes or national groups that

Haeckel wanted to exclude from German society? He certainly did not name any, though he did spell out sympathy for American exclusionary acts against Chinese immigration, racial measures he equated with the specific need for excluding the Russian Jews!9

For Haeckel, Eastern European Jewry was clearly a distasteful and inferior racial conglomerate that was intrinsically incapable of imbibing German culture and he certainly does not indicate that he would treat them as he would any other lower class or group of people, as Richards suggests. “In this matter false humanitarianism,” Haeckel intoned, “can only be harmful and I think that we have to energetically protect ourselves from the Russian Jews.” In attitudes

4 that were very close to Hitler’s view of the same group of Jews whom he viewed so myopically in Vienna as a young man, Haeckel described them as a “filthy” people with an “outlandish” appearance. Indeed, the impression he conveyed to Bahr was that they could hardly be considered to be human at all, and he complimented England for its attempts to exclude the very same population from its shores.

In any event, if Haeckel’s testimony about the racial character of the Jewish people in the Bahr interview was not sufficiently convincing for Richards he might have turned to the pages of Haeckel’s noted book, The Riddle of the Universe [1899], where Haeckel expanded upon his racial definitions of the Jews, when he denied the Jewish origin of Christ and confirmed his Aryan identity. Haeckel pointed out that Christ’s true father was not the Deity or Joseph, but rather a

Greek Centurion of the Roman army who had seduced Mary. The proof of this was that Christ exhibited positive traits of personality which could not have been Jewish. As Haeckel noted: “The characteristics which distinguish [Christ’s] high and noble personality, and which give distinct impress to his religion, are certainly not Semitical; they are rather features of the higher Arian [sic!] race”10 – hardly a denial of Jewish racial identity on the part of Haeckel, or a position remote from .

Richards never mentions The Riddle of the Universe in his article [except in the Bibliography], and this is a critical omission.

In this work, not only are the Jews described in racial terms, but the major historical and theoretical formulation of Haeckel’s anti-

Semitism is presented in extenso, a position that held the Jews to be at the root of the decline of European civilization, Europe being the victim of two thousand years of Judaic and Christian subversion –

5 Christianity itself being nothing more than a nefarious product of

Judaic civilization. What Richards does not or will not admit is that Haeckel revealed himself as being deeply anti-Semitic when he postulated in

The Riddle of the Universe that the Jews, as the creators of the monotheistic God, were invidiously responsible for the introduction of the religions of transcendental dualism into Western history and that they were especially culpable for the unfortunate invention of Christianity which had culminated in the accelerating decline of

European society in modern times.11

Convinced of the advanced intellectual, moral, and physical decay of the European world, Haeckel held the Jews accountable for the dualistic errors that had weakened the fiber of society and disturbed the natural course of evolution. The expectation rooted in scientific authority, that the world would be vastly improved if the Jews were to be made to vanish, contributed significant academic weight to the escalating anti-Semitism of the early decades of the twentieth century. For Haeckel, the Jews, as the principal authors of dualism, were the great symbol of man’s rebellion against nature, constituting as it were, a clear and present danger to the intellectual and spiritual health of modern scientific civilization, and hence to its very physical survival. Haeckel himself, although openly espousing and justifying anti-Semitism, did not speak at all in terms of genocide, but close followers and principal translators of his major works into

French, Jules Soury and Georges Vacher de Lapouge did in fact call much more aggressively for the “scientific” destruction of the Jews, explicitly basing their ideas on the clearly radical anti-Jewish implications of Haeckel’s monist program.

