There is no shortage of books on the Nazi leader's worldview and titles that begin with the word “Hitler's …” Some works such as Eberhard Jäckel's Hitlers Weltanschauung have made crucial contributions by demonstrating ideological coherence and how the dictator systematically implemented his ideology. Other books have offered fewer insights. Richard Weikart, an intellectual historian at California State University, Stanislaus, has now added a new study that seeks to demonstrate how an “evolutionary ethic” guided Hitler's thoughts and policies. His book Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress treads familiar ground, representing a sequel to the author's 2004 study From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany in which he laid out historical links between Darwinism and Nazism.

Acknowledging the many scholarly examinations of social Darwinism in Hitler's ideology, Weikart takes a step further by arguing that the Nazi dictator adopted a coherent evolutionary ethic that centered on the perceived necessity of improving the human race. This ethic was rooted in a Darwinian understanding of evolutionary laws in which the “struggle for existence” between unequal races brought about “biological progress” (pp. 2, 58). Weikart defines the term ethic rather loosely, describing it as a “fundamental principle used to justify moral commands” (p. 6). In this sense, Hitler did not only style himself as a “moral crusader,” but also firmly believed in a “higher moral purpose” and continually strove for the German Volk's “biological improvement” (pp. 17, 197).

Weikart develops his thesis in nine text chapters that cover a wide range from sexuality and socialism to war and genocide. While he reiterates findings of previous studies, including Eberhard Jäckel's case for ideological coherence, Weikart introduces evolutionary ethic as “the core” and glue that held Hitler's ideological edifice together. Rightfully asserting that this brand of ethics does not explain all tenets of Hitler's worldview, Weikart, nonetheless, maintains that it functioned as “the guiding principle” behind his policies, even behind the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Anti-Semitism only emerges as “a prominent factor” that Hitler integrated into his broader “evolutionary worldview” (pp. 15, 75). In addition, each chapter shows that the Nazi leader was not original in his thinking, but drew widely on writings by eugenicists, racial anthropologists, and social Darwinists (pp. 71, 157, 114, 11). Furthermore, Hitler remained firmly committed to his “ultimate goals,” even if he had to adopt flexible, often contradictory tactics. In both of these cases, the author largely presents commonly held scholarly positions, but pushes further by suggesting closer links between Darwin's and Hitler's thought.

Weikart has written a clearly structured and argued book that is easily accessible to nonspecialists. The included chronology of Hitler's life increases its suitability for a wide reading public. One of the book's greatest strengths is the impressive amount of quotations from Hitler's published speeches, writings, table talks, and postwar accounts of members of his entourage that Weikart introduces to make his point about the dictator's evolutionary ethics. At the same time, this achievement also points to one of the book's weaknesses. In his chapter on human reproduction and evolutionary ethic, for instance, Weikart discusses the “evolutionary language” of a 1944 Hitler brochure, a 1935 legislative initiative, and the unpublished 1928 book (pp. 138, 142, 144). This step allows Weikart to suggest continuity in Hitler's thought. Yet, the author barely pays attention to the specific socio-political contexts of these texts. He also does not draw on the innovative approaches in the pursuit of new intellectual histories and their responses to challenges of the linguistic turn that could shed new light beyond conventional idea-prompts-action schemata. When Weikart reflects on context, his analysis is also not always cogent. Why, for example, is a Hitler speech to hundreds of officer cadets “private” (p. 175) and, implicitly, more revealing than a public wartime address to Nazi officials widely covered in the press?

Weikart's account is convincing when he, like Claudia Koonz in a recent study, argues in favor of a Nazi ethic that informed policy in a self-perceived world of racial struggle. Unlike Koonz, the author does not set out to trace to what extent the German population embraced this ethic. Yet, Weikart repeatedly makes broad claims about the successful impact of the dictator's evolutionary language (pp. 176, 202). By offering these claims without weighing the complex and heavily fragmented evidence, the author unnecessarily weakens his account. More importantly, Weikart, a senior fellow at the Center for Science and Culture that supports scholars who challenge neo-Darwinian theory and support intelligent design, also pushes his interpretations too far in other sections of his work. To argue that Hitler's evolutionary ethic and reasoning “motivated his extermination of the Jews” does not sufficiently integrate the complex motivational factors, especially the crucial racial anti-Semitic dynamics, that are pivotal to any understanding of the Holocaust and not of secondary importance (pp. 193, 199).

This said, Weikart's book makes a strong case for the importance of (social) Darwinism in Hitler's worldview, supports recent readings of historians such as Jeffrey Herf who called on scholars to take Hitler's verbiage seriously, and follows in the vein of researchers such as Claudia Koonz to explore Nazi ethics. His study, however, offers little in terms of a new, fully convincing understanding of the Nazi dictator's thought.