
Richard Weikart is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Ideas that Drove the Third Reich, and The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life. His most recent book is Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (2022). He completed his Ph.D. in modern European history at the University of Iowa in 1994, receiving the biennial prize of the Forum for History of Human Sciences for the best dissertation in that field. His revised dissertation, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein, was published in 1999.
His book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, documents the influence of naturalistic evolution on ethical thought, euthanasia, militarism, racism, and ultimately Hitler's ideology. It was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. For more information on this book, visit darwintohitler.com.
His "From Darwin to Hitler" lecture delivered at the University of California San Diego is available here.
Dr. Weikart has also written Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) which helps explain the mystery of Hitler’s pernicious ideology by demonstrating that Hitler’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic, inspired by an evolutionary utopian project of biologically improving the human race.
He published two books in 2016: The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, which contains chapters on materialism, Darwinism, and biological determinism, among other issues; and Hitler’s Religion, which shows that Hitler was a pantheist who deified nature and based his morality on the laws of nature, especially the Darwinian struggle for existence.
His latest book is Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (2022), which takes his earlier scholarship a step further by examining the Nazi biology curriculum, textbooks used in German schools during the Third Reich, Nazi propaganda, and the writings of prominent German biologists and anthropologists during the Third Reich. He thereby demonstrates the importance of Darwinism for the Nazi worldview. In the final chapter he shows how white nationalists and neo-Nazis today still rely on Darwinism to buttress their racist ideology.
Richard Weikart's Vitae can be accessed here.
Archives


Darwinian Racism vs. Evolutionary Ethics that Devalue All Men Equally

Richard Weikart and Hank Hanegraaff Talk Darwinian Racism

Linking Darwin Skepticism with Anti-Communism, Historian Offers a Misguided Attack

Do Darwin Critics Reject Evolution Because They’re Anti-Communists? Carl Weinberg Says Yes

Rejecting Evolution Because of Anti-Communism? Charge by Cornell U Press Book Fails to Detonate

Anti-Racists Often Ignore This Non-Religious Source of Racism

Does Disbelief in Human Evolution Foment Racism?

Eric Metaxas and Richard Weikart Spotlight Darwinian Racism

Darwinian Influences on the Alt-Right

Darwinism in Nazi Propaganda

Darwinian Racism Webinar, Pt. 2

Racism Serves Darwinism, Darwinism Serves Racism

The Racism of Darwin and Darwinism

Darwinian Racism: The Author Webinar, Pt. 1

Let’s Learn from Whoopi Goldberg’s Misunderstanding about the History of Racism

Darwinian Racism: How Evolutionary Theory Shaped Nazi Thinking

Remembering E. O. Wilson and Sociobiology

Richard Weikart on Scientific Racism and the War on Humanity
