Richard Weikart is Professor of History at California State University, Stanislaus. 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, go to www.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.
In addition to articles in scholarly journals, he recently published two books: The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life (2016), which contains chapters on materialism, Darwinism, and biological determinism, among other issues. His most recent book, Hitler’s Religion (2016), shows that Hitler was a pantheist who deified nature and based his morality on the laws of nature, especially the Darwinian struggle for existence.
Richard Weikart's Vitae can be accessed here. More articles by Dr. Weikart are accessible here.