Free Republic

The Biology of the Second Reich: Social Darwinism and the Origins of World War I reveals the ideological and scientific roots of the war that gave rise to Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust. To German intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wars of annihilation were the natural outgrowth of Darwinian evolution’s survival of the fittest mantra, a “natural law, without which the organic world...could not continue to exist at all,” observed German zoologist Gustav Jaeger in 1870. Darwin clearly saw the implications of natural selection for human society. In his The Descent of Man,...

A fascinating collection of photos have resurfaced showing the hardships faced by German-Americans at the brutal height of the First World War. As Europe was ravaged by fighting, German immigrants in the US suffered harassment, internment, lynchings - and even the humiliation of being tarred and feathered. Although a little-remembered part of history today, America was wracked by the fear and paranoia that swept from coast to coast during the Great War. The United States declared war on Germany in April 1917 and helped lead the Allies to victory. But before that, many Americans were terrified of the German threat...