Darwin and the Nazi Legal System
This article is focused on the Darwinian roots of the Nazi legal system. It contends that Darwinism underpinned the most basic features of Nazi legal order and theory. The Nazis developed a ‘progressive’ theory of law in which ‘law’ was interpreted as a result of force and social struggle. According to the Nazi legal theory, the legal system should not contain fixed rules of law but evolve in continuous flow as a ‘living law’. Because the Nazis were Darwinists who believed that human beings were descended from the animal kingdom, they did not accept the idea of God-ordained human rights, but rather that the ‘stronger’ would have the ‘right’ to dispossess and destroy the ‘weaker’. During that time, most German judges and lawyers were legal positivists who rejected the concept of God-given rights as defined by the Holy Scriptures and classical natural-law theory. As a result, a ‘master morality’ w...