Book Excerpt: Harari’s Nazis Were Not Humanists

Adapted from Chapter 2 of Harari’s Humanist Wars of Religion: A Critique of Harari’s History of Modern Ideologies by Leslie Allan

In Sapiens and Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari tells his readers that modern humanism splintered into warring sects, and that one of those sects produced the Third Reich. Of the ‘evolutionary humanists’, Harari [2015: 258] writes that the

“most famous representatives are the Nazis. What distinguished the Nazis from other humanist sects was a different definition of ‘humanity’, one deeply influenced by the theory of evolution. In contrast to other humanists, the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or degenerate into a subhuman.”

He presses the point in Homo Deus [2017: 300]:

Whereas liberalism merged with the milder versions of nationalism to protect the unique experiences of each human community, evolutionary humanists such as Hitler identified particular nations as the engines of human progress, and concluded that these nations ought to bludgeon or even exterminate anyone standing in their way. . . . Auschwitz should serve as a blood-red warning sign rather than as a black curtain that hides entire sections of the human horizon. Evolutionary humanism played an important part in the shaping of modern culture, and it is likely to play an even greater role in the shaping of the twenty-first century.

Harari does not claim a straight road from Darwin to Auschwitz. He claims that the Nazi conception of humanity was ‘deeply influenced by the theory of evolution’ and that the Nazis were ‘following the logic of Darwinian evolution’ [2015: 261]. It is a weaker claim, yet leaves the reader in the same place. And tracing Nazism to Darwin is no obscure academic thesis. For decades it has been among the sharpest ideological weapons aimed at secular Americans. Richard Weikart [2004] built From Darwin to Hitler on it. The Discovery Institute has made it a staple of its campaigning against the teaching of evolution, and the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed [Frankowski 2008] carried it to a popular audience. Humanist organizations have spent much of this century answering it. What is new is that the argument now arrives stripped of its apologetic packaging, in books that have sold tens of millions of copies, under the authority of a professor of history whom humanists have every reason to admire. The trouble is that the story is untethered from the historical facts.

Hitler and God

Hitler and the Nazis were diametrically opposed to what is conventionally called ‘humanism’, seeing it as a bourgeois, atheistic, and sentimental ideology. A dispassionate reading of Mein Kampf yields the unmistakable observation that Hitler was anti-humanist in every sense of the word. In a speech delivered at Kulmbach in 1928, he rejected the humanist regard for all of humanity outright:

Only through struggle has man raised himself above the animal world. Even today it is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle. [Prange 1944: 8]

Perhaps Harari’s first mistake in aligning the Nazis with ‘evolutionary humanism’ is his thinking that Hitler and Nazism eschewed theism. Harari [2015: 258] puts ‘evolutionary humanism’ unambiguously in the atheist camp when he writes that ‘The only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism is evolutionary humanism, whose most famous representatives are the Nazis.’

In fact, Hitler and the Nazis were stridently monotheistic. They regarded the triumph of the strong over the weak as part of the divine will. In Mein Kampf, Hitler made many appeals to the ‘Almighty Creator’, ‘Almighty God’, ‘Providence’ and the ‘divine’. He made the obligation to produce fit offspring a divine imperative when he appealed to every German citizen’s ‘bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image’ [Hitler 1925: 316]. He invoked the ‘Divine Will’ against the ‘sin’ of allowing the ‘weaker’ to live [1925: 113, 223f]. For him, the Jews’ ‘very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God’s image in His creation’ [1925: 146]. He saw his as a divine mission: ‘And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord’ [1925: 61]. Writing of the German physique and character, he warned: ‘Whoever destroys His work wages war against God’s Creation and God’s Will’ [1925: 430].

Hitler did not abandon traditional religion. He believed he was its true representative on earth, writing that the Jew’s life ‘is of this world only and his mentality is as foreign to the true spirit of Christianity as his character was foreign to the great Founder of this new creed two thousand years ago’ [1925: 240]. Far from wanting to eradicate belief in God, he thought it essential to the social fabric: for the masses, he wrote, ‘faith is absolutely the only basis of a moral outlook on life’ [1925: 210].