6 Richards is so taken by his own validation of Haeckel’s philo-

Semitism, that he knows with certainty that even the Nazis desisted from naming him as an anti-Semite. To this end, he mentions a critical work, a full biography of Haeckel written by the Nazi zoologist, Heinz

Brücher, who was attached to the Haeckel Haus in Jena and also served in the SS Ahnenerbe and was on Heinrich Himmler’s staff for the resettlement of Germans in Eastern Europe.12 Brücher was occupied among other things with research into plant and agricultural life in the eastern territories, so as to prepare the way for the economic and demographic expansion of the Third Reich.13

Richards tells us that in Brücher’s biography, enthusiastically conceived from a National Socialist perspective, there was no mention of Haeckel’s anti-Semitism an inclination that Richards indefatigably continues to insist was non-existent. “Notably, however, Brücher did not try to make Haeckel an anti-Semite, except perhaps, by implication,” Richards reassures us with his dispassionate analysis and irrepressible candor.14 But Richards’ account is again hardly reliable, displaying a highly tenuous relationship with reality. Far from eschewing the subject of anti-Semitism, Brücher explicitly discussed it and employed Haeckel’s revealing remarks to Bahr to establish the content of

Haeckel’s thinking. Unlike Richards, Brücher correctly understood that

Haeckel’s explanations to Bahr were clearly anti-Jewish -- sentiments which Brücher obviously approved of. Despite having collaborated with

Jews in the international scientific community, Brücher noted in derogatory anti-Semitic language, Haeckel had come to understand

“Judas’” perfidious nature.15 For Brücher, Haeckel’s attack on the admission of Eastern Jewry into Germany, as revealed in the Bahr interview, served to “finally put to rest the fairy-tale of Haeckel’s

7 ‘Judenfreundschaft,’” his reputed friendship towards the Jews. And the

Jewish press, Brücher happily noted, also reacted angrily to the anti- Semitic implications of the Bahr interview. In no uncertain terms,

Brücher assured his readers that Haeckel was absolutely anti-Semitic and that he clearly perceived that the Jews were a threat to Germany, given their “assaults” on the German state; that they were a people apart “endangering German unity.”16

Not only, therefore, are the major proofs that Richards provides about Haeckel’s non-existent anti-Semitism apparent errors or possibly even downright fabrications, but it is also noteworthy that Professor

Richards fails to grasp or even mention the significance of the underlying philosophy of Haeckel, his Monism. What the great German neo-Kantian philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen, said critically about

Haeckel’s book, The Riddle of the Universe, that Haeckel did not begin to understand the nature of his subject matter, might also be said about Richards’ analysis.17 By not mentioning Monism, Richards reveals a lack of understanding of how Haeckel’s philosophical and scientific ideas were transformed into the rudiments of Nazi ideology. And not only Monism, but also Richards’ grasp of the intellectual origins of

Nazism is wanting. By totally equating anti-Semitism and Nazism, Richards fails to understand that there is much more to National

Socialist ideology than anti-Semitism, and this weakness further exposes the deficiencies of Richards’ approach to the subject. To be sure, the Jewish question was of utmost importance for Nazism, an indispensable part of the ideology, but also there were a host of other considerations that went into its ideological makeup. The fact is that when Richards singles out the issue of the Jews and no other dimension of Nazi thought, this attests to his glaringly incomplete and superficial knowledge of the subject, and is, in addition, a

8 backhanded way of trivializing an understanding of National

Socialism’s threat to mankind in general by relegating its content solely to the persecution of the Jews, resulting in its history being obscured and weakened. If, as Richards suggests, the prevailing theory about the Haeckelian intellectual origins of National Socialism are unacceptable, perhaps Richards might favor us with his own explanation.18

Much of the difficulty characterizing his article stems from Professor Richards’ curious and arbitrary historiographical approach that grants some individuals the privilege of having exercised historical influence after their deaths, and others, who are not so favored. In the eccentric way that Richards conceives the discipline of history, he maintains that Haeckel died in 1919 and therefore could not have influenced the coming of Nazism. “[Gasman] continues to maintain that Haeckel, dead a decade and a half before Hitler came to power, had virtually begun the work of the Nazis.”19

