How Did the Holocaust Come to Be?

Well, I learned me sumpin today!  Who says Netflix is a time waster?  Lately I have been doing research on the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.  I wanted to know where all that hate for people that were not acceptable in the eyes of the Nazi came from.  That led me to a few documentaries about World War II, Auschwitz, Hitler and the Nazi party.  How the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals became synonymous with Hitler and the Nazi part is actually a very interesting subject.  A subject that had beginnings that were not unlike the United States and many other "thinking" and "developed" countries. 

Now, before you fly off the handle and label me as a hater of the United States, please read on.  In the early 1900's (1920-1940), a school of thought surfaced among "thinking" and "developed" nations.  At the time, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution had really taken hold.  Of course, Darwin's theory of natural selection was a prime part of his theory of evolution.  Darwin believed that the strong would survive and pass along their positive qualities to the next generation, and the weak, would slowly die off and take their bad qualities with them.  Therefore, Darwin concluded, mankind would eventually reach perfection.  As a result, "thinking" people wondered, "Well, what if we helped that natural selection along and helped weed out the weak, sick, disabled, mentally retarded and dumb!?" 

It was in the 1920's and 30's that sterilization became a popular way to keep the undesirables from reproducing.  The idea being to rid the undesirable people, "help" the natural selection process along and speed up the process.  In fact by the middle of the 1930's, more than half the states in the United Sates had passed laws that authorized the sterilization of "inmates of mental institutions, persons convicted more than once of sex crimes, those doomed to be feeble-minded by 10 tests, 'moral degenerate persons,' and epileptics."

Then, there was the Buck v. Bell case, brought before the United States Supreme Court, (1927), a ruling that upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the mentally retarded, "for the protection and health of the state." It was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool. 

This ruling was actually used by the Nazi party to make the relatively small leap to the idea of eugenic killings in Nazi Germany.  But to me, it is amazing to think that the United States really had the same mind set as Nazi Germany.  Obviously the United States snapped back to reality once another country dared to kill in the name of eventual human perfection.  Who knows where we would be now had that genocide been allowed to continue here in our home. 

To me, it just shows the dangers that are involved in the theory of evolution.  If we evolved, why not just "help" out the natural selection process and speed up our eventual arrival at perfection?  If we evolved, there really is no such thing as morals or conscience, so why not just do what is believed to be a foregone conclusion anyway?  Fortunately, Adolf Hitler answered these questions for us.  We do have a conscience, unlike other primates.  We are guided by morals, unlike other primates.  So, really, the conclusion of the matter should be quite evident.