Was Hitler none the less an atheist? In a newspaper article he wrote in 1933, he was adamant: ‘It is charged against me that I am against property, that I am an atheist.’ ‘Both charges are false’ [Baynes 1942: 93]. In his speech at Munich in April 1922, he emphasized many times his identity as a committed ‘Christian’ [Baynes 1942: 19f].

Throughout his speeches and writings, Hitler railed against the ‘atheist’ Communists and Socialists. The Nazis’ appeals to Almighty God were matched by their persecution of atheists and of the earliest modern humanist groups. Following the outlawing of atheist and freethinker organizations under the 1933 Enabling Act, Hitler boasted in a public speech that

we have restored to faith its pre-requisites because we were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out [Baynes 1942: 378]

Copson [2021] recounts Berlin’s Protestant Church co-opting the Freethinkers Hall for its own religious propaganda after Hitler banned the German Freethinkers League that year. Many humanists fled.

The suggestion that Hitler merely feigned belief for reasons of political expediency sits awkwardly with how thoroughly Christian his movement was. Of the SS staff working at Auschwitz from 1940 to 1945, 42.6 percent declared themselves Catholic, 36.5 percent Evangelical (Protestant) and 20.1 percent Gottgläubig (‘God-believer’) [Gutman and Berenbaum 1998]. German soldiers had Gott mit uns [God is with us] inscribed on their belt buckles in the First World War [Spector 2004: 14], and Wehrmacht soldiers wore the same slogan in the Second [Armbrüster 2005: 64]. Himmler barred atheists from joining the SS because they were ‘arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid’ [Ziegler 2014: 85]. Recruits to the SS, the Wehrmacht, foreign volunteer units, the German civil service, and the Hitler Youth were all required to swear an oath to Hitler and to God.

The National Socialist government promoted Christianity from its earliest days, using religious rhetoric and policy as a bulwark against Bolshevist atheism. Speaking in August 1934, Hitler implored: ‘National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality’ [Baynes 1942: 386f].

On the list of books banned by the Nazis in 1935, Rosenberg included ‘All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk‘ [as cited in Arizona Board of Regents 2002]. The Party set up a new state church it called ‘Positive Christianity’ and promoted it as more authentic to the real Jesus (see Steigmann-Gall [2003] and Buesnel [2020]). Point 24 of the Nazis’ 25-point Program read: ‘The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not commit itself to any particular denomination’ [as cited in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2025].

Hitler’s private convictions are, it should be said, a matter of genuine historical dispute. Some historians read the Table Talk and Goebbels’ diaries as the record of a man privately contemptuous of the churches and merely tactical in public. That argument can be left open here, because nothing in what follows depends on it. Whatever Hitler believed in private, a regime that outlawed freethinker organizations, required an oath to God of its SS recruits, banned books ridiculing ‘faith in God’ and grounded its racial doctrine in divine creation had not ‘broken loose from traditional monotheism’, as Harari contends. It had bound itself to it.

Hitler and Darwin

What of the other association that Harari makes—that Hitler and the Nazis used Darwin’s theory of evolution to conclude that superior nations ‘ought to bludgeon or even exterminate anyone standing in their way’ [Harari 2017: 300]? It is specifically Darwin’s notion of the biological evolution of one species from another that Harari incorporates into what he labels the Nazi ideology of ‘evolutionary humanism’. In Sapiens, he has the Nazis ‘following the logic of Darwinian evolution’ [Harari 2015: 261]. In Homo Deus, their ‘evolutionary humanism’ is rooted ‘in the firm ground of Darwinian evolutionary theory’ [2017: 295].

When Hitler and the Nazis appealed to ‘evolution’ weeding out the unfit, were they leaning on the Darwinian theory of the mutability of species? The answer is no. Nazi ideologues relied on the works of Christian writers such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who argued that the human races have separate origins configured by God. They outright rejected the Darwinian thesis that the Aryans and all other races share a common ancestor. Hitler and the National Socialists picked up the idea that the races cannot be improved by natural selection and concluded that the God-given supremacy of the Aryan race must be prevented from degenerating through interbreeding with inferior races. Later figures such as Alfred Rosenberg and Hans Günther leaned heavily on these earlier writers and their anti-Darwinian notion of the separate creation of races.