The point about Haeckel dying before the coming of Nazism and therefore freeing him from any connection with it is a theme repeated frequently in Richards’ writings. In this very odd approach to history, Richards, a professor of history, frequently renounces the past, but only when it suits him. Thus, in a recent book, and quite contradictorily from a methodological point of view, he credits the influence of the German poet Goethe on Darwin, even though the former died in 1832.20 Given this inconsistent logic, what would Richards’ analysis make of the influence on Nazism of Houston Stewart

Chamberlain, who died in 1927, or Friedrich Nietzsche who died in

1900, thinkers who are commonly assumed to have played a substantial role in the formulation of Nazism, but in both cases departing the scene appreciably before Hitler came to power.

9 This strangely odd historiographical theory is also applied to the history of racism. He takes issue with me by pointing out that I have proven nothing in my analysis of the Haeckelian origins of

Nazism. “[Gasman has] simply unveiled to a startled world that the founders of evolutionary theory lived in the nineteenth century,”21 and that therefore Haeckel was simply reflecting the racial zeitgeist of the time, which has no real bearing on the events of the twentieth century. But this is methodologically confused and leads to untenable historical conclusions. To be sure, there was a long tradition of racial thought in European society that Richards has recounted at length in his article to absolutely no purpose. But this in no way undermines the analysis of what Haeckel made of that tradition and when combined with Monism literally gave birth to the foundations of

National Socialist ideology. It is only Richards’ desire to exonerate Haeckel of any ties to Nazism and his flawed approach to history along with his unjustifiable delineation of a cultural divide between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, that makes it possible for him to conclude that Nazism cannot be deciphered by examining its roots in the nineteenth century.22

Richards writes ex cathedra from his privileged position as chairman of the history of science program at a prestigious American university. But this apparently does not prevent him from betraying a disconcerting lack of knowledge about the widespread development of non-religious scientific anti-Semitism in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, despite some citations in the bibliography that play no role in the article itself. He tells us that unlike

Haeckel, who was a godless materialist, the “most rabid anti-Semites during Haeckel’s time were conservative Christians, the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stöcker (1835-1909). Given Haeckel’s extreme anti-

10 religious views, it is unlikely that he would be allied with such

Christian apologists.”23 There was no need for Haeckel to ally himself with traditional

Christian hatred of the Jews. Scientific racism was much more powerful and believable for Haeckel and for his Monist followers who played such an overwhelming role in the invention of twentieth century scientific anti-Semitism that defined the theoretical basis of the

Holocaust. As we have already mentioned, Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Jules Soury were deeply committed Monists and close disciples of

Haeckel and it was these thinkers and many others in Germany as well, who were scientifically anti-Christian and who provided the theoretical basis for the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Richards, however, does not reveal any familiarity with this critical aspect of the history of Nazism, and he suggests discarding the analysis contained in my “pumped” up volume, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of

Fascist Ideology, where such details are more fully spelled out.24

About the only correct bit of information in Richard’s article is the fact that Haeckel was not, as I had originally maintained, a member of the proto-Nazi Thule Society. This assertion was based on an error in research and my publishers have been instructed to enter a correction in forthcoming editions of my works. This information was originally contained in a footnote in the first edition of The

Scientific Origins and never played a central role in the analysis.

Richards gleefully presents this error as though it’s his own discovery and he uses it as a further basis for discrediting my entire hypothesis. In fact, readers have pointed out the error quite some time ago, and I have offered a number of public apologies for the incorrect information.

