a basis in natural selection for the class struggle in history . . not only is a death blow dealt here for the first time to ‘teleology’ in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is emphatically explained.’ "—*C. Zirkle, Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene (1959), p. 88.
"Defending Darwin is nothing new for socialists. The socialist movement recognized Darwinism as an important element in its general world outlook right from the start. When Darwin published his Origin of the Species in 1859, Karl Marx wrote a letter to Fredrick Engels in which he said: ‘. . this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view . .’ By defending Darwinism, working people strengthen their defenses against the attacks of these reactionary outfits, and prepare the way for the transformation of the social order."—*Cliff Conner, "Evolution vs. Creationism: In Defense of Scientific Thinking," International Socialist Review, November 1980.
"Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was an avid, self-appointed spokesman for Darwinism in Germany . . Haeckel professed a mystical belief in the forces of nature and a literal transfer of the laws of biology to the social realm. The movement he founded in Germany was proto-Nazi in character; romantic Volkism and the Monist League (established 1906), along with evolution and science, laid the ideological foundations of [German] National Socialism. " . . English Darwinism interlinked two main themes, natural selection and the struggle for existence. Social Darwinism is an attempt to explain human society in terms of evolution, but Haeckel’s [proto-Nazi] interpretation was quite different from that of capitalist Herbert Spencer or of communist Marx. For him a major component was the ethic of inherent struggle between higher and lower cultures,—between races of men."—*Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984), p. 48."Along with his social Darwinist followers, [Haeckel] set about to demonstrate the ‘aristocratic’ and nondemocratic aspect of the laws of nature . . Up to his death in 1919, Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed-bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany’s main ideologists for racism, nationalism, and imperialism."—*Daniel Gasman, Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (1971), p. xvi.
"German Darwinism was shaped by Ernst Haeckel, who combined it with anticlericalism, militaristic patriotism and visions of German racial purity. He encouraged the destruction of the established church in Germany, with its sermons about ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ and compassion for unfortunates. Such a ‘superstitious’ doctrine would lead to ‘racial suicide.’ "—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 119. ("Monism" is the theory that all reality consists only of matter. This teaching is an important basis of atheism).
"Of all the forerunners of Hitler in Germany—Hegel, Comte, Nietzsche, Bernhardi, and others—the most significant was certainly Ernst Haeckel, the atheistic founder of the Monist League and the most vigorous promoter of both biological Darwinism and social Darwinism in continental Europe in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."—H.M. Morris, Long War Against God (1989), pp. 77-78.
"Only the fittest should survive."
"He [Haeckel] convinced masses of his countrymen they must accept their evolutionary destiny as a ‘master race’ and ‘outcompete’ inferior peoples, since it was right and natural that only the ‘fittest’ should survive. His version of Darwinism was incorporated in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), which means ‘My Struggle,’ taken from Haeckel’s German translation of Darwin’s phrase, ‘the struggle for existence.’ "—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 207 [also 312-313].
"In 1918, Darwin’s apostle Ernst Haeckel became a member of the Thule Gesellschaft, a secret, radically right-wing organization that played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi movement. Rudolf Hess and Hitler attended the meeting 