So antithetical were the Nazis to Darwinian theory that in 1935 they placed on the list of banned books ‘Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel)’ [as cited in Arizona Board of Regents 2002].

Hitler himself resolutely rejected Darwin’s central claim that the human species and its races, as with all other species, have a common biological ancestor. In Mein Kampf he explained [1925: 222]:

Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law – one may call it an iron law of Nature – which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species.

For Hitler, the Aryans were a special creation in need of protection from adulteration—the ‘highest image of God among His creatures’ [Hitler 1925: 298]. Far from the Germans’ higher capacities being the result of natural selection, ‘it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties’ [1925: 430]. The role of the State was not the biological improvement of mankind through selective breeding, but ‘the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind’ [1925: 297]—to ‘preserve and encourage the highest type of humanity which a beneficent Creator has bestowed on this earth’ [1925: 310].

Hitler did appeal explicitly to the ‘evolution’ of humans. But these were not references to the biological evolution of a master race. Writing of the shift from enslaving subjugated peoples to enslaving the ox and horse, he described a progression: ‘One does not reach the higher level without first having climbed the lower rungs’—a cultural progress prompted by the Aryan’s ‘sense of reality’ [1925: 230]. He attributed ‘human evolution’ to ‘the spirit of sacrifice in favour of the common weal’, and on the same page made the point explicit in discussing the ‘real origins and causes of the cultural evolution of mankind’ [1925: 344]. A review of his key speeches from 1922 to 1939 [Baynes 1942] likewise turns up no appeal to Darwin or to natural selection as the engine of human progress. The only ‘evolution’ in them is cultural and spiritual.

Given this, what evidence does Harari bring that the Nazis really were Darwinian evolutionists? In Sapiens he reproduces a Nazi cartoon from 1933 depicting Hitler as ‘a sculptor who creates the superman’ from clay while a ‘bespectacled liberal intellectual is appalled by the violence needed to create the superman’ [2015: 262]. But there is no suggestion here of natural selection fashioning anything. The point of the cartoon is to ridicule liberal squeamishness about the violence required to eliminate the biologically unfit—entirely consistent with the Nazi objective of preventing pollution of an already perfect race.

Harari [2015: 262] also quotes a 1942 German biology textbook: ‘The battle for existence is hard and unforgiving, but is the only way to maintain life. This struggle eliminates everything that is unfit for life, and selects everything that is able to survive.’ But this teaches only that nature sometimes produces defective offspring that cannot survive unassisted, a fact known for centuries before Darwin. There is no inkling here of humans as a ‘mutable species’ able to ‘evolve into superhumans’ [2015: 260], as Harari supposes and superimposes onto Nazi ideology.

In Homo Deus, Harari continued to maintain that the Nazis had ‘planned to create superhumans by means of selective breeding and ethnic cleansing’ [2017: 411]. He offered no further evidence for it, and a reader will search his end-of-chapter Notes in vain for support.

There is, in any case, an incoherence at the heart of the construction. Harari [2017: 114] writes that the ‘founding idea of humanist religions such as liberalism, communism and Nazism is that Homo sapiens has some unique and sacred essence’. Six pages later he tells us that Darwin deprived us of the idea that ‘each human possesses an eternal individual essence’ [2017: 120]. How Darwin’s mutability of species fits with the Nazis’ immutable racial essence is left unexplained.

Huxley and UNESCO

Perhaps Harari is right none the less, and there really is an ideology of ‘evolutionary humanism’ that calls for the ‘creation of superhumans’ [2017: 411] and ‘mandates the oppression of inferior humans by their superiors’ [2017: 295].

The term appears to have been coined by the prominent humanist Julian Huxley, in his 1946 statement of purpose for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Huxley was one of UNESCO’s founders and its first Director-General. Coming as it did at the end of the Second World War, his essay was keen to emphasize the peaceful and universalist character of humanism—a ‘world humanism’, as he put it, ‘treating all peoples and all individuals within each people as equals in terms of human dignity, mutual respect, and educational opportunity’ [Huxley 1946: 7].