11 However, even here Richards falls into error. In the earlier edition of his article posted on the Internet, he asserts that Haeckel was ideologically remote from the position of the Thule because of his materialism.25 In fact, despite a veneer of materialism, Haeckel’s mystically nationalist and racial Weltanschauung was indistinguishable from the prevailing ideas held by many members of the Thule

Gesellschaft. And many of the radically völkisch ideologists, like

Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels for example, who provided the intellectual foundation for the Thule were inspired by Haeckel’s Monism.26 If

Haeckel was not a member of the Thule, this did not prevent another very prominent anti-Semitic and deeply racially inclined völkisch Monist leader, Raoul H. Francé along with his wife, Annie Harrar from apparently lending support to the Thule in Munich during the spring of

1919. When the organization’s participants and sympathizers were warned away from Munich by right wing circles to avoid impending arrest by the left-wing Bavarian government in late March and April of that year, the Francés were listed among those in danger and did in fact flee the city after being tipped off.27

Richards’ historiography is deficient in other ways; blanket statements are made that cry out for clarification. For example, he introduces a section on Nazi writers who rejected Haeckel and the title of the paragraph – “The National Socialist Rejection of

Haeckelian Science” – implies that this position was officially true of the whole Nazi party and hierarchy, thus conveying an erroneous impression of Nazi unanimity of thought in regard to Haeckel. In this misleading segment, Richards mentions a number of Nazi writers who rejected the idea that Haeckel was the progenitor of Nazism, and excludes all the Nazi literature that did grasp the significance of

Haeckel’s Monism and eugenics for Nazism. If there were objections to

12 Haeckel from some Nazi writers, one has to bear in mind that the Nazis were not objective scholars and seekers after historical truth; in such a polycentric environment everyone had their own ax to grind and curried favor for their own survival. The full understanding of

Haeckel as intimately tied to Nazism came only after the War when it became possible to analyze the Nazi era with greater objectivity. In addition, the recent literature on the history of National Socialism increasingly is absorbed with the impact of academic science on Nazism’s functioning and on its ideology.28 The fact that the SS chose

Jena, in close proximity to Buchenwald, as one of the two SS university research centers, also attests to the fact that the Nazis gravitated naturally to what was for them historically a great center of theoretical racial research in Germany.29

Richards has spent much of his career trying to diminish any sense of difference between Haeckel and Darwin, but this goes against the grain of the prevailing evidence and the opinion of most historians of biology. He is especially disturbed by the fact that Stephen Jay Gould, an author who had neglected to support Richards, accorded prominent recognition to The Scientific Origins of National

Socialism in his classic text, Ontogeny and Phylogeny [1977], thus helping Gould launch the critical turn to Developmental Biology in the

1970s.30 Richards describes Gould as a “young scientist” when this took place, implying, one would imagine, that a mature Gould would have known better than to align himself with Gasman’s ideas.

Gould, however, valued the insights of The Scientific Origins until the end of his life. His article, critical of Haeckel’s much discussed and apparently fabricated embryonic drawings along with

Haeckel’s promulgation of the Biogenetic Law, “Abscheulich

(Atrocious!)” was published in 2000.31 Gould repeated his support of my

13 work in this article, and in a letter to me, somewhat earlier in

February 1997 Gould reiterated his intellectual indebtedness to my work.32 His last book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory also credits my interpretation of Haeckel.33

Richards’ article assumes a malevolent, intemperate style and he chooses his words with intentional malice. There are instances where

Richards employs scarcely veiled mockery to get his questionable revisionist ideas across. He juxtaposes my writings together with those of ,34 even though Weikart and I disagree on almost all basic interpretations of Haeckel, Darwin, and evolution and

Richards must be well aware of the fact that I certainly do not lump Haeckel and Darwin together, as does Weikart. Richards’ attempted synthesis of the two works is an apparent desire to introduce elements of confusion and even derision into the general academic discussion about Haeckel.35

In what amounts to a ludicrous and ultimately non-comprehending inversion of the witticism about anti-Semites who defend their honor by claiming that some of their best friends are Jews, Richards in a literal, non-ironic way, provides scores of illustrations about

Haeckel befriending Jews as if this could prove anything one way or another about Haeckel’s deeply held anti-Semitic convictions regarding

European history and society. Wilhelm Marr, who was influenced by

Haeckel, coined the term anti-Semitism, and was the founder of the

Anti-Semitic League that transformed anti-Semitism into a political movement [1879]; but he also had two and even possibly three Jewish wives. During the Nazi period many Germans openly spoke of their

Jewish acquaintances, and there are examples of Jews who served in the

Wehrmacht during the war;36 even a Field Marshall of the Luftwaffe,

Erhard Milch, was half Jewish. Do these “racial” anomalies present

14 mitigating evidence when assessing the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitism?

