EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY
http://www.csustan.edu/History/Faculty/Weikart/FromDarwintoHitler.htm
"Richard Weikart's outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society by the time of the First World War, in which the supposed good of the race was applied as the sole criterion of public policy and 'racial hygiene'. Without over-simplifying the lines that connected this body of thought to Hitler, he demonstrates with chilling clarity how policies such as infanticide, assisted suicide, marriage prohibitions and much else were being proposed for those considered racially or eugenically inferior by a variety of Darwinist writers and scientists, providing Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power."
-- Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and author of The Coming of the Third Reich
You can read the first few pages here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/140397201X/103-6006591-6925412?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glanceEVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND RACISM IN GERMANY The supposed "chain" linking Darwin and Hitler is nonexistent in reality. You can force a connection, as the creationists do, only by asserting that the misapplication of a theory is the responsibility of the author of that theory or the natural result of the theory.
Was Hitler and the Nazis influenced by the Eugenics movement? Yes. (At least in part. The [ultimately religion-based] Jew hatred in Germany and Austria were a larger cause.) Eugenics, however, was not an application of Darwinian theory, but a misapplication. It strove to derive moral distinctions by using a theory that was not only morally neutral, but which was incapable of granting a moral imprimatur to begin with.
So the "Darwin to Hitler" chain is as false as the "Jefferson to KKK" chain is.