Harari writes that ‘evolutionary humanism thinks that the human experience of war is valuable and even essential’ [2017: 296] and that for it ‘conflict is something to applaud rather than lament’ [2017: 295]. It could not be further from the truth. Huxley [1946: 14] made his target explicit:

It [scientific and evolutionary humanism] also constitutes a complete disproof of all theses, like those of Hegelian philosophy, of Fascism, or of Nazism, which maintain that the State is in some way higher than the individual, and that the individual exists only or primarily for the State.

Huxley’s reaction against totalitarianism was hardly his alone. Years earlier, the Annual General Meeting of the Union of Ethical Societies (renamed Humanists UK in 2017) had recorded:

We believe peaceful solutions of all international problems are possible. Fascism, glorifying war as the supreme achievement of mankind, denies this. We believe in individual freedom, the right of all to self-development according to one’s highest ideals. Fascism seeks to enslave mind and body . . . Fascism believes in the subjection of woman to man. . . . Fascism believes in the deification of one man, the ‘Leader’. Surely there can be no more urgent claim on us to-day than to fight against this monstrous thing . . . [Copson 2025]

It is perfectly acceptable to apply a label post-hoc to a person such as Hitler, or to a movement such as National Socialism, where the label fits. Here it does not fit, in three separate ways. Hitler and the Nazis were not atheists. They did not rely on Darwin’s theory to support their view of racial supremacy. And the term ‘evolutionary humanism’ was coined to denote a philosophy in opposition to Nazi totalitarianism.

The name Harari gives to the ideology of Auschwitz was invented, after the war, by a man whose purpose in inventing it was to make Auschwitz impossible. That is not a small slip in an otherwise sound account. It is the first of many.

References

Arizona Board of Regents 2002. Lists of Banned Books, 1932-1939, Arizona Board of Regents, http://ualibr-exhibits.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/burnedbooks/documents.htm.

Armbrüster, Thomas 2005. Management and Organization in Germany, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Baynes, Norman H., trans. and ed., 1942. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (April 1922 — August 1939) Vol. 1, London: Oxford University Press.

Buesnel, Ryan 2020. ‘Positive Christianity’: Theological Rationales and Legacies, Religion Compass 2020;e12353, https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12353.

Copson, Andrew 2021. What Happened to Humanists during the Third Reich?, Andrew Copson, https://andrewcopson.com/2021/01/what-happened-to-humanists-during-the-third-reich/.

Copson, Andrew 2025. No, It Wasn’t Godly Values That Defeated Fascism (And It Won’t Be), Andrew Copson, https://andrewcopson.com/2025/05/no-it-wasnt-godly-values-that-defeated-fascism-and-it-wont-be/.

Frankowski, Nathan, dir., 2008. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Premise Media Corporation.

Gutman, Yisrael and Michael Berenbaum, eds, 1998. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Harari, Yuval Noah 2015. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage.

Harari, Yuval Noah 2017. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, London: Vintage.

Hitler, Adolf 1925 (1939). Mein Kampf, trans. unknown NSDAP members, London: Hurst and Blackett.

Huxley, Julian 1946. UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy, London: UNESCO, https://archive.org/details/huxley-unesco-its-purpose-and-philosophy.

Prange, Gordon W., ed., 1944. Hitler’s Words: Two Decades of National Socialism, 1923–1943, American Council on Public Affairs, https://archive.org/details/hitlers-words-two-decades-of-national-socialism-1923-1942.

Spector, Robert M. 2004. World without Civilization: Mass Murder and the Holocaust, History and Analysis, Vol. I, Lanham: University Press of America.

Steigmann-Gall, Richard 2003. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2025. Nazi Party Platform, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party-platform.

Weikart, Richard 2004. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ziegler, Herbert F. 2014. Nazi Germany’s New Aristocracy: The SS Leadership, 1925–1939, Princeton: Princeton University Press.