Or, would our evaluation of Nazi hatred of the Jews be somehow tempered if one were to recall Heinrich Himmler’s chilling homily that cautioned about an apparent desire among some SS officers to protect

Jewish acquaintances even while implementing the higher calling of the Final Solution?

Richards concludes his article as delusional as it began. We must, he argues weep for the injustice that has been done to the racial thinkers of the nineteenth century. They are the victims of a

Whig interpretation of history that reads the present back into the past. “We may justly expect that individuals who lived long ago display no less moral sensitivity than we do, but we cannot expect them to have the same empirical and theoretical knowledge that we do.”

It would be atavistic for us not to recognize that “such easy judgments are beneath the dignity of experienced scholars.” If “some

Nazis used Darwin’s [sic!] or Haeckel’s ideas for their own purposes, those two individuals stand in the same line with Goethe, Humboldt, and a very large number of Christian apologists.”37 But Goethe,

Humboldt, and Christian apologists were not precursors of the Nazis; their ideas, even in Nazi misappropriations were not as relevant for National Socialism as the immediately applicable ideas of Haeckel.

The only ones who have some trepidation about holding Haeckel to account for his ideas are Richards and a small coterie of like- minded authors, many at the Haeckel Haus in Jena.38 The nineteenth century was not silent or uncomprehending about what Haeckel was saying or proposing. Many voices were raised against Haeckel because there was a clear perception that his ideas were dangerous and he provoked a sense of foreboding among many prominent writers and thinkers – to be seen, for example, in the concerns about turning

15 Monism into a religious dogma raised by Rudolf Virchow in his debate with Haeckel in 1877, to recount just one instance. The journal, the Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie, which Haeckel helped found, and which eventually became an organ of the Nazis, featured at its outset, articles by scientists and anthropologists who were not always in agreement with the radical assumptions of German racism. In France, Haeckel’s intimate follower,

Georges Vacher de Lapouge was treated as a crank by most of French science and anthropology. In Italy, Vilfredo Pareto at first seemed to cast doubt on the assumptions of racism. In the socialist movement others warned about the danger of Haeckel’s cult-like evolutionary ideas like the prominent Italian Marxist intellectual, Antonio

Labriola; and in the religious press attacks on Haeckel were a perennial occurrence. Leading biologists like Erwin Baur and Alfred Ploetz who eventually were converted to Aryan science and Nazism, in the beginning took a more objective approach to racial questions. And

Richards says not a word about the Abolitionist movement that brought to the fore many issues about race throughout the earlier and middle decades of the nineteenth century. In other words, Richards’ attempt to exonerate Haeckel and to divest him of all links to Nazism because Haeckel was only an unconscious product of his time are doomed to failure when measured against the conscious sophistication of the intellectual and scientific debates about racism and Monism that proliferated in the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century, a time not atavistically “long ago” as Richards describes it, but an era intruding directly on the heels of the Nazi revolution.

Richards, one must conclude therefore, has not succeeded in providing any new information or insights that might discredit the all too apparent affinities between Haeckel and the Nazi movement.

16

Notes

1 Gasman (1971; 1998).

2 Richards (2007).

3 Richards’ approach bears some similarities to recent publications originating from the Haeckel Haus at the University of Jena that also seem to sow confusion and attempt to run rings around the available source material in order to subvert an understanding of the links between Haeckel and Nazism. See, for example, the review by Ball (2007)of Breidbach (2007). Ball raises the issue of Breidbach’s reticence when it comes to the possible connection between Haeckel and Nazism. Breidbach is the director of the Haeckel Archives at the University of Jena. A recently published essay by researchers affiliated with the Haeckel Haus, denies Haeckel’s anti-Semitism: “Haeckel was not an anti-Semitic precursor of National Socialism.” But this goes against the grain of the prevailing evidence that is manipulated by the authors to gain a conclusion arrived at a priori. See Stefan Wogawa, Uwe Hossfeld and Olaf Breidbach, “’Sie ist eine Rassenfrage.’ Ernst Haeckel und der Antisemitismus;” 233: in Preuss (2006)

4 Bahr (1894). Richards points out that Bahr interviewed a host of liberal and leftwing personalities in addition to Haeckel. This information adds nothing to the content of Richards’ article but does seem to suggest that Richards hoped that by naming them, the atmosphere generated by the positive attitude of some of these individuals towards the Jews would lend more credibility to his denial of Haeckel’s anti-Semitism.

5 Richards (2007; 100).

6 The following summary of the Bahr interview (1894) is derived from the account in Gasman (1971; 157-159).

7 Consistency is not one of Richards’ strong points. He argues, on the one hand, that Haeckel did not think of the Jews in racial terms, and then goes on to describe Haeckel’s description of the Jews in biological terms and the place they assumed on the evolutionary tree of life. Haeckel, in typical racist terms, thought of the Jews as both biologically inferior and superior at the same time. Richards (2007; 101, ft. 10).

8 Richards (2007; 100).

9 The theme of the dangers to European society of an escalating Oriental population was typical of the publications of the Monist League. This was especially true of the lectures and publications of Wilhelm Schallmayer, a noted eugenicist.

10 Quoted in Gasman (1971; 157).

11 When Richards writes that “any tincture of what might be thought of as anti-Semitism to be placed within the scope of Haeckel’s more broadly directed animus: namely, against all orthodox religions, including Judaism, but with special disdain … for Catholicism.” (Richards; 2007; 100). Richards misinterprets Haeckel’s theory of history as presented in The Riddle of the Universe and downplays the deleterious role of the Jews for Haeckel, who conceived of the Jews are the instigators of the monotheistic religions and therefore the source of the infection generated by revealed religion. Haeckel did display a special contempt for Catholicism, but this was subordinate to his general theory of history that located the Jews as the source of what had gone awry with Western Civilization.

17

Richards also overlooks the stream of anti-Semitic sentiments expressed throughout Haeckel’s life: “the Jews among us have absorbed large sums of money;” or “the Jews in Europe being enterprising, calculating, and even crafty, with a special aptitude for money matters.” Haeckel (1881; 52, 89). Even as a young student Haeckel exhibited strong anti-Jewish sentiments. In 1853 he write to his parents from Würzburg that an “insolent Jew boy” a “disgusting insolent” person was injured in a duel. Haeckel went on to write that his “very nice” gentile friends “slashed his Jewish face about handsomely, without receiving even a scratch in return.” Haeckel (1923)

12 Brücher (1936). Brücher was a staff member of the Institute for Human Hereditary Research and Racial Politics at the University of Jena, the sponsor of the book.

13 For an analysis of the career of Brücher during the War and afterwards in South America, see Gade (2006).

14 Richards (2007; 100).

15 Brücher (1936; 118).

16 Ibid.

17 Gasman (1971; 14).

18 Richards writes: “in the case of the Nazis, there is no compelling evidence … that evolutionary ideas (as opposed to genetic and eugenic ideas), played a dominant role in forming their attitudes.” (Richards; 2007; 101). Apart from the fact that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to separate from evolutionary considerations, how would Richards explain the role of Natural Selection and the Struggle for Existence in Nazi ideology? Richards also seems to be unaware of the cyclical theory of history in Nazi and Fascist ideology that rejected ideas of progress that in turn have their roots in Haeckel’s evolutionary Monism. To be sure, there were some elements in Nazi ideology that did cast doubt on evolution, but Richards exaggerates their influence and overlooks the role of the Biogenetic Law in shaping Nazi beliefs about the existence of racial constants in organic nature.

19 Richards (2007; 97).

20 Richards (2002; 210-211).

21 Richards (2007; 99).

22 The genre of Richards’s approach to history seems very much like a sub species of Holocaust denial. Despite overwhelming evidence, he detaches Haeckel from all indications that he and many of his followers made major contributions to the ideology of National Socialism and racial eugenics.

23 Richards (2007; 99).

24 See, for example, Burleigh and Wippermann (1991; Chapter 2), for a historical summary of “scientific” racial theories. Without providing any proof whatever for discarding the analysis contained in Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology, Richards, implying great doubt, writes that “in Gasman’s estimation, [Haeckel became] the primary source of fascism throughout Europe in the first part of the 20th century;” (Richards; 2007; 97).

25 In the version of his article in Biological Theory, Richards repeats his claims of Haeckel’s materialism: “[Haeckel] disdained such superstitions as theosophy and astrology – doctrines that he would have dismissed as completely antithetic to progressive modernism;” (2007; 99). The trouble with this statement is that Haeckel’s Monism was very close to theosophy and was intimately part of the theosophical movement in Germany and to the anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. Haeckel himself openly praised theosophy (Haeckel 1905; 1918; 70) as fully expressing his own vision of God: this book was a French translation from the German by Georges Vacher de Lapouge. For the many links between Haeckelian Monism and theosophy, see (Berlin um 1900; 1984), a catalogue of a major exhibition organized by the Berlin Academy of the Arts in Berlin in 1984 on the state of German culture around the turn of the twentieth century.

18

26 For a discussion of the Social Darwinian content of ideologists of the Thule, see (Rose; 1994; passim).

27 See (Francé-Harrar; 1961, 166-171), for an account of these events. I am indebted to the Spanish historian, Dr. Rosa Sala Rose, an authority on the thought and career of Raoul Francé, for calling my attention to the Annie Harrar memoirs and the apparent involvement of the Francés in the activities of the Thule society.

28 See, for example, the recent important study of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute during the Nazi period by (Gausemeier; 2005).

29 It should also be recalled that the famous Nazi racial theoretician, Hans F.K. Günther, was on the faculty at the University of Jena. Günther had been deeply influenced by Haeckel’s disciple, Georges Vacher de Lapouge. See (Hecht; 2000).

30 See also (Gilbert; 1996; 357-372), for an account of the influence of The Scientific Origins of National Socialism on the theoretical direction of evolutionary biology in the 1970s.

31 (Gould; 2000; 42-50). A further indication of Richards’ campaign of defending Haeckel, without apparently substantiating his claims, is seen in his talk at the 6th International Conference of Vertebrate Morphology held in Jena, Germany [summer 2001]. Richards presented a lecture claiming ‘surprising’ evidence that would exonerate Haeckel of deception in his embryonic drawings. To my knowledge the publication of this material is still awaited. It is also noteworthy that the embryonic drawings that have drawn so much criticism are reproduced uncritically on the cover of Richards’ book, (1992). For a critical view of Haeckel’s drawings, see (Richardson; 2002).

32 Gould wrote: “As you know, I am a great admirer of your previous book on Ernst Haeckel’s biological work and its political influences. This book was greatly useful to me when I wrote Ontogeny and Phylogeny, and I greatly appreciated the insights that you provided to my own historical and biological studies.”

33 (Gould; 2001; 209).

34 (Weikart; 2005).

35 It should be noted that Weikart’s erroneous interpretations of Darwin, Darwinian evolution and Haeckel’s science, politics, Social , and anti-Semitism, seem to be as subversive of sound scholarship as are the writings of Richards.

36 See (Rigg; 2002).

37 (Richards; 2007; 101).

38 See above, p. 1, ft. 3.

References

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Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann (1991) The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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20

Weikart, Richard (2005) : Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

21